Splunk channel to sprout OEM and SI program

Splunk is about to expand its channel program with dedicated programs for OEMs and system integrators.

Brooke Cunningham, the company’s area vice president for global partner marketing, programs and operations, told CRN Australia the programs will commence in coming months. Cunningham said the OEM program will target mostly ISVs, in an effort to have them embed Splunk in their products. The system integrator program, she said, will target both global and smaller companies that aim to build a practice on Splunk. India integrators are very much on the company’s mind, Cunningham said.

As ever, selling more stuff is the aim of the expanded channel program.

It helps that Splunk now has more stuff to sell. At its .conf 18 in Orlando today the company announced new releases of its flagship Enterprise and Cloud products, plus a new “Splunk Next” range.

The big change to core products is decoupling of storage and compute. Today, Splunk requires both to scale in lock-step. The new releases allow storage to use any source that uses Amazon Web Services’ S3 API, making it possible to put storage in the cloud and use on-premises compute. Doing so lets Splunk scale without the need for new storage purchases.

Also new is the ability to create instances of Splunk with different levels of access to resources: demos during the keynote address showed a list of instances, each allocated their own share of a server’s CPU and RAM. The idea here is to allow users to prioritise certain jobs, while keeping others humming along without taxing infrastructure.

“Splunk Next” is a play that makes the company data-agnostic, by allowing better connections to data sources other than Splunk. It also adds real-time analytics with anew “Data Stream Processor” to deliver insight with an emphasis on diagnoses of customer experience, to take the company into the kind of territory currently occupied by the likes of AppDynamics and New Relic. Together, real-time analysis and links to more data sources are expected to let the company target users beyond IT by delivering insights about customers rather than just the state of IT or security.

Cunningham said partners will appreciate that broadening of Splunk’s addressable market, and that the company has already developed assets to help them converse with line of business managers.

She added that partners should also appreciate a new mobile app revealed today, as it makes it possible to drive Splunk from smartphones and even an Apple TV, thereby giving resellers and SIs a convenient way to service customers!

Simon Sharwood travelled to Orlando as a guest of Splunk.