Splunk Partners Gain New Product Insights for Customers at .conf25

SPLUNK .conf25, Boston – For Splunk partners, the company’s recent annual user conference was their chance to learn about Splunk’s latest innovations and service offerings, and hear directly from Splunk executives on how the company has progressed since its $28 billion acquisition by Cisco last year.

So, what did ChannelE2E learn from conversations with several Splunk partners on the event’s show floor at this year’s Splunk .conf25 conference?

Tom Nasca, a category business manager for global technology distributor Ingram Micro, told ChannelE2E that meeting with Splunk product specialists about the company’s announcements and strategy gave him important details to share with partners and customers.

"That is kind of our role here, to talk to our partners and customers and figure out where they see either gaps or needs to fill to help supplement all the value-added services that they want,” said Nasca. For Ingram Micro, while it has been an established Cisco partner for years, its relationship as a Splunk partner is newer and still evolving since the Cisco acquisition, he said.

“We are newer to Splunk, and we are onboarding this year,” said Nasca. In response, many longtime Ingram Micro partners have questions about how working with Splunk will look as part of their Cisco product portfolios, he said. “They want to know, ‘how do I integrate it? What does it look like being a joint partner, especially with Cisco's new 360 partner program?’ And those are the things that we are here to help with and answer.”

Ingram Micro does not work directly with end-user customers, but works with MSPs, VARs, and other channel partners which provide direct services to customers. As part of its work with partners, Ingram Micro provides products, services, training and partner program benefits to its channel partner clients.

For its partners that want to offer Splunk products and services to their end-user customers, Ingram Micro can provide in-house technical resources and broad help in entering Ingram’s partner program that can bring significant partner benefits, including better profitability and margins, said Nasca. “We can help guide partners through that journey and those needs to get there, because there are usually certification pieces” to be completed.

Nasca said that the Splunk announcements on the company’s latest innovations, including Cisco Data Fabric, Splunk Observability, AI capabilities and tools and more, were helpful to hear because “for us it connects the dots a little more every day, hearing how Splunk will fit into the Cisco portfolio, powering the technology. It is really exciting.”

Nasca said AI’s expanding use in enterprises is guiding much of Ingram’s direction nowadays, including how it is being used to improve business processes. Ingram is working to help partners figure out life cycle planning for these new technologies, from selling them to managing them and more, he said.

“We have a lot of programs internally that we offer for Cisco that we are trying to translate for Splunk and then layering in services,” he said. By working closely with partners Ingram can help to ensure that end customers are getting what they expect out of the products through proper configurations, installation and other factors, he said.

“We have found that someone might not renew if they do not know [and take advantage of] all the features that are available,” said Nasca. It is important to have such conversations with partners and their customers beyond the initial sale, said Nasca, “so that we can minimize that and improve the experience.”

Looking into Splunk’s Latest Offerings

Jonathan Hanyok, a senior solutions engineer for NuHarbor Security, a Colchester, Vermont-based MSSP, said he was intrigued by announcements here that will help his customers. That includes Splunk’s work with federated data systems which keep data in its  original locations but then aggregate it to a global model, making it accessible from anywhere. This is something that NuHarbor’s state and local government customers, as well as its public utility clients, can especially benefit from and are interested in, he said.

Other technology areas being addressed by Splunk for his clients are edge processing and data availability in the government sector, said Hanyok.

“So, we work with organizations to help them drive value out of the technology they are using,” he said. “Sometimes there are features that are available in Splunk Cloud that they may not be aware of” and are not yet using. By pointing those hidden features and capabilities out to customers, NuHarbor is able to get their clients back on track and boost the success of projects as they arise as they help to find the best tools for their needs, said Hanyok.

Splunk is receptive and helpful when NuHarbor wants to talk about project work it is doing for its customers, Hanyok told ChannelE2E. “A lot of times it is us and the organization that we are working with [asking] ‘What can we do? How can we do it? How do we solve this together? So it is definitely something collaborative.”

Another MSSP executive, Judd Robins, the co-founder and vice president of sales for TekStream, an MSSP and VAR, told ChannelE2E at the event that he was particularly interested in the Cisco Data Fabric and agentic AI news that was revealed here at .conf25.

At TekStream, the goal is to serve its customers – which are mostly SMBs – by bringing the best vendor technologies and helping them integrate the power of these new and evolving ideas to drive their businesses and operations, said Robins.

“The agentic AI pieces will be interesting for customers, specifically as it relates to how we deliver it,” said Robins. Splunk’s news on how its agentic AI features and capabilities will help TekStream’s customers do tasks better, faster, and with more automation and fewer people “translates to value to my customers,” he said.

“We come up with this co-managed approach where we tie our team to the customer's team to co-manage their security operations center,” said Robins. “The more product and service pieces they take on,” the greater the discounts and the lower their costs. “And now if I can bring in an AI piece to that to reduce costs even more, it makes me a more attractive offering over others.”

A .conf25 event highlight for Robins were comments made during a keynote by Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel, who talked about how Splunk and Cisco have been working together since the acquisition.

“It is good to see Jeetu up there from the Cisco side,” said Robins. “Because this represents all the Cisco pieces, and it is important to hear his voice when we are talking about Splunk.”