Splunk, this week, in addition to naming Aziz Benmalek to be its next channel chief revealed plans to provide additional rewards and incentives to partners that deepen their investment in the company’s operational analytics platform.
Announced at the Splunk Global Partner Summit, Benmalek most recently served as vice president of worldwide cloud and managed services providers (MSPs) for Microsoft. At Splunk, Benmalek is now vice president of worldwide partners.
Going into fiscal 2020, the focus of the Splunk channel program will be adding refinements such as providing increased backend rebate opportunities, more incentives for renewals, and greater rewards for selling multi-year contracts, and a simplified deal registration process, says Brooke Cunningham, AVP of global partner programs and operations at Splunk.
Overall, Splunk now has over 1,700 active partners, which contributed to a 63 percent of software bookings and 61 percent of all service deals being driven by partners, says Cunningham. Those partners also registered over 14,000 deals, resulting in 76 percent of all new Splunk customers sales being driven through the channel, adds Cunningham.
Partners are also investing in attaining additional Splunk certifications with over 11,000 new partner credentials being issued in the last year, says Cunningham.
Finally, Cunningham claims recent research shows that Splunk partners generate $6.30 in services revenue for every dollar of Splunk software revenue they generate.
As Splunk starts to rely more on the channel to increase the overall size of the addressable market for its operational analytics software and cloud services, it’s apparent the channel will be playing a much larger role. Most of the success Splunk has achieved in its early years is attributable to its direct sales efforts. But as Splunk continues to grow it is discovering like most vendors of any size the only way to efficiently expand sales is to rely more on indirect sales channels.
In fact, the biggest inhibitor to Splunk’s future growth at this juncture may very well have more to do with how quickly it can expand its channel than it does the actual demand for its software.
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