Splunk's EMEA channel boss highlights where partners can benefit from new programme

Software vendor announced the launch of its Partnerverse Programme last week

Splunk's EMEA head of alliances and channels says partners will be able to benefit from becoming more specialised as part of its newly launched programme.

The software vendor announced the launch of its new Partnerverse Programme last week, which will allow participants to earn different badges in areas such as cloud migration services, zero trust services, observability, security, managed service, system integration and authorised learning.

Splunk claims the new programme, which will become broadly available in February 2022, will allow its partners to differentiate and to "build on their technical expertise through clear, progressive enablement pathways and certifications".

And, speaking to CRN, the company's EMEA channel boss, Blanca Galletero, said partners will be able to focus more on specialisation while earning incentives from the badges they achieve.

"We are allowing our customers to become much more specialised and also to publish this to the market so the customers will be able to identify what the journey is for them," she said.

"We have created special tracks, so what that means is partners go into the journey and they basically start going through milestones and once they complete the journey, they can get the badge and they can publish this on their website.

"And we believe that this is a very good thing, not only for partners, but also for individuals because this is the way that the whole community can recognise what the added value is that you can provide into the ecosystem, and it will be easier to identify which parts of the journey line up with which partners.

"Obviously there will be some economic incentives on the back of everything, but they will have to be discussed case by case depending on the motion, depending on the badges and depending on the different initiatives in which partners will be focused on."

As part of the programme, Splunk will also offer a new Partner Solutions Catalogue which it says "will allow partners to reach the widest audience possible and highlight "their portfolio of Splunk-based offerings".

Galletero said that while Splunk is seeking to expand its partner base to reach more MSPs, CSPs and cloud native companies, it is also working with its existing partners to help them adapt to the new programme.

"You do have to get your badge in order to be incentivised but for existing partners, we are ready to basically look into the details, because we want to incentivise all our existing partners to move into the new badges system," she added.

"We are actively reaching out to them and having conversations, because we want to help them. We don't want this to be something else that they need to do on the top, we want them to see this as a valuable thing to do.

"Our partners are critical to our growth and this is why we are basically revamping everything. We are evolving our partner programme because we can see, with the growth rate that we have in front of us, that we do need a much bigger ecosystem to be able to cover all the needs that we are going to have."