This year, GTRI was fortunate to be invited again to Splunk’s Worldwide fiscal year 2017 Partner Kickoff (PKO), February 22-23, 2016 in Las Vegas. PKO is always a fun and insightful event, and even more so this year, as Splunk decided to combine it with their annual Sales Kickoff (SKO). The event provided an opportunity to hear about new offerings and the “future of Splunk” via the CEO address from Doug Merritt, and also a format to meet with many of the Splunk sales personnel that GTRI works with on dozens of joint customers across both public and private sectors. It also demonstrated that Splunk is truly committed to their partners – so much so that they decided to combine these two strategic events into one.
The theme of this year’s PKO/SKO was AMPED, and it was beyond evident from the intro to Splunk’s new CEO keynote address with wicked guitar licks crossing Van Halen, Hendrix and many other artists. Doug Merritt is clearly a phenomenal leader and one that I have had the pleasure to work with in his previous role as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Splunk. He discussed four main themes under the AMPED umbrella, but the one that struck our team the most was the MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY ahead for Splunk and their partners. Case in point, the total addressable market (TAM) that Splunk fits squarely into is $30 billion. That being said, and to Doug’s point that “no customer is tapped out on Splunk – ever,” it’s important to recognize that the use cases are endless and that we, together, have just five percent market penetration presently. Onwards and upwards as they say!
In my time at GTRI working in our Splunk practice, I have watched Splunk’s impressive trajectory going from 4500 customers and approximately $115 million in revenue just a few short years ago to over 11,000 customers today and fiscal year 2016 revenue reaching nearly $670 million with year over year growth of nearly 50 percent. In a similar fashion, GTRI has seen its own Splunk business double the past two years, and I am confident that we can do it again in 2016. What was once referred to as “Google for your data center” is truly a platform for operational and security intelligence, and will become the machine data fabric Doug discussed in his keynote, as Splunk continues to enhance their offerings and premium apps.
Speaking of which, this blog would not be complete without some of the great enhancements to Splunk’s differentiated offerings that were showcased at PKO/SKO in Las Vegas. You may have heard about Splunk’s acquisition of Caspida at .CONF in September and the addition of its User Behavior Analytics (UBA) and new IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) offering. What is truly impressive, however, is how much progress and traction both offerings have achieved in just a few months.
ITSI launched at .CONF on September 15, 2015 and since then, Splunk has delivered nearly 60 new ITSI solutions to clients – well done! In addition, Splunk is now combining its award winning Enterprise Security (ES) Application with UBA to provide both risk- and context-based intelligence with data and human behavior to present a more holistic insight to an organizations’ security posture.
Furthermore, ES continues to dominate the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space, being named the number one SIEM solution by SC Magazine a few weeks ago. Each year, the SC Awards honor the most outstanding contributions in the information security industry. Splunk also won, for the fourth year in a row, the Best Fraud Prevention Solution category. What is even more compelling about Splunk’s security plays is that the company was not even on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM four years ago, but has been in the top right corner – again, well done.
In conclusion, I would be remiss in not thanking all our great partners at Splunk across sales, engineering, channels, marketing, education and strategic partnerships who have enabled us to build a differentiated and value-laden business within GTRI. I’d name you all but the list would be nearly 100 “Splunk’ers” long and I am out of space. So, THANK YOU to our great partners at Splunk, our great Splunk team here are GTRI and especially to our mutual customers for allowing us to be a part of this tremendous ecosystem. I look forward to seeing many of you at Disney World in the fall for .CONF2016.
Robert Berger is the Managing Director of Big Data for GTRI’s Professional Services practice.
