Future of Splunk on-prem vs cloud

[davidhome]

I've been away from Splunk for a few years and trying to catch up.  I noticed at .conf23 it was mentioned that Splunk on-prem installations will be supported for the "foreseeable future".  Does this imply that Splunk Cloud will at some point be the only way to go?  Is the skill of installing and maintaining a distributed, clustered on-prem environment a soon to be obsolete skillset?  Or, will it most likely follow the same timeline of any other product and the general gravitation toward cloud.  What skill/knowledge around Splunk is the most in-demand at this point?

[gcusello]

Hi @davidhome,

I agree with @richgalloway : there are too many and too important customers (especially in the Finance and Defense Sectors) that will never pass to Cloud and I'm sure that Splunk doesn't want to leave these customers to its competitors!

Surely (as now!)  new features will be before released in Cloud and then on premise, but it will not be a so great problem.

Ciao.

giuseppe

[richgalloway]

While Splunk has been a "cloud-first" company for a few years now, there are too many large customers who can't or won't switch to Splunk Cloud to make it worthwhile for Splunk to drop their non-cloud offerings.  But one can never say "never", hence the "foreseeable future" phrase.  I expect to be retired by the time Splunk goes cloud-only, though.

Until then, skills around on-prem Splunk still are in demand.  Even Splunk Cloud customers have need to run on-prem instances so the need for people who know how to run them will be there for a long time.