Splunk uniquely positioned to address data related problems and encourage organizations to be data driven

Splunk aims to empower IT, DevOps and security teams to transform their organizations with data from any source and on any timescale. Splunk is known throughout the financial services community. For many years now, firms have been deploying Splunk solutions within IT departments and data centers, for IT operations, infrastructure monitoring, DevOps, and event management. Their solutions are also used for fraud detection and prevention, anti-money laundering, sanctions compliance, and insider threat detection. In a chat with VARINDIA, JYOTI PRAKASH, Regional Sales Director, India & SAARC Countries, Splunk discusses helping the FSI organizations, Splunk’s growth potentials, the focus areas etc.

Splunk- a differentiation in India market

Splunk is a very unique solution and they strongly believe that a partner who is serious in Splunk business should have the ability to invest in Splunk. They need to put enough energy and time into building the resources and capabilities within their team. The partners should also see this partnership to be beneficial for them and also for their customers.

Jyoti feels, “From India perspective Splunk has been quite programmatic when it comes to investment in India. If you see the track record of Splunk, it has been quite careful in terms of expansion because they want to be very clear that if they are getting into a region, the right support has to be there. Right support does not mean only sales coverage but what are the kinds of technical capabilities we have built not only within the Splunk team but also with the extended channel network that we have. We are also part of a lot of round table customer conferences, reaching out to large customers, and conducting workshops to make sure that our story reaches out to them. They should know what Splunk is capable of.”

The core competency into technology

Splunk is a data driven company and encourages organizations also to become data driven because they keep on hearing about Digital Transformation. The data explosion has gone up. In every organization the way they are using their data, consuming the data, the velocity and the volume both has gone up big time.

On the digital transformation Jyoti says, “Whether you look from a security lens or you look from an IT lens the problem is the majority of data is an overlap. The challenge is if you don’t have enough data you will not be able to take actionable intelligence out of that and you will not be able to make the right decisions. On the other hand if you have too much data and you don’t know which data to extract then there is a bigger problem. This is the basic and the most important problem that Splunk fixes. Splunk is very uniquely positioned to address and solve data related problems from the intelligence that customers get from the data they store at one single place.”

Splunk’s growth potentials and the focus areas

Globally, Splunk has been very smartly and very impactfully used by FSI verticals. Those are the organizations that have got multiple and huge ranges of customers with complex infrastructure.

“The Splunk platform has been very strong, especially the impact that we have brought in with multiple global banking and insurance customers all across the globe. Even in India larger banks have a bigger impact. They carry a lot of sensitive data and that is where the infrastructure requires a very intelligent data platform. FSI is going to be a very strong focus for our side as far as Splunk strategies are concerned.

Second vertical will be IT/ITeS, IT/ITeS as they have already built enough capabilities because they have been managing a lot of Splunk customers. Thanks to the global outsourcing projects that they have been managing for a long time. They are aware of Splunk capabilities and they have been using it for their customers so it becomes a logical progression for them . The tool is so powerful why can’t use it for their further internal IT enhancement as well. Right now from FSI, IT/ITeS has become the prime focus for Splunk,” comments Jyoti.

Partner and distribution ecosystem in India

Splunk follows the multi-layer channel ecosystem. They have distributors and partners in India, so normally their GTM is quite clear. It is a partner driven GTM where customers need to be much closer to their registered partners.

Jyoti explains, “Splunk is not a company who will get into a mass recruitment of partners, just to increase coverage because Splunk focuses a lot when it comes to adoption. The partner should be equipped enough to take the story of Splunk forward with the set of customers that they have and also to make sure that they are equipped to help customers to adopt Splunk over a period of time. We are very careful when it comes to building our partner ecosystem. We have recently launched our partner program, and it is quite impactful. The program is very helpful in terms of boarding the right partners and giving them the right badge. Basically, this is the program which will cover almost 1000 of distributors and a number of partners have to get registered based on the space that they want to work on.”

At Last

Splunk is an open data platform, and ingest any data that customers want. In his concluding words Jyoti points out, “Splunk is a uniform platform capability which can tag around multiple buying centers that you have. I don’t think in the market you have any single platform that cuts across all the buying centers. I can quote you four buying centers like security, AI/ML, IT ops and DevOps. All four buying centers can be delivered using a single Splunk platform. Scale also becomes very important because when the data ingestion goes up you need a very solid and powerful platform which could scale up.”