BOSTON – Splunk's AI ambitions could transform its pricing approach and address long-standing customer complaints about the cost of data intake.
Splunk Leaders disclosed these AI roadmap plans in an interview with Informa TechTarget this week following the launch of Cisco Data Fabric Architecture. Many of the new features demonstrated at this week's Splunk annual user conference are expected to be released over the next six months.
According to Mangesh Pimpalkhare, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Splunk Platform at Cisco, plans to expand federated search and analytics on the new platform by maintaining data instead of importing and indexing everything within Splunk's backend, by design, will reduce customer intake costs. However, over the next three months, Splunk will also be testing new pricing models that focus on analytics rather than data.
“Federation ideas change economics [of the platform] For customers, “Even the parts being processed by Spranck will begin steering into new multidimensional pricing models, separating ingestion and analysis, and deleting unit prices for data management to a minimum,” he said in an interview.
The new pricing pilot program simplifies product licensing and allows customers to start with critical features and expand to additional data analytics over time. This is similar to this week's update to Splunk Enterprise Security version 8.2. This combines previously separate security orchestration and response (SOAR), threat intelligence management, user entity behavior analysis, and security information and event management tools with essentials and the Premier Edition. In addition to previously UI integration between separate tools, the new Splunk Enterprise Security Premier Edition includes Soar licenses that are no longer limited to named users within the company.
In the new pilot program, Splunk will provide cost management capabilities to map spending to specific services, allowing customers to allocate more predictable levels of overall spending to different parts of the platform as needed, he said in an interview.
Splunk Plan is working on PEVES pricing
The new pricing changes have partially become a jockey as a result of an increase in the relationship between AI Gold Rush's position and Splunk's Cisco wide product set. However, these moves will ease complaints about pricing from Splunk customers in recent years, according to IDC analyst Stephen Elliot.
“The cost of intake was a fixture for Spranck's customers,” Elliott said. “There's also a maturity in the market for log value. Now it's about metrics, logs, traces, events. It's about integrating information from both on-premises and cloud-native apps. And there's an AI layer – an agent digital workforce.
Splunk previously introduced workload pricing because it deployed Splunk Cloud Platform. This provided customers with licensing options other than data intake as they set rigid limits on data intake and imposed practices left over from the vendor's initial log management date, which could lead to charging immediately if exceeded. However, while Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise cost management capabilities continued until this week, they will also change under Splunk Enterprise version 10, according to a keynote speech at Pimpalkhare's conference on Tuesday.
“Everyone who works in a standalone on-prem environment has been asking, 'Why can't I filter, mask, route, or route data to the extent I can in the cloud?” he said during his presentation. “Well, you can now. It's the same consistent experience in the cloud and on-prem, and now there's a single console to look at the entire end-to-end data pipeline, from transfer agents to where you land at the right destination based on your use case.”
As Splunk and Cisco approach, the focus must shift to increasing product use by multiple teams within large organizations as they compete with ServiceNow, IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.
“Splunk has a large installation base for enterprise security and logging products, and an increase in installation base for SOAR and Observability,” says Elliot. “Cisco can use the width and depth of the portfolio to sell a lot, but selling is one thing. It's another thing to actually adopt across the organization.”
Cisco's plan to integrate AI canvases into the Federation Splank Data Management platform could be key to promoting the use of the platform among multiple groups within large enterprises, Elliot said.
“There's one interface that every customer can go as their first entry point, and whatever the problem they have, they can start segmenting data using the architectural backend and direct AI to assist each persona in a personal way,” Elliott said.
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering Devops. Any hints? Please email her Or reach out @pariseutt.
