Dear CEO, CTO, CIO, and other Company Leaders,

Consider this letter a wake-up call.

As an individual responsible for setting the vision of your company, please be aware that the people who work for you now, those smart, intelligent, high-tech individuals who believe in your vision, who are extremely proud of serving you, do not want to let you down.

Every day, these individuals work hard for you and you pay them well for their services. They are system and network administrators, security analysts, application developers, infrastructure architects, QA testers, and various other IT consultants.

As these individuals attempt to move your company forward towards explosive growth and expansion, incredible innovation, and unbounded profitability, you are either not aware of or not focusing enough on “how” they are striving to realize your vision and make it a reality.

Of course, you are probably thinking it’s not your job as a company leader to worry about “how” things are done so much as “why” or “when“. After all, that’s what being a company leader is all about, right?

Indeed, this may be true, but the reality is you need to be aware of the “how” more now than ever.

Recently, I received an email from a client that was struggling with a Splunk configuration issue. He was a sysadmin trying to figure out how to setup Splunk-2-Splunk within his private testing environment. The specific issue he was encountering was not so much related to the Splunk software not working or throwing an exception, etc. But rather, it was more about him trying to understand the “how to” part of Splunk-2-Splunk.

I think anytime you have a technical IT tool like Splunk combined with the ability for a technical person to download, install, and evaluate it for FREE, you will also have plenty of “how to” questions that will naturally accompany those evaluation efforts.

With this said, I want to remind all you technical folks, especially those of you who may still be struggling with the HowTos of Splunk, that as Sales Engineers, it’s our job to provide you with the HowTo support you need during your evaluation of Splunk. In a way, you can think of us as Splunk’s HowTo Team, always willing and able to discuss and recommend the best ways to configure and test out Splunk. It’s our job to make sure you understand all of the technical features and how best to leverage them for your specific needs. And, it’s also our job to help you develop a strong business case for purchasing a Splunk license based on the technical benefits. That way, your manager or director can more easily justify the purchase of that license for you. And, if you are like me, more often than not you need all the justification you can get.