Virtual Splunk conf20: Thriving in the Data Age Amid COVID-19

This week’s virtual Splunk conf20 kicked off with unveiling two acquisitions, a new observability suite, and other enhancements and updates.

Splunk has acquired Plumbr, an application performance monitoring (APM) company. In addition, it is buying Rigor, a digital experience monitoring (DEM) company. Rigor offers advanced synthetic monitoring and optimization tools. Both acquisitions increase Splunk’s observability capabilities.

The Splunk Observability Suite includes solutions for infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, digital experience monitoring, log investigation and incident response.

Splunk’s Brooke Cunningham

Splunk also announced enhancements to its IT operations portfolio, as well as Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise. Furthermore, it unveiled innovations across its security operations suite.

Brooke Cunningham is Splunk‘s area vice president of global partner programs, marketing and operations. In a Q&A, she talks about Splunk’s partner program momentum and opportunities for continued growth.

Channel Futures: What’s the theme and message of conf20?

Brooke Cunningham: Overall, the core messaging for the event is around thriving in the data age. And really, the data age is here. It has accelerated these digital transformations within our customers and within global organizations, and everyone is really rethinking their data strategies. So change is just going to keep being part of this new normal. And so all of the content that we prepared for the event has really focused on how our customers are leveraging Splunk to solve these data challenges and how data is such an essential service for all of them. And then we’re featuring a lot around our partners. We’ve got a ton of amazing participation from our partners in the event, both as audience members, as well as sponsors and participants in some of the content and how they’re helping customers solve these data challenges as well.

CF: Is this the first virtual conf? If so, are there pros and cons to this format?

BC: We’ve seen an amazing response to conf, specifically from our partner ecosystem. We’ve got 9,000 partners registered. That’s the largest group of partners we’ve ever had from any kind of event in person or virtual. We’re going to have the largest event we’ve ever had historically. And we’re reaching people around the globe that maybe wouldn’t have been able to travel. So that’s certainly a positive.

We thought a lot about all the things that we know our customers and partners love about in-person events. And we’ve tried to bring as much as we can to the virtual platform to ensure that we’re bringing networking opportunities, hands-on opportunities and ways that people can have some fun.

CF: What sort of growth has Splunk’s partner program experienced over the past year. How has COVID-19 affected that momentum?

BC: Our partner ecosystem continues to be a very significant part of our go-to-market strategy. Recently in our second-quarter earnings, we had over 50% of our total bookings from cloud — and that that was 89% year-over-year growth. Our partners have been significantly supporting this move to the cloud in our earnings. And the growth of partner cloud bookings is even faster than that.

We’re growing at 109% year over year in terms of cloud bookings. So that’s significant. Our partners are helping our customers accelerate to their cloud and we’re also seeing increased partner engagement. We’re about 2,000 active partners strong currently, which is just up from about 1,900 this time last year. We’re seeing … the breadth of the relationships that we have with our partners really growing. And we’ve got some amazing announcements like SAP and Google Cloud, where we’re sharing where some of these partnerships are gaining ground. And we’re seeing increased engagement from the existing ecosystem in this time. For example, we’ve had a 42% increase in partner portal engagement in the first half of this year. So the partners we do have are …