Insights for infrastructure is aimed at the sub-$500 million segment, and while not an exclusive channel play, the channel will be an important part of the go-to-market strategy. It will also be available to MSPs, albeit in the single-tenant version that is standard for Splunk.
Splunk has announced the general availability of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure, a scaled-down version of Splunk Enterprise designed to expand Splunk’s presence in their lowest market segment, companies with $500 million revenues or less. It’s low cost – free for smaller environments with below 50 servers – and low complexity are designed to combat traditional objections to Splunk in this market segment. It will also make it easier for channel partners to expand Splunk logos in the segment with a ‘land and expand’ strategy.
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure lets system admins and DevOps teams automatically correlate metrics and logs to monitor IT, providing the core capabilities of Splunk Enterprise to smaller environments.
“Insights for Infrastructure is based off the same technology as Splunk Enterprise,” said Faya Peng, Senior Director, Product Marketing, at Splunk. “What we have done is design it for the use cases of smaller organizations to make sure that they have the same seamless, fast inexpensive experience. While a lot of the core value of Splunk Enterprise is there, it is designed to be much easier to use, and is more interactive.”
“Splunk Enterprise does 1000 things very well,” said Judd Robins, executive vice president, sales, at Atlanta-based solution provider TekStream. “Splunk Insights for Infrastructure doesn’t have the bells and whistles, but it does the core 20 per cent of things that everybody wants.”
TekStream has been partnered with Splunk for a little over two years, and has nine accredited people in their Splunk practice.
“Splunk has divided the market into four segments, with the lowest of them being Commercial – companies with under $500 million in revenues – and that’s where this plays,” Robins said. “We participate in all four segments, but mainly in Commercial and Field, the level above Commercial. We have strong practices around Oracle and AWS, and have brought some of those customers to Splunk.”
Robins said that Insights for Infrastructure delivers on a theme that Splunk emphasized at their Global Partner Summit in February.
“At the Sales Kickoff, they wanted to address the perception that Splunk Enterprise licensing was expensive,” he indicated. “This also greatly simplifies the process, and lets you stand up Splunk quickly, in a matter of hours. It quickly does some automatic association of servers and brings value in a short amount of time. We see it as a great way to defuse the perception that Splunk is too expensive and too complex.”
Robins said that there is some market for this in isolated parts of larger firms, but that he doesn’t think it will be a major play.
“Larger enterprises have already invested in that journey,” he said. “A company like that, like Georgia Southern, would have small pockets of their business where this would work, but realistically, this screams to the Commercial layer, Splunk is going from a one billion dollar to a five billion dollar business and the only way to do that is to add a lot of logos.”
“Many companies that need to do monitoring is encompassed in that $500 million segment, so we see a lot of these smaller companies being interested,” Peng said.
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is free for small environments of up to approximately 50 servers, with 200GB in total storage.
“There is an easy upgrade path to add more storage capacity to support more servers [starting at $USD 3,750 per year], as well as the path to Splunk Enterprise,” Peng added.
Robins noted that even the free version can be bundled with lightweight support as well.
“We really see this as a great opportunity to land Splunk into new logos, which are a huge priority for us,” said Brooke Cunningham, Splunk’s AVP of global partner programs and operations. “It will give partners a great opportunity to expand and upsell as these companies grow. Partners also wanted to know how to help customers realize value more quickly, and this will let them do that as well.”
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure can be obtained as a download directly from Splunk, through authorized Splunk Partner+ partners, and soon, as an Amazon Machine Image on the AWS Marketplace.
“We are making this broadly available to customers, as a download, or through Arrow and channel partners.” Peng said.
“We see partners as an important part of the go-to-market,” Cunningham said. “We have engaged some partners prior to the launch, and provided them with marketing and enablement materials.”
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure will be available to MSP partners as well. Since Splunk launched its MSP program in February 2017, it has been geared around single tenancy, and that won’t change here, particularly since the focus on smaller teams is well-suited for single tenancy.
“This is something that could certainly be multi-tenant down the road if Splunk wanted to do that, but Splunk MSP contracts are not set up that way today,” Robins said.
