The Gately Report: Exabeam Expects New Opportunities from Cisco's Splunk Acquisition

Exabeam’s global channel leader says Cisco acquiring Splunk is a good thing and will open new opportunities for his company.

Ken Hammond, Exabeam’s vice president of worldwide channel sales and alliances, has “lots of thoughts” on the Splunk acquisition because he used to be Cisco’s global security sales leader.

When Cisco announced the Splunk acquisition, Cisco told us Splunk’s security capabilities complement its existing portfolio, and together will provide “leading security coverage from devices to applications, to clouds.” The integration of Cisco’s extended detection and response (XDR) and Splunk’s security information and event management (SIEM) offering will give customers a “comprehensive security platform for threat detection and response.”

Splunk Acquisition by Cisco Validates SIEM

“Ten years ago, I was acquired by Cisco via Sourcefire, and I was the lead integration channel person and the first leader of the global security sales organization at Cisco,” Hammond said. “So where it opens opportunities first, the most important thing is it validates the SIEM category in a big way, the value of it. It's the third-largest category. So it helps Exabeam just to be part of that conversation. We're much smaller than Splunk, but we're also in an interesting mix where we've got Cisco as a competitor, we've got IBM as a competitor with Qradar, we have Google somewhat with Chronicle and Microsoft with Sentinel. Those are very large companies.”

Exabeam's Ken Hammond

The difference is Exabeam is known “in its DNA” as a cybersecurity company, Hammond said.

“So where it opens up opportunities for us, I believe, is that we're a security innovator in this market,” he said. “And so while we may not be the perfect fit for all companies that are looking at these other large competitors, we have a big partner and customer base that sees our innovation, our ease of doing business with and our channel program as a key differentiator and a benefit. So I think it's a good thing for the whole category. And we do see it as a way for partners that aren't traditional big-four resellers that are focused on security to expand with us.”