Splunk Expands Software Pricing Options For Customers, Partners

Splunk is changing up the way customers purchase and pay for the vendor’s big data management software.

Splunk has unveiled several new pricing programs the vendor said will provide more flexible options for current and prospective customers – and the solution providers who serve them – and expand sales into new markets. The new pricing plans are also expected to benefit channel partners by giving them more ways to sell Spunk’s software portfolio.

“We want to provide more flexibility, more choices, more predictability,” said Ammar Maraqa, Splunk senior vice president of business operations and strategy, in an interview with CRN.

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Splunk now calls its software, which collects and processes machine data for a range of IT management, security and business analytics tasks, the “Data-to-Everything” platform, given the wide applicability of the technology.

“It’s our vision for where we see the world going and where we see Splunk fitting in,” Maraqa said, noting that businesses and organizations are collecting more data from more sources and applying it to more decisions and actions. “Every problem is a data problem.”

Splunk’s idea is that with so many different types of customers buying its software for so many different purposes, the vendor needed to offer more pricing options. Customers need to better predict the total cost of ownership, Maraqa said.

Currently Splunk prices its software using a consumption-based model based on the amount of indexed data. Splunk will continue to offer that option. But with some applications it can be difficult to forecast upfront how much data will be processed – and so calculate total costs, Maraqa said.

A new Predictive Pricing option allows customers to purchase pre-defined tiers of data capacity, from 125GB to a top tier with unlimited data capacity, making it easier to calculate costs at time of purchase. The option covers the Splunk Enterprise platform, Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk IT Service Intelligence products.

Under a second option called Infrastructure-Based Pricing, customers can purchase Splunk software based on the compute power needed to run the software, both on-premises and in the cloud. The option, which Maraqa said uses a “virtual CPU metric,” allows a buyer to de-couple the software purchase from data volumes and focus on the underlying system that runs it.

That option covers Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk IT Service Intelligence and some other products the vendor has in development, the executive said.

The third option is called Splunk Enterprise Rapid Adoption Packages, bundles of Splunk software designed to handle three, four or five specific use cases in IT and security operations.

Maraqa said those packages are geared toward new customers making their first Splunk purchases and departmental customers looking to buy for narrowly defined tasks. Pricing for the packages will start at $10,000 MSRP, according to the company.

Splunk partners re-sell, co-sell and reference sell the company’s software and the new pricing options are available to partners for all sales modes, Maraqa said, with no changes to how partners handle purchase transactions.

The new pricing options will help partners offer more flexible buying options to their customers. “Many partners sell on infrastructure-based metrics,” Maraqa said. And the Rapid Adoption Packages should help partners more easily acquire new customers and get customers up and running on Splunk software more quickly, he said.

In related news, Splunk said it has expanded its strategic relationship with systems integration and IT services giant Deloitte, specifically its Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory business, to add Splunk’s Phantom security orchestration software to Deloitte’s Fusion Managed Services to provide automated security monitoring and response capabilities.

Spunk also said it is expanding its relationship with systems integration giant Accenture to develop data analytics solutions.