Splunk: Partners to Cash In on New Opportunities

Splunk‘s partners, including MSSPs, will be heading back home from this week’s .conf19 in Las Vegas with lots of new products to sell to their customers.

That’s according to Brooke Cunningham, Splunk’s area vice president of global partner programs, marketing and operations. Splunk’s active partner number has now reached 1,900, up from 950 at .conf two years ago.

“Partners are a component that is really important for us to drive our business and you can really see it come to life here at .conf,” she said. “They are a significant contributor to our overall success. An example here, we have over 2,000 partner individuals who are here and 76 partner sponsors, so an absolutely phenomenal showing of partners, and it makes it the largest gathering of Splunk partners we’ve ever had as a company.”

Splunk is focused on bringing on the right partners, and making sure that “we’re having a really active and engaged partner ecosystem,” Cunningham said.

Splunk’s Partner+ Technology Alliance Program now offers enhancements to increase value for partners that build connectors, apps and add-ons to Splunk. This includes a new structure for partner engagement and solution development across the Splunk product portfolio addressing a broader set of customer challenges, the company said.

Splunk’s Brooke Cunningham

“Specifically we’ve been hearing a lot of things from partners around them wanting to progress up the tiers and not really having a clear path, and wanting to earn more as they progress,” Cunningham said. “So we took that feedback and then we’ve added more marketing benefits and more NFRs (not for resale) because these are the partners that are building apps and add-ons, and connectors.”

Splunk also has enhanced its partner portal, making it faster and easier to submit deal registrations, as well as an all-new configure price quote (CPQ) system designed with Splunk partners in mind.

“All of the new products announced and released at .conf are available to partners, so it is great for partners because there’s more for them to sell,” Cunningham said. “And the things I’m hearing from partners that they’re excited about are the Data Stream Processor and Data Fabric Search. [Those] are two areas where they see immediate opportunities with their existing customers, where they’ll be able to click it into already deployed customers and give them new features and functionality.”

Partners also are excited about recent acquisitions, she said.

“In particular, I’ve had a lot of interest in SignalFx, so that’s something we see an immediate opportunity to give existing Splunk partners the opportunity to add SignalFx,” Cunningham said. “And we also will be bringing in a number of new partners through SignalFx’s acquisition because they had a partner ecosystem as well.”

ReliaQuest is one of Splunk’s top MSSPs and a top-tier sponsor, and it’s hosting the security operations center (SOC) for .conf, she said.

“That’s an example of a partner really putting that to work in terms of a full scope of how they’re leveraging Splunk to service their customers,” Cunningham said. “And Splunk is also a customer of ReliaQuest.”

Observability via AI and ML was touted as the latest essential weapon in the war on cybercrime during the conference. Sandur Sellakumar, Splunk’s senior vice president of cloud and chief product officer, told attendees his company is serious about observability and is offering this through its latest enterprise-grade solutions.

Kia Behnia, Splunk’s vice president of product management for IT markets, said data is a “uniter,” allowing teams to focus on what’s important and “keeps opinion out of the war room.” ML and AI give you “superhuman powers” and allows you to do more, he said.

“A big part of our power at Splunk is putting data into action … putting your teams back on innovation instead of fire fighting,” he said.

Samir Hans, principal at Deloitte, said Splunk is now in a different state of growth and is growing very fast, “but at the same time I do see a lot more maturity in their partner program.” Deloitte’s Fusion Managed Services offerings with Splunk Phantom help enable organizations to more quickly and consistently detect and respond to a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

“We feel there is much more recognition that global SIs as ourselves will be very critical to Splunk’s growth, which is how we’ve seen some of the other alliances, like SAP,” he said. “I think it’s good, I like what I see, and this is also going to allow Splunk to grow faster.”