Cisco agreed to acquire Splunk for $157 per share in cash, representing approximately $28 billion in equity value.
Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) offers a software platform for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data, including website logs, application logs, server logs, and network logs. It can be used to troubleshoot problems, improve performance, and identify security threats.
Splunk’s Unified Security and Observability Platform delivers ML-powered analytics and insights that can be extended with third-party apps. Splunk, which is based in the San Francisco Bay area, has over 7,500 employees and reported $3.654 billion in revenue for 2023, up 37% year-over-year.
The companies said Splunk’s security capabilities will complement Cisco’s existing portfolio to provide leading security analytics and coverage from devices to applications to clouds. Cisco and Splunk’s complementary capabilities will also provide observability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling customers to deliver smooth application experiences that power their digital businesses.
“We’re excited to bring Cisco and Splunk together. Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability,” said Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO of Cisco. “From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we will help make organizations of all sizes more secure and resilient.”
Upon close of the acquisition, Splunk President and CEO Gary Steele will join Cisco’s Executive Leadership Team reporting to Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins.
- In June 2023, Cisco agreed to acquire Accedian, a privately-held company based in Montreal that offers performance analytics and end user experience solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed. Accedian’s cloud-native Skylight service assurance solution provides granular, end-to-end visibility within “the massive multi” – multi-layer, multi-cloud, and multi-vendor networks. Skylight leverages its high-quality performance data, analytics and machine learning to identify, predict and prevent customer-impacting issues. It uses both hardware and software sensors across network traffic from Layer 2 to Layer 7 on physical, virtualized, and cloud infrastructure.
- In 2020, Cisco acquired privately-held ThousandEyes, a provider of real-time visibility tools for the delivery of applications and services over the Internet. Financial terms were not disclosed. San Francisco-based ThousandEyes was founded in 2010 by Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliveira who had worked together during grad school in the UCLA Internet Research Lab to visualize Autonomous System topologies. ThousandEyes vantage points around the world perform billions of measurements each day to detect when traffic flows are disrupted within ISPs, public cloud networks and other service providers. This network telemetry data is algorithmically analyzed as part of ThousandEyes’ core Digital Experience Monitoring platform and the macro outages that are detected are displayed on an interactive map as part of ThousandEyes’ Internet Insights offering.
