Big-data analytics player Splunk Inc. announced a trio of key executive executive hires today who have been tasked with helping accelerate its cloud product and marketing strategies going forward.

The appointments include Sendur Sellakumar, who has been hired as the company’s first-ever chief cloud officer.

Splunk sells software that processes automatically generated data such as server error logs from companies’ infrastructure. Cybersecurity teams use it to sift through infrastructure data for signs of a breach. Application engineers, meanwhile, rely on Splunk to help them spot performance issues in workloads, and the company’s platform supports a number of additional use cases as well.

Splunk is well-established in large enterprises, and it has has spent the last few years transitioning its technology to the cloud with the launch of new services such as the Splunk Security Cloud. Today’s executive hires are meant to help accelerate that transition, the company said today. They join Splunk at a pivotal time, with the company having just recently secured a $1 billion investment from the private equity firm Silver Lake.

Sellakumar is an eight-year veteran at Splunk who previously led a number of different product, cloud and corporate development teams. In his new role, he will be tasked with overseeing Splunk’s customer cloud transformation, acceleration and go-to-market strategy.

He spent the last two years helping Splunk transition its portfolio of data analytics products to be “cloud-first.” His remit is to help customers accelerate their shift to the cloud and to spearhead the company’s cloud-related partnerships and alliances.

Sellakumar will report to Splunk President and Chief Growth Officer Teresa Carlson, the company said.

Splunk’s new Chief Marketing Officer Claire Hockin will also report directly to Carlson. She has been at the company for three years and in that time has helped implement a number of marketing transformations that have repositioned it as a cloud-first company. Hockin will lead Splunk’s global marketing team and support efforts to transition existing customers to its cloud products.

Finally, Garth Fort has joined Splunk as its new chief product officer from Amazon Web Services Inc., from which Carlson also hails. Fort brings more than 20 years of product management experience and is said to have a long and successful history in guiding software teams through periods of high growth and driving their transition to the cloud. In his new role, Fort will help Splunk to continue to evolve its portfolio of cloud services and software, reporting directly to Splunk President of Products and Technology Shawn Bice.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Splunk is reshaping itself as it heads into its cloud-first future. He said the company needs to accelerate its journey in both product and go-to-market strategy. “The latter job will be left to the utility player exec Sendur Sellakumar, who previously held the role of chief product officer,” Mueller said. “Now, Sellakumar will get to show he can sell what he has built, which is always an intriguing proposition.”

Splunk Chief Executive Doug Merritt (pictured) said his company is well-placed to continue its cloud acceleration thanks to its “unmatched ability” at handling ever-increasing amounts of data.

“With these new appointments, we are aligning our leadership to remain laser-focused on ensuring organizations succeed in the cloud,” Merritt said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE