Partner POV | Powering and Protecting the AI Revolution: A New Era for Splunk and Cisco at .conf25

This article was written by Kamal Hathi, Senior Vice President and GM, for Splunk, a Cisco company.

As I've mentioned in a previous blog, data is the fuel for AI. While the world has done a great job in training AI models on human generated data like text, image and video, there still remains a lot of work to be done as an industry to train the models on time series machine data. Right now, machine data is still messy, massive, and mission critical — and in the agentic era, it matters more than ever.

Furthermore, when it comes to unlocking the value of machine data to fully harness the potential of AI, there are three impediments that come to mind:

• Infrastructure constraint
• Trust deficit
• Data gap

.conf25 marked a pivotal moment for Splunk and Cisco as we continue to deliver significant new value to our customers and help them overcome these impediments to make the use of AI a practical reality in their organizations. This is Splunk returning to groundbreaking industry leading innovation.

In presentations by Jeetu Patel, Tom Gillis, Mangesh Pimpalkhare, Patrick Lin and Mike Horn, we showcased a number of new capabilities to showcase how machine data can help us decode and recode the agentic world, unlocking insights at machine speed and scale that help organizations stay safe and thrive. Some to highlight are:

• Cisco Data Fabric, a revolutionary new architecture that specifically addresses the ability of organizations to harness the aforementioned value of their machine data with AI. This evolution of the Splunk data platform is designed to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of handling machine data at scale. Leveraging it for AI applications, such as training custom AI models, enabling agentic workflows, and correlating multiple streams of both machine and business data to extract insights and drive better decisions.
• A new foundational model for time series data that can be fine tuned on an organization's untapped source of insights: machine data. It enables zero shot and few shot abilities to forecast issues and simulate "what-ifs" correlated across domains. It unlocks a whole new class of autonomous Agentic solutions for enterprise resilience.
• A new GenUI based experience for Splunk search and analytics leveraging Cisco AI Canvas. This makes Splunk even more powerful for existing users and makes it more approachable for a whole new class of users.
• Splunk Federated Search for Snowflake, a Splunk Platform integration that supports Cisco's commitment to foster an open data ecosystem. I was thrilled to host my good friend Carl Perry, head of Core Services from Snowflake, who joined us in presenting the new partnership.
• Agentic SOC with a number of Agentic capabilities including Triage Agent, Malware Reversal Agent, AI Playbook Authoring, AI-Enhanced Detection Library and much more.
• Splunk Enterprise Security Essentials Edition and Splunk Enterprise Security Premier Edition, which unifies security workflows across threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR).
• Agentic AI-powered Splunk Observability giving customers unparalleled visibility and correlated data insights across their networks, infrastructure, applications and AI systems.

Broad adoption of AI in the enterprise requires a practical approach, with security and observability for AI itself. At .conf25 we showcased this practical approach to make AI trusted and scalable. Delivering digital resilience and trust:

• For AI - providing visibility and security in the use of AI.
• With AI - delivering a platform and tools natively powered by AI to respond at machine speed and scale.

I would like to thank our incredible community for making .conf such an exhilarating and unique experience. More than 5,000 customers and partners attended the conference making it a tremendous success.

My deepest gratitude to all the Splunkers and Cisconians, who made this event possible, and are working with contagious energy and a sense of urgency to rapidly deliver new value to our customers.

Special thanks to Parsh Limaye for sharing the amazing work Ford is doing leveraging Splunk and Cisco.

It's a new era for Splunk and Cisco. We are powering and protecting the AI revolution and delivering powerful yet simplified experiences for our customers.