For nearly 21 years, Splunk was an independent company, building technology and expanding its customer base in the observability business for IT. In March of this year, Cisco acquired Splunk in a massive $28 billion deal.

As with any acquisition, customers have questions and worry about what will happen. The biggest impacts typically don't happen immediately but usually occur within a few months – or later – as integration sets in. Now some of that integration has set in, and Splunk recently held its annual .conf conference to highlight its innovation and educate its users as well as reassure them that with Cisco ownership, they don't have to worry.

As part of the opening keynote at .conf, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins emphasized the company's commitment to enhancing Splunk's capabilities without disrupting its core strengths.

“What we want this combination to do is to make everything you do every day and everything you've done with Splunk forever, just better.” Robbins declared. “We're going to not screw it up, and we're going to deliver great value to make you happier about being a Splunk Cisco customer a year from now than you are today.”

Splunk is still calling the shots

A primary concern for any company after an acquisition is that an outsider that isn't familiar with day-to-day operations becomes the person that is making decisions that impact operations and products.

That's not happening with the Splunk acquisition. In fact, Robbins acknowledged Splunk's pivotal role in the acquisition, with former CEO Gary Steele still leading the business unit.

“You should feel really good about how he [Gary Steele] is sitting in every decision that Cisco is making,” Robbins said. “And that should give you confidence that we're going to deliver value for you.”

During the keynote, Steele emphasized that the acquisition model was built on “delivering greater innovation together,” not solely a cost-cutting play.

“In fact, our model actually allocated more dollars to R&D,” Steele revealed, ensuring that both Splunk and Cisco could continue their respective innovation paths while funding critical integration work.

Splunk gets a thousand eyes of improved visibility

Cisco has multiple other observability assets it has acquired in recent years, including ThousandEyes and AppDynamics. Those technologies will now be able to bring new benefits to Splunk users.

“Coming together with Cisco gives us best-in-class, traditional application management, combined with Splunk observability cloud for modern applications, all underpinned by the Splunk Platform,” Steel said. “Bringing together those capabilities, plus the digital assurance capabilities that live in Cisco ThousandEyes, no one else on the planet can deliver the insight that we can.”

How Splunk is continuing to innovate

Splunk executives didn't just talk about things getting better; they also made numerous announcements at .conf that expand the company's portfolio.

Some highlights include the following: Splunk is also rolling out a next-generation data management experience to extend visibility to the edge and beyond. The new services include Splunk Hybrid Data Fabric to manage and analyze data across cloud and on-premises environments. There is also the new Splunk Edge to collect and process data at the source before sending it to Splunk platforms. The new Splunk Data Lens service aims to provide a unified data exploration experience across the Splunk portfolio.

• Introducing generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in Observability Cloud and Security to streamline detection, investigation, and response workflows using natural language
• Making the Splunk AI Assistant for SPL (Splunk Processing Language) generally available to help users interact with Splunk using natural language
• Unveiling new AI capabilities for IT Service Intelligence, like Configuration Assistant, Drift Detection for KPIs, and entity-level Adaptive Thresholds

Overall, the announcements emphasize Splunk's focus on leveraging AI/ML and expanding data management capabilities. The overarching goal is to drive digital resilience across customers' entire digital footprint, ensuring systems remain securely up and running at enterprise scale, which has always been the mission of Splunk.

So is Splunk changing under Cisco ownership? The actual answer is not really, or maybe just not yet. Some of the advanced capabilities from Cisco's existing observability technologies will help to inform Splunk tools, but there is no dramatic overhaul or changes. In fact, Steele also emphasized that roadmaps and product innovation will not slow down or change.

“I feel like we're set up for an incredible journey with Cisco,” Steele said.