'Splunk feels like the icing on the cake of Cisco's recent acquisitions' - Andrew Want, Trustmarque chief technologist

Andrew Want discusses the potential impact of the buyout for MSP partners, competitors and the Cisco ecosystem

The acquisition of Splunk has the potential to be a game changer for Cisco MSPs.

MSPs are all about creating value from products to offer simple, valuable solutions to customers. Cisco has a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class products generating increasing amounts of telemetry intended to influence more impactful decisions.

To achieve this, MSPs need tools that bring product and service together, making them stand out in a competitive market. When it comes to security and observability, value is derived from being able to obtain information from data quickly to focus resources where they are needed most. Splunk is one of those tools. It can take in lots of data and turn it into useful insights for their teams or as services for their customers.

With Splunk becoming part of Cisco, a lot of the hard work of developing these holistic security and observability services should eventually ease. Cisco's technology will seamlessly fit in, giving MSPs a solid base to speed up their offerings, moving from detecting and responding to predicting and preventing issues.

Splunk will apply its models holistically across infrastructure increasing the accuracy of anomaly detection and placing trusted insights into the hands of operational teams.

Furthermore, it is likely that consumption of Cisco software suites will provide commercial benefits to the delivery of end-to-end security and observability solutions which might be built into the widening cloud delivered services such as those we see in Cisco+.

In short, Splunk should help Cisco MSPs deliver security and observability-based managed services with ever increasing efficiency through AI providing greater scale, quality and accuracy, accelerated with out-of-the-box Cisco playbooks that can trigger automated recovery of failure scenarios across infrastructure.

What the buyout means for competitors

Cisco's strength is its ecosystem- across networking, security or collaboration, there is no denying that when you approach an end-to-end solution leveraging the benefits of licensing and technical integrations within the Cisco product suites, the value that you can realise is hard to compete with.

This is now further enhanced with the acquisition of Splunk, making Cisco one of the largest software companies in the world.

The potential to now aggregate all telemetry, with out-of-the-box playbooks geared towards harnessing the power of the Cisco solution set will only reinforce the strength of the ecosystem play.

However, infrastructure always has a mix of solutions.

Whilst security solutions such as Cisco SecureX are open to ingest third-party security information, Splunk is truly agnostic as to what data it can use to provide the context an organisation needs, building on its logging and SIEM heritage.

With Splunk in the portfolio, Cisco can provide the intelligence across any connectivity product set. Customers could gain access to Cisco's vast security and network intelligence through Splunk meaning that there will be opportunities to deliver value outside of Cisco's more traditional product sets.

Integration with recent buyouts could tie everything together

Splunk feels like the "icing on the cake" for many of their acquisitions especially from recent years.

Most acquisitions are insight solutions whether in the security domain or not such as SamKnows, Accedian, Oort or Smartlook, to name a few.

Splunk now provides a capability to extract value across multiple products across the entire portfolio by providing an intelligent and automated means to turn data into information.

"Data is the new oil" has become a common phrase heard in the industry, and with this acquisition, Cisco can now provide turnkey "refineries" to deliver the value of that data to end customers.

Once integrated, the continued development of Splunk alongside the increasing capabilities of the Cisco portfolio means that we should see some truly unique and effective ways of predicting outages, threats and opportunities to improve all driven by AI.

Cisco have acquired some fantastic solutions over many years and this feels like the one that has the potential to tie everything together.