In an email interaction Jyoti Prakash, Regional Sales Director, India & SAARC Countries, Splunk shares how the company works with partners to help customers unlock innovation and embrace the cloud by building resilience and improving security
What is the messaging that Splunk wants to establish within the partner ecosystem? How is Splunk making it easier for partners to do business with them, increasing efficiency?
Cloud migration is essential for organizations that are scaling and pursuing growth, and we are committed to helping our customers and partners succeed. A strong partner ecosystem is crucial to our growth strategy in India. Collaborating with local partners allows us to reach more customers and help them unlock innovation and embrace the cloud by building resilience, 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 unique offering of an extensible data platform that not only powers Splunk-built apps, but also partner integrations and custom applications allow our partners to competitively serve Indian organizations’ digital needs.
The new Splunk Partnerverse offers one program that aligns with 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. For example, the new Partners badging system is designed to recognize partners’ capabilities and feature their accomplishments, making it easier for customers to identify the best partner for their most critical needs.
We will also be expanding our partner enablement efforts. Partners will have purpose-built enablement pathways for their individual roles and competency attainment; access to education credits and expanded funding for training; and access to the Train the Trainer program.
What does Splunk think about changes to benefit the entire channel when today’s partners have a variety of business models? I’m sure Splunk has witnessed ISVs open an MSP business and MSPs becoming vendors.
The Splunk Partnerverse Program offers additional opportunities with cloud providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud, to help organizations 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.
With the partnerverse program, companies can expand their expertise, provide differentiated offerings to their customers, and amplify their success. Splunk has about 2,200 global and regional partners. Majority of these partners have been on a transformational journey by building up their cloud skills to meet customer demands for cloud migration and hybrid-cloud capabilities.
The partnerverse program is built on the strong foundations of purpose-built partnerships to accelerate digital transformation amongst partners and customers worldwide. It recognizes the importance of identifying the right partner and services and offers the Partner Solutions Catalog that highlights partner capabilities and innovations globally.
For MSPs, Splunk has a Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program that helps partners embed Splunk products into their customers’ solutions to provide value-added services. MSP partners play an integral role in Splunk’s go-to-market strategy and Splunk is committed to investing in, be a part of their growth.
What’s the pitch to potential Splunk partners to expand the ecosystem? Can you name some of the key partners in India?
In India, we work with leading organization transformation consultants and established systems integrators such as Accenture and Deloitte. With Splunk’s technology expertise, together we are able to comprehensively serve, and work on unique use cases, government organizations and business in India.
For existing partners, what’s your advice to them on getting the most out of their Splunk relationship?
My advice to our valued partners is to leverage on the comprehensive Partnerserve program that we have set up for Partners to fully utilize. The program has been competitively crafted to address the needs of our Partners to ensure their business success.
The availability of Splunk Cloud Platform on AWS Marketplace, how does it help partners and empower customers in India
Splunk Cloud Platform’s availability in AWS Marketplace helps streamline customer adoption via a consolidated purchase environment and integration with AWS accounts. This ensures fast time-to-value for customers leveraging Splunk solutions to gain an additional layer of real-time security and operational and cost management insights across their AWS and hybrid environments.
Splunk Cloud Platform in AWS Marketplace is empowering the organizations 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 organization’s already secure AWS environment. Additionally, using software as a service (SaaS) contracts, AWS Marketplace bills customers upfront or by the payment schedule that customers define, allowing customers to prepay for Splunk Cloud Platform based on expected usage tiers through contracts up to one year in length.
