Cisco to acquire cybersecurity leader Splunk for $28 bn in GenAI era

San Francisco: Global networking giant Cisco on Thursday announced it is acquiring Splunk, the leader in cybersecurity and observability, for about $28 billion in the generative AI era.

Upon close of the acquisition, Splunk’s CEO, Gary Steele, will join Cisco’s Executive Leadership Team, reporting to Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins.

“We have incredible momentum, and this will be strengthened further with the addition of Splunk to our team. Together, we will bring trusted innovation leadership, an outstanding go-to-market engine, and a world-class culture that will help our customers move with greater speed to rapidly unlock new opportunities ahead,” Robbins said in a blog post.

Cisco and Splunk are two leaders with complementary capabilities across AI, security, and observability.

"Combined, Cisco and Splunk will become one of the world's largest software companies and will accelerate Cisco's business transformation to more recurring revenue," the companies said in a joint statement.

Robbins said that the IT landscape has drastically changed as organisations around the world have digitised their businesses, and it will continue to evolve at an even more rapid pace with the acceleration and adoption of AI.

“The Cisco Security Cloud has visibility into vast amounts of security data -- network data, identities, emails, web traffic, endpoints, and processes. With Splunk, Cisco is adding one of the world’s best data platforms to Cisco’s robust security portfolio,” he noted.

The combination of Splunk and Cisco will help businesses move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, making organisations of all sizes more secure and resilient.

Generative AI is rapidly transforming industries and creating new opportunities.

“Together, Cisco and Splunk see a broad range of data across applications, security, and the network,” said Robbins.

Splunk produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a web-style interface.

Its software helps capture, index and correlate real-time data in a searchable repository, from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualisations.