Splunk: Sainag Nethala of Splunk - A Cisco Company: Navigating Growth Challenges and Cultural Integrity

Technical Account Manager/ Splunk Expert with 9+ years of progressive experience in cybersecurity and observability solutions at Splunk (a Cisco company). Provides premium consulting services to Fortune 500 companies including Ford Motors, Moody's Corporation, Ping Identity, and Corteva. Specializes in platform optimization, cloud migration, enterprise security monitoring, and data analytics. Notable achievements include reducing cloud migration transition times by 20-30%, contributing to the Splunk Health Assistant used by 1000+ customers, and increasing platform utilization from 35% to 87% for key clients. Recognized as a Distinguished Engineer, selected as a judge for multiple prestigious hackathons (VandyHacks X, MakeUC 2024, HackIllinois), and serves as a reviewer for IEEE & Springer conference papers. Currently pursuing BCS Fellowship and EB-1A Extraordinary Ability visa classification. Company: Splunk - A Cisco Company We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine's exclusive interview! Let's start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company. Sainag Nethala : I'm a Technical Account Manager/ Splunk Expert with over 10 years of experience specializing in cybersecurity and observability solutions. My role at Splunk (Now A Cisco Company) involves delivering premium consulting services to Fortune 500 enterprises across various sectors including automotive, financial services, and identity management. I focus on platform optimization, cloud migration, security implementation, and data analytics that deliver measurable business outcomes. My expertise has helped clients reduce migration times by 20-30% and increase platform utilization from 35% to 87% and be a truster advisor for my loving customers. Beyond my client work, I contribute to the technology community by judging collegiate hackathons, reviewing academic papers, and evaluating industry awards. What were the most significant challenges you faced during the scaling process, and how did you overcome them? Sainag Nethala : The most significant challenges I faced during scaling were knowledge transfer bottlenecks and maintaining consistent service quality across an expanding client base especially with the saas platforms and never ending data. As our client portfolio grew, the traditional onboarding process and the admin privileges became unsustainable, taking 4-5 months to fully integrate new team members. I tackled this by developing standardized technical assessments such as data and search hygiene and implementing a modular workshops with excellent documentation. This brought the onboarding period down to just 10 -12 weeks without loss of quality. Scaling our cloud infrastructure created technical challenges with increasing data and search volumes. I addressed this by implementing data and search clean up instead of lift and shift strategy and optimizing resource allocation, which reduced transition times by 20-30% and prevented service disruption and license overages during growth cycles. How did you ensure that your company culture remained intact as your business expanded? Sainag Nethala : I did maintain our culture during expansion by unified engagement model. Rather than relying solely on informal knowledge sharing across our customer success org, I created a "culture codex" that articulated our approach to client relationships, technical excellence, and collaborative problem-solving. I put together regular cross-team knowledge-sharing sessions where non successful implementations were discussed, allowing teams to know where we went wrong while encouraging innovation. Additionally, I developed a AMA/Office Hours program pairing SME's with newcomers, ensuring our cultural DNA transferred effectively while giving new perspectives a voice in our evolution. What strategies did you employ to maintain quality and customer satisfaction while scaling rapidly? Sainag Nethala : To be honest, it's a different battle every time with different customers, especially Fortune 500. I love standardized frameworks, but you still need to tweak them as per the customer's needs. Sometimes you don't need to. We ran a lot of health checks and checkpoints that caught issues before we went live on production. We built this amazing health assessment tool. Before that, we were always reactive instead of proactive. After we spot issues before the customer even notices, we fix them like observability. After all, we are a company that has been doing machine learning for a long time. The one big thing for me is having technical teams leading the business outcomes. Especially developers and administrators can get lost in technical troubleshooting, so we started measuring with value use cases instead of a band-aid fix. Can you share a specific turning point that was crucial for your business's successful scaling? Sainag Nethala : The moment came after a challenging migration where we struggled to keep up with the issues following the cloud migration due to a customized use case. I had to persuade the customer that now is not the appropriate time and we should revert to our previous on-premises setup because we cannot continue to deal with urgent problems every week. Despite being a difficult decision, it was beneficial for everyone's peace of mind. Moreover, during the same migration, we were able to successfully implement the newer product release. Instead of maintaining a faulty system, we made the right choice. Now we have a system with 99.9% uptime and reliability. Moving forward, we focus on implementing and scaling what is best for the business for customer and us. How did you manage the financial aspects of scaling, particularly in securing funding and maintaining cash flow? Sainag Nethala : It always comes down to budget. When you want 100% system uptime and a stable platform, you need robust infrastructure because you should always plan for your end users as if your stack were an AI platform or Google search. End users experiment in production and they break things, so you need to be strong enough to survive that. This means investing in better infrastructure, but that comes with higher costs. That's why I always explain how your money pays off in terms of ROI by focusing on value realization instead of just being the platform team. The more value you extract from the system, the more valuable your use case becomes. This approach helps justify the infrastructure investment by demonstrating tangible business outcomes rather than just technical metrics.