Splunk keeping tabs on APAC opportunities

Gretchen O’Hara, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Splunk shares how the acquisition will bring more opportunities for both Splunk and Cisco in APAC.

As Cisco continues to integrate Splunk’s tools into its offerings, partners are also hoping that they are part of the plans. With Cisco’s new partner program, Cisco360 set to go live next year, Spunk is already ensuring its partners also play a key role in the program.

For Gretchen O’Hara, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Splunk, there will be vast opportunities for both Splunk and Cisco partners once they are part of Cisco360.

Taking a deeper look into Splunk’s presence in the Asia Pacific region, O’Hara shared with CRN Asia how the acquisition will bring more opportunities for both Splunk and Cisco, as they will be able to provide more solutions in the region, both in new and existing markets.

How's it looking like in APAC since the acquisition was announced?

APAC is a big area of investment for Splunk and Cisco. Specifically, we're seeing big bets in Japan and India, which are two big markets for us that we're continuing to expand in.

We also have a mature market in Australia and New Zealand. With the integration of new areas in AI and the hooks into some of Cisco’s networking products, we have an opportunity to now go back into these mature markets with our partners and have a conversation to grow again.

From my perspective, we see big hyper-growth in some markets in APAC, where things have been a little bit more mature. There are conversations to go in and expand beyond what we might already have with that existing set of customers today.

The other area that is becoming really exciting is the MSP side of the business for APAC. In the past, MSP was a good, squarely mid-market type of opportunity. But now, more of our enterprise customers are looking at a way to have managed security in a way that takes away the cost and the complexity.

And so, from APAC, that's an area that's becoming really interesting because there's an opportunity to have centralized SOCs in various regions to support the APAC business.

We're probably working with some of the MSPs that Cisco is also working with right now, and we have more to do there. One of the areas that I think is a big growth opportunity, is to expand on the offerings that existing Cisco MSPs and SPs have today and bring now security and to have a full digital resilience story and be able to expand that portfolio.

So, we're seeing a lot of interest in the service providers, telcos, as well as the traditional MSPs. It’s going to be exciting. We have some opportunity to continue to listen and learn from our partners on what does that optimal commercial model looks like in APAC.

We just got back from our partner advisory board talk about what the future of MSP will look like because we recognize that APAC region and what is needed there might be different from commercially, what would be, for example, in some other areas in EMEA or even in the Americas. So, we're working through some of that stuff now on the road map.

Are there any markets in APAC where Splunk is stronger than Cisco at this point in time?

I wouldn't say there's markets that are stronger, but I would say that there's markets where we have a deeper security penetration than Cisco traditionally would. But our perspective is that we have to go with Cisco together because Cisco is so much larger in the APAC market.

We have some specialty distributors and partners that can really bring a powerhouse into Cisco. So, that's about really jointly coming together and joint selling with our Cisco counterparts to have sort of that unified conversation at the customer level.

Customers will see more than what we've already launched. For example, our joint boot camps across various countries because of the large presence that Cisco has within each country and then bringing specialized Splunk capabilities into that market to be able to expand there.

Do you foresee a lot of changes in mature markets like Australia and New Zealand as compared to the rest of Asia?

I think it's a huge opportunity. There's some point when you're in a mature market, and there's only so much expansion that you can do with a portfolio set that you have. And now with the announcements that we've made around AI at Cisco Live, from the integration with Thousand Eyes, the data platform and analytics piece, it's a way to go back to the customer and have a digital resilient enterprise-wide conversation and be able to go in and expand upon what had been somewhat more of a mature saturated market.

There's like new business to be done and big expansion to be had now in even some of our largest accounts with the combination of Cisco. So, we're really excited.