Splunk’s Channel Partner Ecosystem: Unlocking Innovation and Enterprise Resilience in India
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Gretchen O’ Hara, Vice President, Worldwide Partners, and Alliances, Splunk
- Can you provide an overview of Splunk’s channel partner ecosystem and its importance to the company’s overall business strategy?
Splunk helps make organisations more resilient by offering a unique unified and security platform to help keep digital systems secure and reliable. In order to build enterprise resilience, a strong partner ecosystem is crucial in our growth strategy in India. Collaborating with local partners allows us to reach more customers, work on unique use cases together and help organisations unlock innovation and embrace the cloud by improving security and gaining end-to-end data visibility.
Splunk makes it easier for partners to do business with their customers by providing crucial resources such as enablement programs, development benefits, and GTM strategies to ensure that they succeed. Splunk’s extensible data platform not only powers Splunk-built apps, but also partner integrations and custom applications allow our partners to competitively serve Indian organisations’ digital needs.
The Splunk Partnerverse offers one program that aligns to all partner business models. The Partnerverse Program helps our customers and sales leaders identify and collaborate with the right partners faster and leverage proven solutions to reach their critical missions and outcomes in the cloud. We believe in making it as easy as possible for partners to build on their technical expertise through progressive enablement pathways and certifications to deliver the best joint value to our customers.
2. In the age of Generative AI and cybersecurity, what are the changes that you have seen in consumer buying behaviour? How is Splunk co-creating opportunities for partners to deliver excellent customer service?
Generative AI is changing the cybersecurity landscape. The vast amount of data generated is leading to endless cyber attacks. In fact, according to Splunk’s State of Security report, 42% of Indian organisations report being overwhelmed by the number of attacks versus 23% in the rest of the world. For organisations to knock out these challenges they have to make AI their ally, and customers are beginning to recognize how AI-driven data insights and AIOps give them a better chance to combat risks and threats, without burning out their resources.
Announced at our marquee event .conf23, Splunk AI combines automation with human-in-the-loop experiences, so organisations can drive faster detection, investigation and response while controlling how AI is applied to their data. Leaning into its lineage of data visibility and years of innovation in AI and machine learning (ML), Splunk continues to enrich the customer experience by delivering domain-specific insights through its AI capabilities for security and observability.
With a combination of products, people, and market potential that is unparalleled, our goal is to continually evolve our channel strategy and ecosystem to improve customer and partner experiences and scale Splunk solutions to support customers in the distributed, hybrid, and multi-cloud worlds to gain business resilience.
3. Shed light on the broad range of channel initiatives by which Splunk makes it easier for partners to do business with their customers.
In today’s unpredictable business landscape, it is crucial for customers to have reliable partners who possess a deep understanding of their industry and can address specific business challenges. Splunk has a strong network of 2,800 global and regional partners to help solve organisations’ modern, complex challenges. We have a comprehensive Partnerverse Program that offers additional opportunities with cloud providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud, to help organisations move to the cloud faster as well as the ability to extend cloud-based data innovation and security with partners, which includes renowned companies like SAP and Intel.
Be it IT modernisation or cloud migration, our partners are vital to the business outcomes of our customers. At Splunk, we are committed to bringing world-class solutions to our partners to stay competitive and be able to address their customers’ most critical needs and ensure that our partners and customers succeed. In fact, we are honoured to be recently recognised as a leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. This recognition follows Splunk’s ninth consecutive recognition as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Information and Event Management, positioning Splunk as a vendor recognized by Gartner in both reports.
Additionally, the availability of Splunk Cloud Platform on AWS Marketplace is empowering organisations in India with flexibility in cost management, freedom to provision resources and option to scale, making it faster and easier to implement an additional layer of security to an organisation’s already secure AWS environment.
4. How does Splunk measure the performance and success of its channel partners? What metrics or KPIs are used to evaluate their contributions?
We measure our partner performance and success by the value brought to our joint customers. That value includes joint customer engagement, services revenue, sales acceleration, new logo acquisition, customer success and the ability to engage across the customer lifecycle from sale opportunities and influenced revenue, to the expansion and adoption of joint services and the capability and capacity of partners aligned to use case selling.
5. Can you share some insights on recent enhancements in the Partnerverse program and any takeaways for the channel partner from Global Partner Summit 2023
During Global Partner Summit (GPS), we introduced several Partnerverse program modernizations to simplify our partner experience, boost customer outcomes and drive partner revenue acceleration. These program updates will accelerate the Partnerverse journey towards our goals of simplicity, predictability, transparency and adaptability. The program provides a universal, singular application process and prescribed journey based on how a partner chooses to go-to-market with Splunk. Partnerverse enhancements include a Partnerverse Progression Paths tool to simplify the partner journey, fully remote continuing education courses, transparent and prescriptive guidance on certifications and courses, a modified Splunk Cloud Rebate for Partnerverse partners, and an extended transition date for Partner+ to Partnerverse from August 15, 2023 to January 31, 2024.
We also announced a new strategic partnership with Microsoft that will help build Splunk’s enterprise security and observability offerings on Microsoft Azure. Additionally, for the first time, Splunk solutions will be available for purchase on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Within this agreement, Microsoft will collaborate with Splunk to develop a differentiated product offering by leveraging Microsoft Azure for Splunk’s cloud products. This approach will enable joint customers to innovate with confidence and migrate, modernise and grow environments with end-to-end cloud and hybrid visibility at scale.
During .conf23, we unveiled exciting new AI-enhanced products and other powerful innovations across security and observability. Splunk leaders took the mainstage alongside Splunk customers FedEx, Carnival, IKEA and VMware to reveal the latest security and observability product innovations and celebrate their success.
The new products will expand our partners’ scope and capability to keep customers digitally resilient. These new portfolio innovations will provide customers with greater detection efficacy, insights-driven incident response, unparalleled visibility and a more seamless customer experience so organisations can keep their environments secure and resilient to easily pivot to market demands.
6. Looking ahead, what are the key priorities or goals for the channel partner ecosystem at Splunk?
In our 2023 State of Observability Report, we learnt that Indian organisations are on the leading edge of observability maturity. They are more aggressively transforming their internally developed application portfolios. In fact, 82% expect that substantially more of these apps will be cloud-native within the next 12 months versus 56% in the rest of the world. This pioneering spirit of innovation in the country filled with technology talent and experts presents significant opportunities for us to collaborate closely with our partners in the market to serve their digital transformation needs.
Our partners continue to be an integral part of Splunk’s growth story in India. With the support of our local partners, Splunk ensures that customers are equipped to succeed in their digital transformation journey.
Splunk is committed to build a robust, technically sound partner ecosystem that can bring value to Splunk customers. We will continue to work closely with our existing global and regional partners to keep building Splunk capabilities and in parallel, always open to new strategic partnerships.
