FEATURE Brooke Cunningham
FORMALISING THE
PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
AT SPLUNK
Splunk’s VP of Global Partner Programs laughs off IBM’s new scheme
and says the company’s 1,700 partners are in a good state
Splunk may still seem like a
relatively new company – but in
actual fact its been around since
2003, and went public seven
years ago. It has therefore, as Brooke
Cunningham, Area VP, Global Partner
Programs, Marketing & Operations, says,
been working with partners for many
years. However, it wasn’t until 2015 that
the company really started to formalise
its approach with partners, and since
Cunningham joined the organisation
three years ago, the company has
been on a journey to determine the
foundation of the programmes that it
has to enable its partners to interact, sell
and support customers.
That has led to the company having
1,700 partners globally; with a range of
resellers, managed services providers,
professional services partners,
distribution partners, systems integrator
partners, as well as OEM and technology
alliance partners. Perhaps most
intriguingly, partners contributed 76%
of the company’s total new customers in
fiscal 2019.
“Our partners are helping companies
in their local areas, and they may be
offering Splunk as part of another
solution and that’s how they’re
introducing us,” Cunningham says.
Previously, the organisation worked
with its partners in a bespoke way, but
at its Global Partner Summit in February,
the company rolled out a global system
integrator programme, to provide a more
consistent way of working with partners,
and giving them clear incentives to
engage better with customers. A new
OEM programme, which would enable
more turnkey reporting and big data
analytics for partners that embed Splunk
into their platform, as well as technical
support, was another key announcement
at the summit, while it has also looked at
incentivising its reseller partners to sell
multi-year deals with customers, while
its top tier partners have been given
incentives to earn more if they exceed
growth targets.
According to Cunningham, the
company’s partners are in a good
position.
“We do a partner success study every
18 months and in January we found
that the profit that our most profitable
partners are earning for every $1 of
licensing Splunk, they’re earning $6.30
as an additional wrapper around other
technologies they sell alongside Splunk
and their services. That’s up 22% since
the last study we did, so we’re seeing
an increase and that’s a competitive
advantage,” she says, adding that
these successful partners are adopting
customer success teams and bringing
in roles like customer success managers
into their organisation.
In February, IBM said it would roll
out a new ‘status match’ scheme,
which would instantly on-board its
competitors’ partners before they’ve
completed training on IBM products.
This would mean a shift from waiting up
to eight months to earn money with IBM,
to a mere matter of weeks, and the idea
behind it would be to steal partners from
the likes of Splunk.
Cunningham however, is not
convinced that this is going to work –
particularly after a recent meeting with
partners did little to suggest otherwise.
“None of our partners indicated when
discussing this new programme that it
would be of any interest or provides any
true benefits. We know from our data
that our partners work with us on the
strength of the product, and because
it’s what their customers are asking for.
We’re always looking at the industry and
making sure we’re addressing other
ideas and maintaining a competitive
and profitable programme, and we’ll
continue to focus on that,” she says,
adding that Splunk doesn’t see the
need to counteract this with a similar
programme of its own.
There’s now a clear strategy
in place at Splunk to increase the
number of partners it has, but also
invest in growing many of its existing
relationships.
“For example, AWS is one of our
strategic partners where we’ve
deepened our relationship with them,
and we’ve really doubled down and
made big investments in growing
relationships with
those partners that
have been really
instrumental,”
she says.
“Our partners are helping companies in
their local areas, and they may be offering
Splunk as part of another solution and
that’s how they’re introducing us”
www.technologybusinesstoday.34 com April 2019
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