Cisco has agreed to acquire Splunk for $157 per share in cash, which represents approximately $28BN in equity value.
Splunk offers an extensible data platform that processes data from any cloud, data center, and third-party tool at scale.
In doing so, it powers purpose-built solutions for security and observability.
According to Cisco, the move will accelerate its mission to “securely connect everything to make anything possible.”
In addition, Cisco may support its customers in bolstering resilience and extending their security strategies – as Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco, emphasized.
“Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability,” he said.
From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we will help make organizations of all sizes more secure and resilient.
Indeed, with Splunk, teams can share data, assess these threats, and work together to solve and prevent future problems.
For instance, if the business’s website goes down, teams can collaborate to see if it’s due to a security attack or a peak in demand.
Yet, its platform goes far beyond that, with the provider hosting 2,400 applications on its marketplace. Meanwhile, clients may also build custom applications on Splunk.
These apps may cross many use cases. For instance, an app may help to monitor in-store technology, support supply chain operations, or protect customer privacy.
Giving more of a hint into how these capabilities could complement Cisco’s current offering, Gary Steele, President and CEO of Splunk, stated:
Together, we will form a global security and observability leader that harnesses the power of data and AI to deliver excellent customer outcomes and transform the industry.
“We’re thrilled to join forces with a long-time and trusted partner…and we expect our community of Splunk employees will benefit from even greater opportunities as we bring together two respected and purpose-driven organizations.”
For his part, Steele will join the executive leadership team at Cisco and report to Robbins.
As such, he’ll have a voice at the top table of the tech giant, which promises greater investment into new solutions, faster innovation, and increased global scale.
What Does This Mean for Cisco’s CX Portfolio?
Data & analytics play an increasingly central role in customer experience management (CXM).
Splunk’s platform will bring new insights to these CXM strategies, as its tagline suggests: “We turn data into doing.”
Indeed, when enriched with structured data, Splunk can provide real-time business insights. That includes customer experience, business process, product, and digital marketing analytics.
Alongside this, Splunk helps with customer experience assurance and optimization.
Consider its Digital Experience Monitoring platform. It provides the tools to proactively detect, alert, and resolve performance issues across critical API and service endpoints.
Also, before going live with custom customer experience applications, the solution scopes out performance issues to automatically pass or fail builds.
Next, there is Splunk RUM, which monitors how changes to coding impact users – enabling businesses to troubleshoot faster.
These businesses may then pinpoint issues across web browsers, back-end systems, and third-party services to enhance customer experiences.
Finally, there is Splunk Web Optimization, which enhances experiences by grouping web performance defects, scoring pages with in-house metrics, and gathering insights from Google Lighthouse.
It also tracks trends in web vitals and offers guided recommendations to improve page performance.
Within the Splunk portfolio lies more solutions to, directly and indirectly, improve experiences – bringing lots of new capabilities to Cisco’s clients and its existing solutions.
Those may include its contact center offerings – which recently experienced triple-digit order growth.
Indeed, Splunk’s CX assurance solutions could help accelerate the development of new contact center features, secure CCaaS implementations, and strengthen API integrations.
