conf20: Splunk Boosts Observability with 2 New Acquisitions

The new Splunk Observability Suite is among several innovations unveiled during Tuesday’s start of the vendor’s virtual conf20 conference.

Splunk began its push into observability last year with its acquisitions of SignalFx and Omnition. It announced two more observability acquisitions during conf20.

Splunk has acquired Plumbr, an application performance monitoring (APM) company. In addition, it is buying Rigor, a digital experience monitoring (DEM) company. Rigor offers advanced synthetic monitoring and optimization tools. Both acquisitions increase Splunk’s observability capabilities.

Tim Tully is Splunk’s CTO.

Splunk’s Tim Tully

“Rigor in particular has a lot of customers coming in, and so the partner ecosystem for them will continue to stay robust as we try to pull the product into our broader observability suite,” he said. “There are a lot of customers in there, so we’re not going to disrupt that. So if you’re a VAR or a [systems integrator], that’s still an option. But the main takeaway here is we’re going to move fast and furious, and integrate it into the broader observability suite in the same way that we did with Omnition and SignalFx.”

Observability and More

The Splunk Observability Suite includes solutions for infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, digital experience monitoring, log investigation and incident response.

Also at conf20, Splunk announced:

Doug Merritt is Splunk’s president and CEO. He said one of his company’s top initiatives has been moving from an 80%-plus on-premises vendor to a cloud-first vendor.

Splunk’s Doug Merritt

“We are and will remain a hybrid vendor,” he said. “There’s still a lot of opportunity, room and need for our partner channel to focus on classic Splunk. The way people generally perceive us is on cloud, but the team has been very prescriptive on how to think through delivering Splunk as a service, and the value that VARs and OEMs can drive consuming the underlying data platform from a cloud basis, but also resell servicing and support of a cloud offering.”

Splunk’s customer success and partner management teams work with the partner community to help all partners, Merritt said. That includes both cloud-native partners and those “who are going through their own transformation and make sure that they update their approach to be able to provide the same type of value from our cloud platform if they have been from our on-premises capability.”

“We do expect that 80%-plus of our bookings will be cloud-based over the next few years,” he said. “There are a ton of opportunities for partners of all sorts to think through and work with us closely on delivering that value in the cloud. We need their help and there’s lots of opportunity for them.”

Data Is the Key

Bill Hustad is Splunk‘s vice president of global go-to-market partners. He said the message and theme of conf20 is “it’s the data age.” Data has been the key to maintaining business continuity throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Companies have been moving to cloud much faster than planned due to the pandemic, he said. They’ve also been increasing the visibility of their overall IT and security operations infrastructure.

“We play a key role in that,” Hustad said.

Partners will see value from the latest acquisitions and Splunk’s increased focus on observability, he said.

“If you think about the true value of a platform in the partner world and the ecosystem, it’s extensibility,” Hustad said. “The ability for our partners to take it as is, with new integrations and new feature functionality, there’s a tremendous amount of value there. What you see with these two acquisitions are really creating more of that platform’s orientation toward observability, which is our newest market that we’ve identified starting off with our SignalFx acquisition last year.”

All of the product announcements are in those core areas that create more extensibility in the platform, he said.

“These are just continuous moves and enhancements, and features to make sure we’re enabling and creating more visibility, and as much of the easy button as possible for our partners and ecosystem as they engage with their customers,” Hustad said.