Just a few weeks ago, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE broadcast live from the AWS re:Invent 2013 conference. One of the interview broadcasts welcomed the director of developer marketing for Splunk, Jon Rooney. Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly sat down with Rooney to discuss Splunk’s role as a partner with AWS, their focus on working directly with and for the developer community and how competitor criticisms won’t keep Splunk from trying to maintain their leadership position in the industry.

Amazon is migrating their successful pricing transparency to the world of AWS. Vellante asked Rooney about the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) option AWS is allowing for customers and software developers. With regard to BYOL “one of the things [AWS] says is…the ISV(independent software vendor) is required to list on the marketplace. In that instance, Amazon is going to take their 20 percent vig and ISV gets 80 percent,” Vellante commented. “So, are you cool with that as an ISV?”

Rooney’s enthusiasm about Splunk’s partnership centered on the value it is meant to bring to their current and future customers via the AWS marketplace and Splunk’s key participation in the CloudTrails product developed for AWS. “We’ve been really happy with our partnership,” Rooney commented. “It’s a tremendous channel for us. How do we bring the value we deliver on operational intelligence to where [cloud customers] are? They’re at AWS.”

You can view the interview in its entirety here:

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Splunk, as a latest generation company seems better positioned to embrace and take advantage of the Amazon business model than, say, a legacy provider like SAP or Oracle. “The cloud model totally screws up Oracle’s business model,” stated Kelly. Though Oracle has partnered with AWS, Kelly believes they were likely less than happy about participating in the marketplace. “They want to sell you a big box, put it in your data center and then turn around and charge you a lot of maintenance over the years.”

Mentioned above, the Splunk/AWS CloudTrails partnership is a mechanism that will allow AWS customers to derive log information from the most popular AWS services. “They can view access control, utilization, performance and see what it is that people are actually doing,” Rooney noted. “Our integration point is, and it’s a perfect use-case for Splunk, we ingest that data and (then) you’re able to visualize.” It’s estimated CloudTrails has already saved customers some $143 million so far.

The developer community has been a primary focus for Splunk. Rooney attributes this to their recognition, like others in the industry, that developers are key stakeholders “for not only classic technology selection but sort of driving that technology forward.”

Rooney continued, “From a Splunk standpoint, we look at developers as being huge enablers of sort of driving the value that Splunk delivers, in terms of providing operational intelligence from the data across the enterprise and in different ways.”

Splunk’s cloud offering, Splunk Cloud is available as a free service for developers. However, the company has had customer feedback, as they move their operations into the cloud, how they would like to consume and use Splunk in the cloud as a service. “That is something AWS is enabling and driving.”

Competitors have, according to Kelly, been calling Splunk out of late. “They’ve said SplunkCloud really isn’t a true SaaS offering. What do you take from that criticism and how do you respond to that?”

“I think we really focus on what we are hearing from our customers and how do we deliver value to our customers. It is a cloud offering in a the sense that it provides the flexibility, the time to value, the moving of the burden of operations from the customer on prem to the provider,” Rooney explained. “It’s all the things that the cloud delivers. We’re delivering that with SplunkCloud. It’s running in AWS. We’re obviously partners and customers of AWS.”

Despite competitor sniping, Splunk is positioned very well in the industry. “What gives you the confidence that you can maintain the lead,” asked Vellante.

“I think it’s the options across deployments and consumption. Really, we’re about delivering the value of operational intelligence,” Rooney explained. “There’s all this data. It’s coming from a bunch of different sources. It’s all over the place.” SplunkCloud, which Rooney insists is a service, is one component of their insured future success. Both Splunk and their other product, Hunk, are available on the AWS marketplace. By offering a range of products and services and allowing customers to use them multiple different ways, Splunk’s position in the industry seems secure.