Splunk encouraging partners to look beyond security

It has been four months since Steve Bridge left a position at KPMG and took the decision to move to Splunk to head up the EMEA channel team.

In the time since he became area vice president, EMEA alliances & channels, at the vendor he has visited partners in all of the main regions covered by his brief. This week also gave him the chance to catch up with about 160 more at the vendor's partner event in London.

Although still fairly early on in his tenure at the channel helm Bridge has already spotted an opportunity for its partners to widen their market reach. With the majority of the reseller base focusing on the security angle there are emerging areas around operations and IoT that they could be getting involved with.

"Historically we have come from security but we are expanding much more into IT operations, IoT and data management and there is a huge opportunity for us," he said.

As well as encouraging the existing partner base to skill up in new areas Bridge is also open to recruiting more specialists to plug any gaps that might emerge.

 "What I am doing now is taking what we have done with resellers and distributors, largely in the security space, and thinking through how can we continue and nurture and grow that part of the ecosystem but also look at other organisations that are going to help us reach our growth potential and deliver value for customers in the future," he said.

The list of some of those that the firm is looking to work with includes MSP and SIs and getting to more of the cloud providers.

"We have some of the jigsaw in place and we need to put the last pieces of the jigsaw into place that will help us really accelerate into areas like IOT operations and IoT," he said.

"It is taking what we have got today and just extending that and maturing that as we go forward," he added.