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Splunk Announces Strategic Partnership With Google To Fuel Customer Collaboration

Google Cloud and Splunk have announced a new strategic partnership focusing on helping organizations drive actionable insights from their data. This will expand the availability of Splunk Cloud to be available on Google Cloud.

While no date has been set for the rollout, customers can soon utilize Splunk's Data-to-Everything Platform, which helps organizations ask questions, get answers, take actions, and achieve business outcomes from their data on Google Cloud.

"Data is at the center of every business' digital transformation and we are proud to partner with Splunk to help organizations build data-driven, cloud-native strategies," said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. "Businesses can now leverage Splunk's capabilities in data analytics for IT, security, user behavior, and more, on Google Cloud's trusted and secure infrastructure."

This announcement arrives just as Splunk is ramping up its efforts amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

While most companies are pointing to the importance of digital transformation during this time, Splunk's Director of Security Strategy Jim Hanlon insists that it's about working with customers to understand and meet their needs.

"As most salespeople and finance people decided that profit was king, and we would just have to squeeze margins, squeeze your teams, squeeze the customers in the legacy world, people would sign contracts," Hanlon said at the company's pre-lockdown London conference. "But now the customer has access to all sorts of data on the internet so they can find things out for themselves. They can shop around, they can work out where a better deal would be available in the subscription economy."

With a shift in the power dynamic, customer retention is getting trickier. Hanlon insists that tech companies should treat customers as more than just an asset, and ensure collaboration while working towards a common goal.

As the company's Splunk .conf2020 conference looms, initially scheduled for Oct. 20-21 in Las Vegas, the company is making a lot of exciting announcements. This includes turning the in-person event into a virtual conference. Last year's Splunk .conf.2019, also in Las Vegas, attracted about 11,000 attendees.

"We know that a percentage of our valued customers, partners, vendors, and employees simply may not feel ready to travel before the end of the year," said Leslie Hasvold, Splunk's Director of Corporate Event Marketing, in a blog post. Finally, .conf brings an international audience. We want our people from all over the globe to feel safe and welcomed despite what may or may not be happening from whence you come."