Driving Customer Success – A Splunk and AWS Blog

This is a guest blog from Tony Bolander, Manager, Global Strategic Alliances, Splunk 

AWS and Splunk have developed a powerful relationship through the AWS Partner Network (APN) over the past couple years, buoyed by shared customer focus and strategic alignment across executive leadership, engineering, and marketing teams. As I reflect on our work together, it becomes increasingly clear how we have been able to collaborate so well: We’ve found that the principles that form the foundation of what each company does, the Amazon Leadership Principles and Splunk Values, are closely aligned. They gave us a solid foundation to start from, and build upon. Today, I want to discuss how we’ve driven customer success as an APN Advanced Technology Partner by focusing on our customers, building a dedicated AWS-focused team within Splunk, driving innovation and experimentation through a think big mentality, and successfully educating customers and going to market with AWS.

It All Comes Down to the Customer

AWS and Splunk customers innovate at a rapid pace – they introduce new, diverse, and sizable workloads onto AWS and need to ensure security, visibility and operational intelligence are consistent with or better than their previous on-premises experiences. This customer consideration has been the cornerstone of Splunk solution development on AWS, as demonstrated in customer case studies like Autodesk and EnerNOC.  Strong collaboration between the product teams has also been essential for us. Splunk often participates in AWS’s early release and Beta programs to help ensure our customers’ needs are getting visibility as new services from AWS are introduced. Splunk’s own value of “Passionate” has a beautiful synergy with the customer obsession we see at AWS, as we embrace customer requirements and challenges to deliver a best in class solution. Most recently, our collaboration manifested in Splunk being the launch APN partner for AWS Personal Health Dashboard. Splunk was the sole APN Partner fully integrated with the AWS Personal Health Dashboard at launch!

Deep Ownership and Transparency

To be an effective APN Partner, Splunk moves beyond a traditional business development rhythm. There is a global Splunk team dedicated to the AWS relationship. This team owns the overall relationship and coordinates activity with the rest of Splunk. This allows us to better align AWS & Splunk colleagues responsible for demand generation, marketing, social media, public relations, sales, technical services, professional services, product management, development, operations and support. By applying Splunk’s own value of “Open”, we work closely through honest interactions that positively impact our collective goals and objectives.

Drive Simplicity and Innovation

Splunk’s own journey to the AWS Cloud is the epitome of invention and simplification, and combined with our own company value of “Innovative”, we were able to quickly launch Splunk Cloud, a global SaaS offering for machine-data analytics powered by AWS. Splunk has since become an “all-in” AWS customer and is supported by the AWS Partner Network, Sales, Solution Architects, Professional Services, and Executives. AWS also promotes APN Partner invention through a full range of AWS acceleration programs via the AWS Partner Network (APN). These programs help Splunk to quickly and cost-effectively develop new AWS-focused solutions for our customers on AWS. Customers benefit from a simplified process of gaining global insights from their AWS-generated data.

Go Big or Go Home

For Splunk, we think big with Big Data and apply our own value of “Disruptive” when identifying new ways for customers to quickly gain business insights at scale. Most importantly, we ask our customers to Think Big when asking questions of their data through Splunk – this has resulted in a growing set of joint AWS & Splunk success stories including FamilySearch and Adobe. Other AWS partners are also thinking big – this was most notable at AWS re:Invent where Atlassian & Puppet demonstrated their Splunk Apps and Accenture showcased Splunk as part of their Cyber Defense Platform as shown here:

Educate and Drive Customer Success

Before taking our solutions to market, Splunk and AWS collaborate early and often to identify ways to serve our customers. Ultimately, it comes down to the following equation for us: leveraging AWS Agility + Splunk Visibility = Cloud Success. With security being the top priority for AWS, we want to ensure our customers hear a clear message from both AWS and Splunk, resulting in a co-authored AWS & Splunk Security Whitepaper. We also deliver an AWS-centric solution that both an advanced AWS user and a new Splunk user can gain value from within a few hours – this manifests itself in the Splunk App for AWS, a fantastic testimony of collaboration, innovation and advanced integration.

Bringing it all together at AWS re:Invent 2016

“Fun” is the final Splunk value, and while it’s not written down – we know our friends at AWS embrace this attitude as well.

In fact, they provided plenty of fun at AWS re:Invent 2016!  This was a fantastic opportunity for AWS customers to get hands-on with AWS & Splunk at the Security Jam or track their water, food, and meds with the Splunk and AWS IoT-based First Responder Service!  We also worked with AWS Marketplace to promote a new version of Splunk Light, bundled with the App for AWS for 6 months for free – we invite you to try it out! *(AWS service charges still apply)

This alignment has definitely paid off. Our CEOs recently got together to discuss the importance of collaboration and the results it drives for customers.

Happy Splunking,

Tony Bolander, Manager, Global Strategic Alliances (@tonybolander)

The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.