August 26, 2026 · News
Suat Çelikok Selected for the 2026-2027 SplunkTrust Cohort: A Sixth Consecutive Year
Splunk announced the 2026-2027 SplunkTrust cohort in July 2026. Suat Çelikok of DataVira is on the list. It is his sixth consecutive selection and the only known six-cohort SplunkTrust streak in Türkiye.
What is SplunkTrust?
SplunkTrust is Splunk's global recognition for people who contribute technically to its own community. It goes to individuals, not companies. Applications and nominations open each May and June, new members are announced by the end of July, and the cohort is inducted at .conf. The 2026-2027 cohort is made up of 4 new and 49 returning members.
Six consecutive cohorts
Splunk changed the cohort naming twice over the years: first by .conf year (.conf21, .conf23), then a single year (2024), then two-year spans (2025-2026, 2026-2027). The naming changed; the streak did not. Membership is reassessed every year and nobody gets in once and stays. Six consecutive selections means the contribution kept going for six years.
Not the badge, the community
SplunkTrust members traditionally receive a black fez. But what sustains a streak is not the fez; it is the people who answer a stranger's question at 2 AM and write up what they learned the hard way so the next person doesn't hit the same wall. That is the community Suat Çelikok has been contributing to for six years. The 2026-2027 cohort gathers at .conf26 in Denver.
What this means for our customers
When you make an architecture decision on the Splunk side, who makes it matters. SplunkTrust is not a marketing badge; it is an assessment by Splunk's own engineers and community. At DataVira that recognition shows up directly in the work: tuning ES at a bank, keeping more than 10 TB a day flowing at an e-commerce platform, or monitoring services with ITSI in the public sector, the decision has someone behind it who has been doing this for six years.
Alongside Elite Partner status
SplunkTrust is individual recognition; Elite is organizational. DataVira sits at the Elite tier, the highest in the Splunk Partnerverse, with Sell, Manage and Cloud Migration Co-Delivery authorizations. It also holds the Specialized tier in the Cisco Splunk Security Solutions program formed after Cisco acquired Splunk. Together they mean the license, the deployment and the operations afterwards all come from the same team.
The fez is nice. But what really keeps me here are the people: the ones who answer a stranger's question at 2 AM, and share the lesson they learned the hard way so the next person doesn't have to.
Selection history
- SplunkTrust .conf21 cohort
- 2022 SplunkTrust membership (no separately named announcement was published)
- SplunkTrust .conf23 cohort
- 2024 SplunkTrust cohort
- 2025-2026 SplunkTrust cohort
- 2026-2027 SplunkTrust cohort (current)
Official sources
- Splunk Community — Introducing the 2026-2027 SplunkTrust cohort
- Splunk Community — Congratulations to the 2025-2026 SplunkTrust
- SplunkTrust community page (Splunk Community)
- DataVira Splunk Elite Partner & SplunkTrust page
About DataVira
DataVira is a Türkiye-based Splunk Elite Partner delivering across Türkiye, the Middle East and CIS markets. It provides advisory, architecture, deployment, health checks and ongoing support across Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud Platform, Enterprise Security (SIEM), ITSI, UBA/UEBA, SOAR and centralized log management.
Contact: [email protected]