Together Towards Tomorrow: News From the Global Partner Summit

Partners are critical to how Splunk+Cisco will revolutionize the way customers build resilience across the entire digital footprint. That was a key takeaway from the Global Partner Summit (GPS) at .conf24.

Splunk and our partners have had tremendous collaborative success this year — delivering greater value to over 500 new customers together. Our strategy to capture our joint opportunity is working, and our focus for this year is how to continue that momentum. We will keep our go-to-market strategy consistent to help minimize disruption, but that doesn’t mean we’ll stop improving. This year, Splunk is making deeper investments in the Partnerverse program.

Committed to Your Success

While the Splunk and partner journey started with initial transactional selling, we have learned that delivering continuous customer value is where we win together. Partners that have taken advantage of this strategy have seen up to 10x their deal size this year. 

The opportunity for partners is only getting bigger as we continue to focus on product innovation that enables you to deliver on customer value with best-in-class solutions. With Splunk and Cisco, our customers will get unparalleled visibility, game-changing security, comprehensive observability, and an AI platform that helps improve consolidation, drive greater efficiency, and enhance their ability to leverage, secure, and monitor AI.

Last year, we committed to making it easier for partners to do business with Splunk. And we’ve made tremendous progress since the 2023 GPS. We listened to your feedback and embarked on a journey to make partnering with Splunk more simple, consistent, transparent, and adaptable, so you can focus on what matters most — your customers. For example: 

• We simplified the training expectations for partners — focusing on enablement areas that align with your business goals and reducing the extra prerequisite enablement hours by more than half. We introduced the new Partnerverse Progression Path tool, and later this year we will introduce a new Partnerverse Performance Dashboard that will enable partners and Partner Development Managers to review key business and financial metrics and achievements to chart a future course for success together. 
• We’re working to make our programs adaptable to the market and to serve all our partners, no matter how you engage with customers. This year, we’ll add a new Advise motion designed to empower partners to support System Integrators (SIs) and consultancy firms with use case solution development. We anticipate this will help our partners bring greater influence in deals and help drive profitability by offering comprehensive solutions for your customers. 

These improvements would not have been possible without the valuable feedback from our partners. No matter the size of our landscape, we want to make sure each partner has a voice to help us continuously improve and define the partner-first culture in Splunk and Cisco. 

Capturing Our Joint Opportunity

There's never been a year with so much potential and we’re not sitting back and kicking our heels up. We are accelerating innovation to provide partners with new opportunities and focusing on making our partnership a profitable journey. 

Splunk will continue to drive continuous customer value and be more prescriptive on how account teams work with partners to make it easier to work with us. This will center on three key areas:

• Prescriptive use cases 
• Targeted account strategies 
• Scale the Unified Engagement Model (UEM) to focus on value over volume
  

We will introduce new tools and programs, such as marketing plays-in-a-box toolkits, a Partner Solutions Architect Program (PSAP), and Partner Days to drive accelerated pipe. 

We’re also working to modernize our partner incentives to map across the customer life cycle and improve profitability. This includes the introduction of new premium SKU rebates for distributors, cloud migration rebates, and MSP rebates.

Finally, we know the importance of Splunk as an open platform. We remain committed to keeping Splunk an open and accessible platform for you to continue building your unique capabilities to deliver the best customer value.

Better Together: Splunk+Cisco+Partners

Together, Splunk and Cisco will power and protect the AI revolution — and we can’t make that happen without our partners. Each of our partners helps to bring to life unique solutions that are instrumental to how customers can harness AI — with the right infrastructure, data, and resilience to monitor and secure it. 

Collectively, we have an opportunity to deliver unique experiences and high-value services for our customers by working together in new ways. Splunk partners have deep expertise in digital resilience with skills in the areas of cybersecurity, the modern security operations center (SOC), and development and security operations, just to name a few. As Splunk and Cisco come together, we want to extend that reach to Cisco’s end-point security, and expand the SOC and the network operations center (NOC).

Cisco has a partner-first culture, and a deep appreciation of what Splunk and its partner community have built. There is an exciting two-way learning moment before us: to take the best things about the partner ecosystems across both Cisco and Splunk and accelerate our growth together. 

Our future together is bright. We are at a point of unparalleled momentum, and we have the strategies and products in place to harness that opportunity to maximize value for our customers and partners. Partners are critical to how we will make our customers more digitally resilient with unified security and observability. Together, we will not just face the future — we will redefine it.