Splunk Unveils Partner Program Updates, New Channel Chief

Splunk on Tuesday kicked off its Global Partner Summit by briefing partners on how they’re contributing to the company’s growth and announcing new partner-program updates.

The company also announced the appointment of Aziz Benmalek as Splunk’s new vice president of worldwide channels and channel chief. He previously was with Microsoft for more than 22 years and was its vice president of worldwide cloud and managed service providers.

Splunk’s Aziz Benmalek

“’I’m thrilled to join Splunk, a company that is at the center of the high-growth, data-driven world,” he said. “Splunk’s vision and continued innovation around the already recognized industry-leading machine data platform, coupled with the drive for continuous personal, professional and business growth, make it a very exciting company to join. I’m also inspired by leadership’s commitment to the accelerated growth of our partner business while expanding opportunities for our ecosystem into new solution areas. The future of the Partner+ ecosystem is very bright and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Brooke Cunningham, Splunk’s area vice president of global partner marketing, programs and operations, said her company now has more than 1,700 active partners, up from 1,600 at the midpoint of last year.

“Our software bookings growth through our partners was significant, up 51 percent year over year, and as a subset of that … we had over 14,000 deal registrations in our last fiscal year and the revenue associated with deal registration, partner-sourced software bookings, they were up 63 percent year over year,” she said. “So we’re just seeing really impressive growth in the contribution of our partners to the Splunk business overall.”

Another area that Splunk partners focused on in the company’s last fiscal year was driving new customers — a successful endeavor that led to partners delivering 76 percent of Splunk’s new customers, Cunningham said.

Splunk’s Brooke Cunningham

“So partners are really a growth engine for us in new customers, and that was something we had put a partner incentive around so I’m particularly excited about this because we’re seeing that reward is really resulting in such a great outcome,” she said. “And we’re seeing partners invest back with us. One area we look at is partner certifications, their investment in learning Splunk technologies, and we had over 11,000 new technical certifications added to the ecosystem over the past year. So partners are really taking the time and making the people investment to certify more within their organization.”

This week, Splunk is rolling out a new SI partner program track, designed to address the needs of global and regional system integrators (SIs), “providing them a more consistent Partner+ program framework so they can really gain more benefits and participate based on tier-level investments, and get some additional special support in those benefits,” Cunningham said.

“For example, specific to SIs, we’re putting an investment fund in place and really investing where partners are going to invest in building solutions around Splunk, so particularly we’re interested in vertical-solution practices and specializations,” she said.

Splunk also has added enhancements to its other partner program tracks, including more rebate incentives, and is continuing the new customer incentive, Cunningham said.

“We have a big focus on moving away from …