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Following Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, both companies have been focused on aligning their channel strategies and integrating Cisco’s 360 partner program.
Splunk APAC senior vice president Simon Davies told ARN that partners provide essential expertise, in areas like security and observability, which helps address complex challenges more effectively.
Davies explained it was vital for Splunk and Cisco to ensure their partners felt confident and supported following the acquisition.
“Over the past week I’ve had meetings with partners and distributors, all eager to learn more about how the Cisco-Splunk integration will benefit their businesses,” he said. “Many Cisco partners, especially in the security space, are making significant investments to build practices around Splunk.
“Companies like Data#3 are a great example, they’re doubling down on their capabilities to serve customers across both Cisco and Splunk products and are also exploring ecosystem partnerships to strengthen their offerings.”
While on the flip side, Splunk-focused partners, like JDS in Australia, are also seeing opportunities.
“They’re combining the power of Splunk with Cisco’s offerings, which has helped them better serve their customers’ needs, especially in areas like observability,” he said. “Partners are now taking a more holistic view of their devOps and cloud transformation practices.”
According to Davies working with a single vendor like Cisco simplifies the process and allows them to focus on high-value, partner-led activities.
This shift has generated positive momentum, he claimed with more Cisco partners joining PartnerVerse, the transaction mechanism for Splunk.
“We’re also integrating the Cisco and Splunk Partner Program 360, which is helping partners build out new capabilities and expand their offerings,” he said. “As for Splunk partners, they’re now looking at how to integrate Cisco’s additional capabilities, particularly in areas like zero trust, network segmentation, and security.”
Identifying the synergies
During Cisco’s Partner Summit 2024, ARN sat down with Splunk vice president, worldwide partners and alliances, Gretchen O’Hara who highlighted what Splunk wanted out of the partnership with the networking vendor and to make it as easy as possible to do business.
“This is something that Cisco has discussed in its Partner 360 initiative, and it has been a core pillar of Splunk over the past two years in partner transformation,” she said.
“Knowing that our North Star is to be better together and provide the best possible experience, we also recognise the differences in how we go to market.
“Splunk partners require deep skilling and expertise, while Cisco’s go-to-market approach is based on being one of the largest networking companies in the world.”
According to O’Hara, it became crucial for us to take steps to bring partners together while the two-organisation worked on integrating the programs over time.
“The first step was to identify the synergies between their partners and where we could leverage those synergies,” she said. “We found that there were about 241 [global] partners who already had deep expertise in both Splunk and Cisco, so we could immediately start the better together initiative, regardless of the programmatic areas.”
Next, Splunk identified the Cisco partners who were eager to expand into security and observability but needed a path to do so.
“We created the “Partner First” program for Cisco partners interested in selling, managing services, and building on Splunk,” she said. “This program helped them acquire the necessary skills, accreditation, and badging.
“Simultaneously, we began testing how to transact on the global price list, allowing Splunk partners to continue selling with Cisco through Cisco’s program. This has been a good start to ensuring that partners are skilled and capable for cross-selling.”
O’Hara said Splunk had 6,500 accounts partners could work together on.
“This was a critical step in helping them learn how to sell, identify opportunities, and accelerate business,” she said. “The 6,500 accounts can now transact on Cisco’s global price list.”
Aligning the local market
There’s a lot of partner-to-partner opportunity emerging, especially in APJ and the A/NZ market, claimed O’Hara.
“Cisco might have the customer relationship and the contract vehicle with enterprise customers, but they may not yet have the skills to support the deployment and expansion of Splunk,” she said. “This has led to a lot of organic partner-to-partner activity. We’re even seeing Cisco partners looking at acquiring Splunk boutique partners to enter the market more quickly.”
According to O’Hara Splunk is seeing this in “EMEA and in the US”, and now its seeing similar exploration in APJ, particularly in the A/NZ markets.
“Cisco partners are acquiring skills through acquisitions or organically partnering to speed up their go-to-market efforts,” she said.
As long as Splunk ensures that when it integrates with Cisco, its stature doesn’t get overshadowed by the size and scope of Cisco’s networking business,” O’Hara said.
“That’s why Cisco and Splunk have been very specific about announcing the Partner 360 program, which will bring Cisco partners into the program first.”
Additional resources to support the A/NZ channel
Although these changes are coming into play both Davies and O’Hara state that channel partners in A/NZ will continue to work with the same channel teams at Splunk.
“We really wanted to make sure partners felt comfortable and confident in the investment. The investments they’ve made and the teams that were supporting them, so that they didn’t feel like we were disappearing,” said Davies.
The release of Splunk AppDynamics, unified observability platform, announced during Cisco Live in Melbourne will also bring additional resources.
“The integration of AppDynamics under the Splunk umbrella in APJ has added more resources, especially in observability and security for the A/NZ markets,” said O’Hara. “This is an additive move, bringing more technical and sales capability for our partners.
Davies clarified what this means, “we’ve brought the AppDynamics team together and the channel team across as well to make sure we support those AppDynamics partners.
“The trusted partner managers who’ve been working with AppDynamics partners are still very much part of our team, and they’re now helping partners on that journey of building out their observability capability.”
He said the vendor has also made “specific market investments”, such as adding incremental capability to New Zealand and Canberra specifically, in recent months.
“We’re seeing as customers are going on this journey, the role partners are playing is so important to that, and we wanted to make sure we invested to support that as well,” he said.
“We have put additional people into both NZ and Canberra, on top of our existing partner management infrastructure that was supporting the Splunk partners across the region.”