In-Person Discovery Forum
Unlocking Digital
Business Resilience
Driving Growth and Securing Your Future in the Age of AI.
- Thursday, 9th October 2025
- 🇬🇧 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM BST
- Brunel Building, 1 & 2 Canalside Walk, London W2 1DG
Setting the Scene
Get ready to connect, learn, and grow at the Splunk and Somerford Discovery Forum. Starting with a complimentary lunch, this in-person event offers a unique opportunity to network with peers and hear directly from customer speakers.
You’ll also gain exclusive insights from Splunk .conf25, including the latest developments in agentic AI, digital resilience, and how the Splunk and Cisco partnership is shaping the future of data.
Join us for an afternoon of real-world insights, strategies, and networking — including highlights from Splunk’s work with Flight Simulator expertise, and first-hand experiences from customers using Splunk to solve complex challenges.
Expert Speakers
Agenda
Arrival & Networking Lunch
Introductions, Setting the Scene and Forum Housekeeping
Featuring John Dee, Strategy Director, Somerford Associates
Key Note from James Hodge, GVP & Chief Strategy Advisor - EMEA at Splunk
Business success today depends on an organisation’s ability to thrive in the face of disruption.
Hear from James Hodge, GVP & Chief Strategy Advisor - EMEA at Splunk, in a keynote that explores the future of digital resilience, moving beyond traditional security and observability to a unified strategy for a new era. Learn how the powerful combination of Splunk and Cisco is leveraging AI to transform how executives manage risk, accelerate innovation, and protect critical business services.
This session will provide a strategic roadmap for building an intelligent, adaptive enterprise.
How Splunk Fits Into Specsavers’ Observability and AIOps Ecosystem
Featuring Andy Slater, Observability & Automation Lead, Specsavers
ITSM integrations, payloads, webhooks, and automated runbooks: discover how the Specsavers team utilises Splunk as part of its toolset to manage complex infrastructure and automate incident response, positively impacting key incident management metrics like MTTR.
The Role of Observability in Digital Resilience
Featuring Dan Gray, Senior Observability Expert at Somerford Associates
Explore how a unified approach to observability with Splunk helps you eliminate blind spots and make data-driven decisions, ensuring the resilience and performance of your critical business services.
Refreshments & Networking
Overcoming the Visibility Challenge
Featuring Martyn Wheeler, Client Partner Executive at ThousandEyes (part of Cisco)
Organisations today are grappling with a complex set of challenges in their digital environments. The primary struggle is a lack of visibility into networks and services they don't own or control.
Hear from Martyn on how to overcome a lack of visibility into your digital ecosystem by providing end-to-end monitoring of applications and networks, on the public internet, in the cloud, and within a remote workforce. Ultimately, this ensures a reliable and seamless digital experience for both customers and employees, which is crucial for protecting revenue and brand reputation.
Driving Digital Resilience with Splunk Security
Featuring Ben Marrable, Senior Splunk Security Expert, Somerford Associates
Discover the evolution of the SOC from a reactive incident response team to a proactive force that prevents major disruptions. This session will explore how a single platform can centralise security data for unified threat detection and response, allowing for faster and more accurate threat investigation.
We’ll also cover how Splunk’s capabilities support regulatory compliance and risk assessment, and the role of AI and automation in accelerating detection while reducing manual workloads.
Splunk Immersive Experience (SIE) - Splunk Hosted
Get inspired with Splunk's immersive experience centre (SIE)
Explore how Splunk tackles industry-specific challenges and delivers tangible end-customer and user outcomes in Splunk's unique Immersive environment! We will follow a fictional customer around each zone examining how she is experiencing technology, and what happens when it goes wrong. Your host, David Warne – Splunk Strategic Advisor – will then wrap the show by demonstrating how data, security, and observability problems are EVERYWHERE, and what they cost.
Fireside Chat: Business Digital Resilience
Featuring John Dee, Andy Slater, Ben Marrable and Dan Gray
We will explore how a unified observability platform can enhance operational efficiency, improve incident management, and strengthen business resilience. Learn how moving from reactive, siloed monitoring to a proactive approach enables organisations to demonstrate value through technical insights and support key initiatives such as digital transformation and global expansion.
The discussion will be grounded in the practical experience of Specsavers.
End of Day Drinks: Flight Simulator in the Buttercup Arms
Register
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