One message is clear for both traditional Cisco partners and traditional Splunk partners - it is time to build a modern Splunk practice. But, what does that mean exactly? Well, I recently had an opportunity to catch up with Amit Harjani to go over just that. It is a three pillar approach including people, process, and business value. In the video below, Amit briefly touches on all these points as well as giving some direction on where to learn more.

Transcript

Auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Speakers are not separately labeled.

Hey everybody, we’re out here at Cisco live in Amsterdam and I’ve been talking to Amit. We’ve been talking about how do you build a modern Splunk practice? Can you give us some details on that? >> Yeah, Jason, thanks for having me. First off, no um building a modern Splunk practice and there a couple of elements involved in it and specifically around digital resilience and the one Cisco story. A lot of partners have have been longtime Cisco partners or on the other hand you have a lot of Splunk partners who have been who have been using our solution stack for a pretty long time. Building the practice around digital resilience is bringing those two complimentary technologies together from Cisco’s networking observability endpoint and security with Splunk’s leading data security and observability platform. Building it together there’s there’s come a couple of challenges we hear from partners is how do I get started? We need help kind of establishing a practice, building a center of excellence with the right skill sets. How do I uplevel the resources and how do I help get help around defining a go to market building solution offers that my customers are expecting, right? So the way we do that, we approach it with a with a three pillar process, right? Got to have a common framework to build offerings, right? It starts with starts with having a process established. The center of excellence at your technical organization is the heartbeat of your of your of your practice and they set the governance standards on how to build offers, what offers we should build, is there a market for it. So having a good strong process in place is the first step. Second step is upleveling your resources, the people, right? So establishing the right technology skill set within your center of excellence. Splunk uh architects, cross uh solution architects who have worked on different technologies, Cisco architects, those are the right folks to help build the solutions. Now the most important piece is like your cell sales teams, your consulting teams because they are the front line. They know the f from firsthand knowledge what are the challenges their customers are experiencing. So getting their influence and feedback and support when you build an offer between Splunk and Cisco is really important. Then the last thing is business value. You got to understand the market dynamics properly. You got to understand what are the solutions that really provide real resolution to your customers. At Splunk, we have three main disciplines. Splunk platform, Splunk security, Splunk observability. Depending on your customer base and the challenges they experience, you can use the Splunk solution stack integrated with like thousand eyes for network observability with the Cisco security portfolio for like intelligenceled sock and then data strategy with platform and Cisco data uh fabric framework. So there are a lot of options there but in a nutshell hopefully that gives a good perspective of what it takes to build a splunk practice or a splunk modern splunk practice. >> So you gave us a lot of information just now on how how to do all this and what it means. Now >> if I am wanting to build a modern splunk practice and get all of this information and learn some more myself where can I go find this? So the first thing I would say is talk to your partner development manager or partner SC in region right they have a they know where the right learning paths where the resources are whether it’s on splunk partner verse or it’s on Cisco black belt start there um and then you can visit Cisco black belt or um sales connect that have a lot of information on digital resistance uh we’re gearing up in the next couple of weeks to launch a new how to build your practice on black belt um some content around MSP and MSSP and partner learning journeyings is on our road map to develop for Splunk. So those assets will be released soon. So be on the lookout. A lot of good stuff coming to help activate your teams. >> That’s awesome. So thanks for giving us the lowdown, man. >> Thanks Jason. Anytime. My pleasure.