Splunk Unveils New Partnerverse Partner Program at Conf21
Splunk partners wanted a partner program purpose built for the cloud, and with faster enablement.
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Brooke Cunningham is Splunk‘s area vice president of global partner marketing and experience. She said partners needed a program that was more purpose built for the cloud.
“They also indicated that they needed even more and faster enablement so that they can get their team skilled up to be able to effectively deliver for their customers, especially since the Splunk portfolio continues to grow,” she said. “And we’ve extended and expanded our offerings not just in the security space, but also in the IT operations and observability space. So there’s just so much more that our partners need to get their arms around to be able to deliver that value to their customers. So enablement was No. 2 on the feedback list.”
Furthermore, partners want to be able to differentiate themselves, and their particular skills and expertise in the market, Cunningham said.
“So all of that culminated into us really looking at the Splunk partner program, and to really signal all of the goodness and newness that we’re building into that new program,” she said.
Splunk is focused on improving the partner experience and simplifying how they work with the company, Cunningham said.
“We’re trying to make it easier for partners to engage, with things like one simplified partner agreement framework,” she said. “We’re seeing it from an industry perspective in partner programs. You don’t have to be in all these different tracks of the program if you sell, do services, advising or building. You can engage in more modular ways and you don’t have to be in seven different tracks of a program for it. So we’re really trying to simplify that overall framework and then use the badges as the point where partners can lean in to both enable their teams and then differentiate themselves.”
Teresa Carlson is Splunk’s president and chief growth officer. She said Splunk’s partner community includes more than 2,000 partners who continue to develop technologies and services.
“In talking with our partners, we’ve heard from them that they want us to make it easier and faster for them to enable their teams for success with Splunk,” she said. “Once again, we listened. Partnerverse, Spunk’s reimagined program, provides partners with the foundational support and incentives they need to explore different tiers of customer value and success. It’s design to help partners scale up quickly, validate their expertise and differentiate their offerings to the market. Partners will have access to clearer and faster enablement pathways to skill up their teams.”
Customers will be able to more easily identity the right partner with the right expertise for their industry use cases, Carlson said.
Also at .conf21, Splunk and Accenture announced they have formed a business group that brings Accenture’s functional knowledge, industry and technical experience together with Splunk’s platform technology to help clients maximize insights from data, with a particular focus on AI-powered IT operations, security automation and intelligent supply chain.
The Accenture Splunk Business Group expands the partnership between the two companies as they help clients better take advantage of real-time data from across their business and quickly take action to improve IT operations, supply chain and security processes, as well as manage and explore new revenue opportunities.
“That is a significant piece of momentum,” Cunningham said. “Just talking about the the amount of people at Accenture that are focusing on Splunk and how we’re really bringing those solutions to market for our joint customers, I think that’s a really good proof point around the investment in partners and the growth of the momentum for Splunk.”
Splunk announced a series of new product innovations designed to help organizations securely embrace digital transformation by providing the security visibility needed to accelerate time to detection, investigation and response. Led by new enhancements to Splunk Security Cloud and Splunk SOAR, Splunk provides organizations a comprehensive security operations center (SOC) platform with intelligence, analytics and automation.
Jane Wong is vice president of product management for security at Splunk.
“Digital transformation is a top priority for all organizations,” she said. “However, many security teams lack visibility across their cloud environments, are overwhelmed by alerts and manual tasks, and use too many disparate tools. With Splunk, security teams can detect and respond to threats faster, effectively keeping their organizations more secure in the face of an ever-evolving attack surface.”
Splunk also announced the latest enhancements to its observability portfolio, including advanced product innovations for Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, Splunk Log Observer, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring and Splunk IT Service Intelligence. With these expanded observability capabilities, Splunk customers gain increased visibility across all environments, accelerating performance, productivity and innovation.
In addition, Splunk unveiled the latest enhancements to Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise, propelling its more than 20,000 customers into the next wave of digital transformation.
“All of our our product portfolio is available to partners,” Cunningham said. “So I just always look at this as more opportunity on the table for our partners, more in the bag to sell. Many of our partners have focused in one particular area, one use case, security as an example, and they are super deep experts with security. So they’re always excited, very engaged around all the innovations that we’re bringing around security as a specific example. And many of them are really trying to expand how they’re servicing their existing customers. Observability is one specific example as a lot of our partners are raising their hands, saying I’m seeing the opportunity, I want to lean in on the enablement and really help drive that value for customers. So I’m just excited about all of the breadth of solutions that we continue to offer to our partners.”
Splunk also announced the latest enhancements to its observability portfolio, including advanced product innovations for Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, Splunk Log Observer, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring and Splunk IT Service Intelligence. With these expanded observability capabilities, Splunk customers gain increased visibility across all environments, accelerating performance, productivity and innovation.
In addition, Splunk unveiled the latest enhancements to Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise, propelling its more than 20,000 customers into the next wave of digital transformation.
“All of our our product portfolio is available to partners,” Cunningham said. “So I just always look at this as more opportunity on the table for our partners, more in the bag to sell. Many of our partners have focused in one particular area, one use case, security as an example, and they are super deep experts with security. So they’re always excited, very engaged around all the innovations that we’re bringing around security as a specific example. And many of them are really trying to expand how they’re servicing their existing customers. Observability is one specific example as a lot of our partners are raising their hands, saying I’m seeing the opportunity, I want to lean in on the enablement and really help drive that value for customers. So I’m just excited about all of the breadth of solutions that we continue to offer to our partners.”
SPLUNK .CONF 21 — Splunk on Tuesday unveiled its new partner program, Partnerverse, which aims to help partners expand their technical expertise and demonstrate core competencies via a new badge system.
The company announced the program on the first day of this week’s Splunk .Conf21 virtual conference. Partnerverse will be broadly available in February. It will support thousands of distributors, global SIs, service providers, OEMs, technology alliance partners and VARs.
Doug Merritt is Splunk’s president and CEO.
Splunk’s Doug Merritt
“Like a handful of other tech companies, we have grown like crazy through the pandemic,” he said. “We’ve continued to see very high annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth as a company. We just finished our 10th straight quarter with 70%-plus cloud ARR growth. And our focus, of course, is to help these organizations make that journey, to get them confidence as they make that journey. We started out and continue to be focused on a hybrid landscape. We know that as exciting as cloud is, and we’ve invested a ton in cloud and we love what’s happened in the cloud, there are a whole bunch of workloads that are still on premises. So wherever the workload is and wherever the customers are, wherever their needs are, we can be there to help them.”
New Partner Program Framework
Splunk’s active partners can now access the new Splunk partner program framework and three initial badges highlighting cloud migration, zero-trust services and authorized learning excellence. Partners can earn different badges to help customers identify which partners have the right expertise to meet their needs.
Partners can build on their technical expertise through enablement pathways and certifications. The new partner badging system also includes a cloud migration services competency. It features a professional services kit and the ability to configure customer deployments for Splunk Cloud. This further expands partners’ professional services practice development.
Splunk’s Brooke Cunningham
Partnerverse also will have a new partner solutions catalog that highlights partner capabilities and innovations globally. The catalog brings the most innovative offerings to new and existing customers, and allows partners to reach the widest audience possible, highlighting their portfolio of Splunk-based offerings.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more about Partnerverse and .conf21.
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