This article is co-authored by Gary Steele, President & CEO of Splunk
A lot has happened since we announced our agreement to combine Cisco and Splunk. We’ve each been on the road meeting with customers to learn how together we can help them stay ahead of the evolving technology landscape to drive outcomes critical to their organizations.
A common question during our respective conversations has been: How will the combined company better serve customers?
We continue to hear from organizations around the world that the resilience of their digital systems matters more than ever. With the acceleration of AI, expanding threat surfaces, and hybrid, multi-cloud environments, keeping systems securely up and running has become exponentially more complex – demanding that companies access, analyze and act on their data faster than ever before.
We both believe that combining Cisco and Splunk will allow us to harness the power of data and AI to deliver exceptional customer outcomes now and in the future. And the good thing is, we have a solid foundation to build upon.
Over the last 10 years, Cisco and Splunk have partnered to help thousands of organizations navigate the challenges of the hyperconnected world. Our complementary capabilities have helped protect our customers and find and fix problems by powering comprehensive visibility across highly complex technology stacks. Joining forces will be the next step in our journey to bring transformative innovation to organizations worldwide.
Accelerating innovation across security and observability
Splunk and Cisco have been independently innovating at an accelerated pace to keep up with the dynamic technology landscape. In the last 12 months, Cisco has introduced the Cisco Networking Cloud, Cisco Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Cisco Secure Access (SSE), and Cisco Multicloud Defense, Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform, G200 and G202 networking chips for AI workloads, and AI Assistants and capabilities across Cisco’s collaboration, security, and observability portfolios.
Splunk, too, continues to accelerate innovation across its AI-powered Security and Observability product portfolio. Take security as an example. At Splunk’s marquee customer and partner event, .conf23, Splunk introduced multiple new features for its award-winning Enterprise Security and SOAR products, and also announced the general availability of Splunk Attack Analyzer, which integrates the capabilities acquired from TwinWave last year into Splunk’s unified security operations experience.
We believe the union of Splunk and Cisco’s technologies will accelerate the leading-edge security solutions needed in the modern SOC. We’re excited by the potential value that our complementary solutions, Splunk’s SIEM and Cisco’s powerful XDR, will provide security teams on the frontlines of an evolving threat landscape. We’re also excited by the tremendous opportunities that exist to drive greater reliability and performance for organizations through the complementary value across Splunk’s observability portfolio, logging and IT infrastructure monitoring solutions and Cisco’s observability platform and AppDynamics APM portfolio.
During this time of transition, customers can continue to rely on both of our organizations to innovate at the rapid pace they’ve come to expect. When we come together, we are excited for the opportunity to accelerate our joint innovation even further to bring organizations incredible breadth and depth in our solutions to drive visibility, security, and reliability across their entire tech stack. Joining forces represents a significant investment to double down on the pace of innovation across security and observability to continue driving incredible customer value.
Expanded global reach and the power of partnership
Cisco has tremendous global scale, and together, we’ll draw upon our collective resources and infrastructure to enable more organizations globally to advance resilience through Cisco and Splunk’s expansive products and services.
One example is the Cisco partner ecosystem that plays an instrumental role in getting powerful technologies to more customers globally. Both of our organizations continue to see amazing opportunities to forge partnerships and help our future joint customers unlock incremental value.
Cisco has been committed to its global partner ecosystem and partner-led model for more than 27 years. Thousands of partners world-wide help us go to market, streamline complexity, and deliver measurable business value for our customers, by meeting them where they are with the technology they need.
Add to that Splunk’s partner ecosystem, which consists of more than 2,600 organizations all dedicated to helping customers realize the tremendous value of its AI-powered security and observability. This network works hand-in-hand with customers around the world to bring the right expertise and strategic partnership at the right time to help drive resilience.
Next steps in our journey together
Cisco and Splunk are excited to continue to do what we love most: helping our customers achieve their technology outcomes with innovative products and solutions. That said, it’s important to remember that we are only at the beginning of planning for our future together. Until the transaction closes, which we expect to occur by the end of the third quarter of calendar year 2024, Cisco and Splunk remain separate and independent companies.
Between now and close, Cisco and Splunk expect to continue working seamlessly with our respective customers. For each of our respective organizations, there will be no immediate changes to the services Cisco or Splunk provide or changes to how either company supports its customers.
Finally, we want to emphasize that neither Splunk nor Cisco would be where we are today without the loyalty and trust of our respective customers. You drive us to be the best in the industry, and we are grateful for your ongoing trust and partnership. We believe the future is bright for Cisco and Splunk, and – more importantly, for our customers. Together, we can unlock many more opportunities to help securely connect everything all while building a safer and more resilient digital world.