Welcome to Perspectives by Splunk

David Whitwell
Global Vice President, Chief Strategic Advisor (Americas)

Dave Whitwell has over 20 years’ experience working with enterprise analytics and applications across multiple industries. He is an accomplished leader who helped the likes of Cloudera, Salesforce.com, Siebel and Oracle become mainstays in the enterprise applications market. David joined Splunk from AtScale, where he most recently spent three years as VP leading an organization that delivered big data analytics solutions for the largest companies in the world.

Patrick Coughlin
Senior Vice President, Global Technical Sales

Patrick Coughlin was the co-founder and CEO of TruSTAR, a cyber intelligence management platform that was acquired by Splunk. Prior to TruSTAR, Patrick led cybersecurity and counterterrorism analyst teams for the US government and private sector clients in the US and EMEA.

Jason Lee
Chief Information Security Officer

Jason Lee is responsible for all facets of security engineering, assurance, policy, compliance, awareness and physical security across Splunk.Prior to joining Splunk, Jason was the Chief Information Security Officer at Zoom, where he was accountable for all aspects of information security. Additionally, Jason was the Senior Vice President of Security Operations at Salesforce, where he led the delivery of critical end-to-end security operations to customers and employees.

Jason has been featured in numerous publications, interviews and panels including Security Magazine, CSO and The Economic Times, and presented at academic institutions including Stanford and Harvard.

Paul Kurtz
Chief Cybersecurity Advisor

Paul Kurtz is an internationally recognized expert on cybersecurity and a co-founder of TruSTAR (acquired by Splunk). Paul began working on cybersecurity at the White House in the late 1990s. He served in senior positions relating to critical infrastructure and counterterrorism on the White House's National Security and Homeland Security Councils under Presidents Clinton and Bush. After leaving the government, Paul has held numerous private sector cybersecurity positions, including founding the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (Acquired by Tech America), Executive Director of SAFECode, Managing Partner of Good Harbor Consulting in Abu Dhabi, and CISO of CyberPoint International.

LaLisha Hurt
Industry Advisor, Public Sector (Federal Government)

LaLisha Hurt is responsible for providing thought leadership, business strategy, executive advisory support and industry subject matter expertise to the federal government. Prior to Splunk, she served in various CISO roles at Capital One, GDIT and General Electric building. She holds a B.S. in systems engineering from University of Virginia, M.S. in information assurance from UMUC and an MBA from the University of Baltimore, with several ISACA industry certifications. She is a Carnegie Mellon University Adjunct Professor for the CISO Executive Program, STEM advocate and has a strong passion for building a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Tina Carkhuff
Industry Advisor, Public Sector (State, Local and Higher Education)

Tina Carkhuff has over 25 years of experience in IT, working in healthcare, higher education, and government. Before joining Splunk, she was a Vice President leading Gartner’s Executive Programs.She has served as CIO for the City of Houston, in the US Army, and is a retired law enforcement officer. Tina is a doctoral candidate in organization and management at Liberty University in Virginia. Her dissertation topic is “How to use predictive analytics to influence first-generation students’ graduation rates.”

Cory Minton
Field CTO (Americas)

Cory Minton joined Splunk in 2019 as a solution strategist focused on ITOps and was later promoted to director of the observability strategist team in the Americas. While at Splunk, Cory’s most visible work has been to activate Splunk’s unique value propositions in partnership with McLaren’s F1 and Esports Teams through the Data Drivers program. Before joining Splunk, Cory was a principal engineer and Field CTO at Dell, focused on emerging AI and Big Data technology research. Cory is also known as the “Big Data Beard” from the podcast he hosted and projects such as “The Road Trip to .conf19”. Cory lives in Birmingham, AL with his wife and two children, who share his crippling addiction to traveling the world.

Kirsty Paine
Field CTO & Strategic Advisor (EMEA)

Kirsty Paine (she/her) provides technical thought leadership for strategic accounts. As an experienced technologist, strategist and security specialist, she thrives on understanding difficult problems and finding creative solutions. Kirsty's background in cyber security stems from her mathematical roots, built on by her time working for the UK National Cyber Security Centre, where she spent years specializing in security, privacy and internet technologies. This role required technical strategy, coupled with international engagement across industry. When not finding or fixing problems, Kirsty can usually be found in the gym or surrounded by sushi (making it, eating it, or both).

Mark Woods
Chief Technical Advisor (EMEA)

Mark Woods is a passionate technologist who’s spent too much time owning a P&L to really call himself an engineer. Innovative technology (in all its various flavors) has been the common backbone for Mark’s career, from mission-critical delivery to innovation acceleration, global portfolio optimization to fundraising, and acquisition selection to ground-up organization building.

At Splunk, he helps executive teams and international policy makers understand the seismic effect that data-driven approaches can achieve and get the right blend of enabling technology, expertise, empowering guidance and practical governance to deliver beneficial change.

Bri Morgan
Senior Manager, Industry Advisory

Bri is a well-respected healthcare industry strategic advisor specializing in clinical informatics. She brings 23+ years of industry experience guiding healthcare systems through the digitization era. Prior to joining Splunk, Bri gained industry knowledge and experience as a former clinician, clinical software engineer and EHR implementation specialist, and security operations center manager. She is dedicated to promoting the collection, analysis and synthesis of data in the clinical space. Bri holds a Bachelor of Science in IT with a concentration in healthcare management from Colorado State University and a master’s in healthcare administration from Louisiana State University, Shreveport.

Audra Streetman
Security Strategist

Audra Streetman is a member of SURGe, Splunk's security research team. Before arriving at Splunk, Audra worked as a reporter, producer and anchor at local TV stations in Indiana, California, Kentucky and Colorado. As a journalist, she covered several major cybersecurity stories including SolarWinds and ransomware attacks targeting Colonial Pipeline, JBS and Kaseya. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and skiing in the Colorado Rockies.

Johan Bjerke
Principal Security Strategist

Johan works for SURGe and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a researcher and contributor to Splunk’s security Rapid Response events, is the lead developer for Splunk Security Essentials — the most popular app on Splunkbase — and is an active contributor to the global Splunk and security communities. Johan is also chairing the Splunk Security SME community group in EMEA.