Shannon McWilliams, senior director of enterprise software sales at Arrow ECS.
Splunk, which makes a Big Data analytics platform that analyzes all machine-generated IT and business data from a single location in real time, has chosen Arrow ECS for its first North American distribution agreement.
“We dealt with more than 300 partners in the US and Canada and it was time to bring in operational capabilities to help us manage those partners,” said Emilio Umeoka, Splunk’s vice president of Asia Pacific and worldwide partners.
“We provide Big Data analytics for machine to machine data,” Umeoka said. “We sell to three principal groups – security buying centres, applications development and management, and IT operations. We started out selling a single product and went from there to a multi-product company, becoming a platform for business analytics.”
The multiple products will all be available through Arrow. For example, Splunk Enterprise collects, indexes, monitors, analyzes and visualizes machine data being generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors, and mobile devices, to provide real-time visibility and insights. Hunk brings Splunk’s Big Data analytics stack to organizations’ data in Hadoop and NoSQL databases. Splunk App for Enterprise Security is a next-generation security intelligence platform that provides monitoring, alerting and analytics to detect known and unknown threats in real time with out-of-the-box content. Splunk Light is a recently introduced product that automates log search and analysis for smaller companies than the other products target.
“Splunk Light addresses the needs of midmarket companies, and we will need a different type of partner for that,” Umeoka said.
“We carry some products that somewhat intercept to the Splunk space, particularly in security, but they are clearly the leader,” said Shannon McWilliams, senior director of enterprise software sales at Arrow.” They have been in a very high growth area, even though the Internet of Things, which Splunk is ideally suited for, hasn’t really kicked in yet.”
Emilio Umeoka, Splunk’s vice president of Asia Pacific and worldwide partners
“The market has exploded because of all the other pieces – cloud, mobility, tablets, mobile phones,” Umeoka said. He added that they have been growing very fast in Canada.
Spunk began by selling largely direct to large accounts, and added partners as they shifted to a more segmented sales approach in the last few years.
“It’s now about a 50-50 split between direct sales and partners,” Umeoka said. “Arrow is coming in at the right moment. We have been too concentrated on a few top partners, and have some gaps in coverage in both Canada and the U.S. That’s where distribution can really help.” Arrow was chosen because of the value-add from both an operational perspective and the way they understand the market.
“They also have strategic partnerships that complement our product line as well,” Umeoka said.
McWilliams stated that Splunk is much broader than simply a niche play.
“It’s suitable for a broad cross-section of partners, ranging from small partners who do consulting around IT optimization all the way up to broad line retailers who sell software and hardware,” he said. “It’s also suitable for someone who may be a security partner, or who does analytics.”
McWilliams indicated that after the onboarding of Splunk resellers to Arrow, they will focus on adding new partners.
“A number of possible partners have come to the surface since this was announced, although not all will be suitable,” he said. “We will identify and recruit new resellers who have a specific skill set. We also are very good at managing MDF, and comparing results across all kinds of campaign types. This will raise Splunk’s profile. This could also fit in Arrow’s Components division in the Internet of Things race that is about to commence.”
