A New Day for Data: Cisco and Splunk

Today, we are excited to share that Splunk is now officially a part of Cisco. This means, starting now, our customers will begin to see the benefits of the power of our technologies coming together to not only solve many of their most complex challenges, but also enable tremendous opportunities. Cisco — supercharged by Splunk — will bring the full power of the network together with market-leading security and observability solutions. 

Organizations need to connect the people, places, apps, data, and devices that power their business, and they must protect their entire digital footprint from cybersecurity threats, downtime, and other business risks. This is exactly what we will do. 

The combination of Cisco and Splunk will provide unparalleled visibility and insights across an organization’s entire digital footprint, fueled by comprehensive security, observability, and networking solutions. Our customers will be empowered to deliver seamless, secure customer and employee experiences across the physical, digital, and AI-powered worlds.

Better Together: Powering and Protecting the AI Revolution

As one of the largest software companies in the world, we have unparalleled capabilities across AI, security, networking, observability, and data. This will help our customers achieve several business-critical outcomes.

First, we’re going to power the AI revolution. To truly reap the benefits of AI, organizations need the infrastructure to power it, the data to develop it, a security platform to protect it, and an observability platform to monitor and manage it in real time. They also need a trusted, strategic partner by their side every step of the way. With our combined solutions and services, we can ensure our customers are well positioned to win in the era of AI.   

Second, we will deliver mission critical security outcomes for our customers to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Together, we will have highly comprehensive security solutions for threat prevention, detection, investigation, and response for organizations of any size, utilizing cloud, network, and endpoint traffic for unparalleled visibility. 

We are thrilled to share a few ways our portfolios will be stronger together. Over the next several months, we intend to incorporate Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence into Splunk, offering our customers access to highly comprehensive threat intelligence to improve threat detection, faster incident response, and a more proactive security strategy. We also intend to unify our AI assistants for security, so security professionals have one common experience when utilizing AI to analyze issues and perform tasks across the combined portfolio. Moving forward, we intend to enable Splunk’s market leading SIEM and SOAR platform to utilize cloud, network, and endpoint analytics available from Cisco’s security portfolio, enabling new ways for customers to detect, investigate, and respond to threats that can only be identified via lateral movement in the network.

Third, we will offer a highly comprehensive full-stack observability solution for delivering amazing digital experiences across multi-cloud hybrid environments. With the most powerful analytics and insights across the entire digital footprint, we will equip our customers with the observability tools to keep their digital systems up and running and avoid costly downtime. We will also begin to deliver a common experience and workflow optimizations across the Cisco and Splunk Observability portfolios. In time, IT and engineering teams can expect AI-driven root cause analysis enhancements and assistants, inclusive of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI).

Fourth, our customers will now get even more value out of their network. For nearly 40 years, Cisco has built networks which move massive amounts of data every second. Now, by bringing Cisco and Splunk capabilities together, we can harness that data in new and more powerful ways to provide a leading secure networking solution delivered on intelligent, resilient, and continually optimized network infrastructure.

Finally, our combined solutions will help deliver better economics with exceptional value. We believe the market trend towards tool consolidation — and the convergence of networking, security, and observability — creates a significant opportunity for Cisco and our customers. With Cisco and Splunk’s platform approach, we will help our customers consolidate numerous point products—delivering better business outcomes and reducing costs. 

Accelerating Innovation with Customers at the Center

While today is a critical step towards the future, it’s the first of many. Our teams have been planning for this moment, and now the deep integration work begins. We are committed to a thoughtful, deliberate, and responsible process. Over the next several months, we will focus on building and delivering best-in-class integrations between Cisco and Splunk products. 

At the core of this work is our commitment to offering our customers flexibility and choice in how they access and deploy their data across any on-prem, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. We will drive new innovations with a unified data platform that integrates application, fraud, network, multi-cloud, security, user, and other data sources to address cyber, technical, and business risks throughout the entire portfolio. In addition, we will continue our extensive use, support, and contribution to the open source community such as OpenTelemetry, eBPF, and more.

We know that many of our customers value an open approach that benefits their unique technology strategy and we take that perspective to heart. As such, our product portfolio will be open and extensible, with solutions that are tightly integrated, but loosely coupled, enabling us to support our customers’ multi-vendor environments and protect their existing IT investments. 

Our Future Together

Today is only the start. While there is so much that makes this day special, perhaps the most important to us is bringing the incredibly talented teams at Cisco and Splunk together. 

We both have such pride in the cultures of our two organizations who embody core values that guide us to make the world a safer, more resilient, and more inclusive place. As we move into our next chapter together with Splunk as a part of Cisco, we share an excitement for solving the toughest problems our customers face not only today, but also long into the future. Together, we know we are up for the challenge and look forward to the opportunity to help organizations around the world become more connected and more protected than ever before.

_{Forward-Looking Statements
This blog may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact (including statements containing the words “will,” “believes,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “expects,” “estimates,” “strives,” “goal,” “intends,” “may,” “endeavors,” “continues,” “projects,” “seeks,” or “targets,” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, as well as similar expressions) should be considered to be forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Readers should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are management’s beliefs and assumptions, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain, and outside of management’s control. Forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the expected benefits to Cisco, Splunk and their respective customers from the completed transaction, the integration of Splunk’s and Cisco’s complementary capabilities and products to create an end-to-end platform designed to unlock greater digital resilience for customers, plans for future investment, and our development and use of AI and the role that our innovation plays as our customers adopt AI. Statements regarding future events are based on Cisco’s current expectations, estimates, and projections and are necessarily subject to associated risks related to, among other things, (i) the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate Splunk’s market opportunities, technology, personnel and operations and to achieve expected benefits, (ii) Cisco’s ability to implement its plans, forecasts and other expectations with respect to Splunk’s business and realize expected synergies, (iii) the outcome of any legal proceedings related to the transaction, (iv) the effects on the accounting relating to the acquisition of Splunk, (v) legislative, regulatory, and economic developments, (vi) general economic conditions, and (vii) the retention of key personnel. Therefore, actual results may differ materially and adversely from the anticipated results or outcomes indicated in any forward-looking statements. For information regarding other related risks, see the “Risk Factors” section of Cisco’s most recent report on Form 10-Q filed on February 20, 2024, and its most recent report on Form 10-K filed on September 7, 2023, as well as the “Risk Factors” section of Splunk’s most recent report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 28, 2023. The parties undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements for any reason, except as required by law.}