Splunk ANZ CTO on the opportunities observability brings partners

Craig Magee explains how partners can use these tools to their advantage.

There is opportunity for partners to get involved in the operational aspect of observability, according to Craig Magee, CTO, Australia and New Zealand at Splunk.

He said there is a chance for Australian partners to be a conduit and link between leveraging data for multiple use cases across security.

“There's a big play for the partner community around the standardisation and simplification of tooling,” he said.

“Some of these partners support these tools in these ecosystems, they support some maybe not others. They may be in-house managed, but from a thought leadership perspective, I think there's a massive opportunity.”

Magee noted that is where partners can get credibility with larger-scale organisations.

“If you can show an organisation you're running 15 tools, you can move to five and you can save a million dollars. That opens doors for other opportunities,” he explained.

“There's opportunity for the service providers and partners to get involved more deeply in that conversation.”

Magee noted that partners need to be more strategically involved with some of these technology companies and their organisations, rather than be tactical.

“I buy something from you, I give you some money for a license agreement or a piece of hardware. For some of them, there's a massive opportunity right now to flip that conversation to more strategic.”

Magee told CRN Australia about the dialogue he is trying to have with some of Splunk’s customers.

“Bringing them into the conversation with our customer base, trying to turn them into more strategic and have more of a seat at the table, rather than more tactical and transactional in nature,” he said.

“There's massive opportunity for them right now, for anybody that can get this AI data problem, get it right and have a way for organisations to manage it, secure it, support it, and govern it.

“There's a massive opportunity for service providers and partners; it's huge,” he added.

How Magee works with partners

He told CRN Australia, one of Magee’s roles as ANZ CTO at Splunk is to lean into the partner community and not leave them on their own.

“To help them and go and talk to their customers, help their customers, and also bring that partner community into dialog with Splunk customers,” he said.

“Their business models in the partner community are starting to be challenged around some of the AI capabilities as well. They want to commercialise and monetise a lot of this capability as well.

“How do they do that? There's a big thing that they're all trying to grapple with at the moment.”

Magee emphasised the importance of the partner and reseller community when it comes to educating organisations around AI.

“One thing is for sure, organisations, corporate, enterprise, public service, don't have the horsepower, nor have they got the thought leadership that the reseller, vendor partner community does to help them navigate this problem,” he stated.

“It's a significant problem with a massive opportunity, but if people don't do it right, it will create challenges and problems.”