Splunk Technology

Yeah, Omar and Marcus, thank you for having me on this today.

Lee Hilt, I'm one of the senior SE managers covering financial services, and I'm on the Splunk side.

So actually Cisco, I guess.

It's not really a Splunk side.

We're all one company.

But I did 10 years in the United States Army.

So it was like one of those aha moments where I know often we get caught up in selling a router or switch or a Nexus data center switch or Nexus dashboard.

Well, we're trying to get services in there so we can get our stuff up and operational.

game begin see when you shoot an enemy in doom you're shooting a kubernetes cluster or something

it's not just a game so all the enemies in the game are actually represented as kubernetes pods inside a live e-commerce web application how does the data get from the game into splunk so i had the developer as he was writing the video game code for us log all this stuff

I've heard this term, and you've used it as well in separate videos, being Splunky.

What does that mean?

Heath, great to meet you.

Hey, great to meet you as well.

What are we looking at yet? It looks like something really famous.

Yes, so at Splunk, if you know what Splunk does, right, we monitor machine data, right? And so in order to monitor and report on things when they go bad, you need things to go bad, right? So there's a lot of environments where you could spin up a test environment and there's nothing wrong with it.

On behalf of Cisco, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around exploring how cloud service providers can scale business with Cisco's partner programs and cloud offerings.

Carnes White, Splunk Manager and Channel MSP at Kerasoft, and Adam Mon, Cloud Program Executive at Kerasoft, will discuss how cloud service providers can grow their business through Cisco Partner Programs with Kerasoft support.

All right, team.

Thank you for joining us today.

Carnes White here.

I lead the channel program for Splunk and Now for Cisco as well.

Definitely the name of the game today.

Been here about eight years.

We made an acquisition of one of the largest companies.

acquisitions we've made under Cisco was under my watch with Splunk.

But the strategy is not to be acquisitive.

The strategy is to be very clear on what we're going to build.

You know, we try not to keep the brand.

No more sweatshirts of your brand that come in.

I mean, there's exceptions like Splunk.

We've kept the Splunk brand because Splunk has such a good brand.

We discuss how demand for AI infrastructure has disrupted traditional IT purchasing patterns, how increasingly sophisticated security threats are forcing solution providers to rethink the way they deliver their services, and how AI itself could change the economics of professional services.

We also get into some of the emerging opportunities around managing AI consumption costs, the growing importance of data sovereignty for Canadian customers, and what Cisco's ongoing integration of Splunk means for partners and their customers.

It's a conversation that goes beyond the announcements of Partner Summit to explore what these changes actually mean for the business of solution provider.

Let's get right into it.

The sovereignty conversation, even though sovereignty is just as important in the U.S., it's not as much a part of the first conversation as it is in Europe and in Canada.

Hmm.

Um, was Cisco brings Splunk more deeply into the security and observability strategy? You know, how do you guys think about Splunk and that business? Are you, are you very active there? And do you see that creating new opportunities for CDW to bring together capabilities that customers have traditionally bought and managed separately?

Absolutely.

So this business couldn't be harder to describe in many respects.

It's a company called Splunk.

And what they do is they take the machine data from your systems and they create a platform that sits on top of them and allows you to extract information from all of these pieces of machine data.

So your log files and your router tables, all these things.

And so you say, well, how do you tell a compelling story about that? What they have done is in cities around the world now, they have what they call Splunk Live experiences, where they bring in their customers and their customers tell how they're using Splunk to create value.

So, a customer will sit down and say, we have one customer that manages huge facilities, lots and lots of buildings, and they've taken all the sensor data from all of their buildings, put it into this Splunk engine, and had been able to figure out how to save a huge amount of money in electricity, in operations, in efficiency.

So they tell this tale, and people go, huh, that's pretty interesting.

And then someone that runs a big website comes and says, look, we took all of our traffic data, put it in here, and we can tell you which are efficient channels, which are inefficient channels.