It's a company with a market cap in excess of $25 billion in late last month You might remember piper Sandler came out saying it was a top pick heading into the fourth quarter We're talking about the infrastructure software and data platform company Splunk where Teresa Carlson serves as president and chief growth officer Her background is pretty impressive She previously led Amazon Web Services public sector business for more than a decade And in just 6 months at her new company she says her work with clients to access use and secure data more important than ever There's no literally customers that I talk to people where I came here that didn't tell me that their use of black citizen is mission critical for their business And I think it's demonstrated through the tax of customers We work with which are really the fortune 100 90 plus of the fortune 100 customers work with us But it's going really well We are amazing to the clouds very quickly and that's one of the reasons I came over here to continue to have our customers move to the cloud and take full advantage of quant cloud How much was that move to the cloud accelerated during the pandemic And again I know you've only been there for 6 months but I know that you know about what's been happening there over the last 18 months during the pandemic I know that you have 93 of the 100 fortune 100 companies using the product How much of that how much was that accelerated during the pandemic and how much more room is there to grow Well we grew our annual cloud revenue over 70% for the tenth straight quarter And so it just continues to show you the acceleration of the cloud And I will share some my previous experience that AWS has given this because I ran our public sector business and industry's groups at AWS and during COVID we saw acceleration within our customers like two years to three years of acceleration to the cloud during the pandemic because they could not get into their data centers They could not give in and take advantage of their application So many of them had to port or rebuild those applications very quickly So especially if you're talking in mission critical areas like government and healthcare financial services telco areas that really the world can not do without They have to keep going So we had to figure out how they got use of their technology when many of their employees could not go into the data centers So you saw the growth of cloud computing really moving fast and I heard so many customers say it was such a differentiator for them in their business and their mission during that time And it also accelerated the use of cloud skills And of course one of the primary things that is as a data company the customers need to be able to take advantage of news or data as a result of that customers really started banking themselves How do I make that move more rapidly You guys think too And you have such a great perspective Theresa because you were leading the Amazon Web Services public sector business for more than a decade And then you of course are now at Splunk but I am curious about data democratization Is that truly achievable And what there always be some entities or parties or countries China for example that will have access to more and better data And so there will always be some kind of imbalance and power plays or power powerful components when it comes to the data universe Well I don't know about better data but efficiency of these to that data And there's still no company that drives innovation more rapidly than U.S. companies I mean if you look at the youth and the growth of cloud tools you know AWS that kind of started from scratch They are data They are web services from day one when nobody really even knew what cloud was And then you have Google you have Microsoft And you have this explosion of startups as a result of cloud computing And the company's in the U.S. and around the world that are developing as a result of cloud computing the access and lead that they have with data is quite amazing But I would say the most important is the ability to take advantage and use your data And one of the big key trends that's happening is open-source data that's out there can be utilized in massive ways to actually understand a problem set And you saw this as an example happening during COVID where you saw crowdsourcing going on So people could solve the problems faster or what was going on and have deeper understanding Right In terms of the data elements itself I would just say if you look at all the company like talent to your confluent and others have gone public you're seeing companies that are truly data driven and they have slices of the way they use their data and tag it that allows these companies to really do things that they never thought of doing Now I can throw their data in somewhere and it gets organized I don't have to put it in all these tables That's Teresa Carlson president and chief growth officer at the publicly traded software maker and data company Splunk You're listening to Bloomberg businessweek coming up next We pick up on our conversation from last week with the founder chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies None other than Michael Dell including his thoughts on the next big technological breakthrough and facing down Carl icahn Gotta say in the book he talks about having dinner at Carl icahn's house and misses icon cooked for them It's a great read And that's another addition of Bloomberg businessweek talks.