Splunk.conf: Splunk and Cisco showcase unified platform
With 18 months having elapsed since Cisco closed its acquisition of Splunk, joint platform capabilities and developments are being showcased at the annual Splunk.conf fair.
Having spent the best part of a year and a half working to unify its products and tools with those of its new owners Cisco, Splunk is using its annual Splunk.conf event in Boston, Massachusetts, to showcase a number of future developments, beginning with the introduction of the new Cisco Data Fabric platform.
Following the closure of the multibillion dollar purchase in 2024, Splunk and Cisco moved quickly to start to integrate their technology offerings. By last September, as Computer Weekly reported at the time, the duo already had multiple tools, such as Splunk’s Observability Cloud, working well with Cisco AppDynamics, Talos Threat Intelligence and ThousandEyes, and were eyeing closer integration in other areas.
Speaking to reporters in advance of the show’s opening keynote on Monday 8 September, Splunk senior vice president and general manager for EMEA, Petra Jenner, reflected on a busy year and said there were a lot of positive aspects to the deal.
“While we still have our own identity we are working more closely together to achieve better customer experiences,” she said. “One of the key priorities for us is to ensure that customers are really supportive. They see that we are collaborating from a technical point of view.”
Jenner said that prior to Splunk’s acquisition by Cisco, while it had had a strong and growing presence in markets such as the UK, France and Germany, there had been a recognition that it needed to invest in growth.
Cisco’s money has been a catalyst for this investment, not only in the UK but also helping open up more business in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said Jenner.
“The impact the acquisition had for the Splunk EMEA team has been extremely good. We have joint customer engagements and there are core initiatives going on so that customers can really leverage the joint Splunk and Cisco, not only the product but also the overall convergence,” said Jenner.
“It also suits very well the technology trends [that are] happening,” she added. “In regard to AI the platform approach is getting more important.”
Jenner also reaffirmed Splunk’s commitment to its IT channel partners both in the security and observability fields, saying it has doubled the numbers on its books. She added that drawing on the strength of Cisco partners – with all the myriad possible networking certifications available – that may not have previously considered Splunk, may help make the platform concept an easier sell to customers looking to do more.
Data Fabric turns machine data into actionable intel
Splunk.conf kicked off on Monday evening with the launch of Cisco Data Fabric, which promises to “transform machine data into AI-ready actionable intelligence”.
On the basis that AI has led to a surge in machine data, but that said data is still largely siloed, fragmented, and hardly ever used, Splunk said Cisco Data Fabric to enable customers to make better decisions, reduce their operational risk, and innovate around AI, for example by helping train custom models, powering agentic workflows, or correlating various streams of machine and business data.
Among some of Data Fabric’s features are the Time Series Foundation Model, which will power pattern analysis and temporal reasoning on time series data to enable anomaly detection, forecasting and root cause analysis, driving proactive operations and easing incident response.
Meanwhile, Cisco AI Canvas, also integrating with Splunk Cloud Platform, will provide an AI agent to orchestrate analysis workflows and workspaces for team collaboration. Splunk described this as a “virtual war room experience” that will let teams glean more in-depth insight, work together in real-time, and make decisions better.
These capabilities will be coming on stream over the next few months, with a few slated for 2026.
Kamal Hathi, Splunk senior vice president and general manager of Splunk, said machine data was now the heartbeat of digital organisations and characterised Splunk as a “heart rate monitor”.
“Our goal is to give customers the fastest, most secure path from data to action,” said Hathi.
“By embedding AI across the platform and embracing open standards, we’re not just helping organisations analyze information faster – we’re enabling them to anticipate change, scale innovation without unnecessary complexity, and deliver digital services that are more resilient, adaptive, and responsive to the needs of their users.”
IDC senior research director of cloud data management, Archana Venkatraman, said Data Fabric addressed a critical pain point – the need to quickly and safely unify vast streams of machine data in the service of resilience.
“By enabling a federated approach that eliminates data movement, it provides a pragmatic solution for organisations operationalising AI at scale,” she said.
“Its focus on real-time search, coupled with a repository for AI-ready data, provides tangible value by reducing complexity and time to insights. This unified architecture is a strong step toward helping customers build more resilient and trustworthy AI systems.”
Searching for Snowflakes
Also on the docket is the launch of Splunk Federated Search for Snowflake, a new platform integration empowering users to connect, query and combine operational and business data across Splunk and Snowflake environments.
Some of its key capabilities include unlimited onboarding of Snowflake data in Splunk; federated queries whereby users can write SPL-like queries to search Snowflake data direct from Splunk; next-gen federation capabilities to combine datasets for more impactful context and insight; and more efficient querying, letting users leverage Snowflake analytics for partial queries before performing final data joins in Splunk.
These capabilities, and others, are slated for a July 2026 release.
