Cisco’s Chuck Robbins and Jeetu Patel tell CRN that Splunk’s strategic importance has surged in the agentic AI era, creating new opportunities for partners around AI observability, security, data and AI economics.
As Splunk takes on greater importance in Cisco’s agentic AI strategy, the tech giant sees an expanding opportunity for partners to help customers harness their data, monitor AI systems and manage the economics of AI, Cisco’s top executives told CRN.
The tech giant is positioning Splunk as a foundational data and observability layer for agentic AI, using data federation, AI observability and agent-driven security operations to help customers analyze more data while tamping down on AI token costs. And Splunk is central to Cisco’s integrated security and observability push as the company strengthens its larger AI story, according to Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer.
“The strategic importance of Splunk in this agentic era has materially compounded,” Patel said.
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Irvine, Calif.-based Cisco partner Trace3 is a major Splunk partner as well. In fact, the firm was named Splunk’s Americas Partner of the Year in September.
“Obviously, [Splunk] is a super strategic acquisition for [Cisco], but it’s been equally good for us,” said Mark Graham, senior vice president of partner business development for Trace3. “Trace3 goes to market with an AI-focused effort, and Splunk fits right into that.”
For Trace3, Cisco’s Splunk acquisition is beginning to pay dividends, with new partner incentives, cross-sell opportunities and an AI-focused go-to-market motion creating more opportunities around an already critical Splunk practice, Graham said.
And right now, Cisco is giving partners more financial incentive to sell Splunk, particularly by putting Splunk on Cisco paper. Splunk historically didn’t have a rebate program, he added.
Cisco, for its part, last month revealed that it’s adding a 2 percent cross-sell bonus for Preferred and Portfolio partners expanding accounts into new Cisco architectures, including Splunk.
Splunk’s Unexpected AI-Era Advantage
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins credits the Splunk acquisition as giving Cisco a meaningful advantage over its competitors that partners can monetize.
“I think this agentic observability, automation, and agentic SOC capability that’s going to be required to actually deal with the security threats that are happening, and the observability of the agents operating in your infrastructure, that’s another competitive differentiator for us. Those are very hard to replicate,” he told CRN in an exclusive interview last month at Cisco Partner Summit.
It’s an acquisition that Cisco initially pursued for one reason, but turned out to be powerful for a different, unexpected set of reasons, Robbins said.
“The applicability of the Splunk platform to this agentic AI era… we had no way of really understanding that completely when we made [the acquisition], when you talk about security on the endpoint, email security, network security, network traffic analysis, collaboration activity. All that stuff can get loaded up into a platform, including logs and traces and all the other things, and if you could correlate that effectively — that’s why we wanted to buy them—then you can give the customer greater insights than anybody else. Now all of a sudden, that moved from being a nice-to-have to being a must-have and I think that’s the big positive surprise, is that it’s become such a must-have,” he said.
Cisco is repositioning Splunk beyond its traditional role as a security correlation platform and toward a foundational infrastructure data layer that can support AI capabilities, said Neil Anderson, vice president and CTO of cloud, infrastructure, and AI solutions for World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco’s largest partners.
That shift creates an interesting proposition for partners, Anderson added.
“Splunk’s been this kind of off-to-the-side security correlation platform that all of our customers had, but Cisco’s turning it into the underpinning for all infrastructure data, a data lake, and [customers] are going to be able to activate AI capability after AI capability on that data. It’s very unique,” Anderson said.
Cisco has become an “unrecognizable” company for the better thanks to the company’s dual focus on innovation and bringing once separate business units together. Security and Splunk, for example, have been brought together under one leader: Sunil Potti, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of security, observability, and data platform, according to Cisco’s Patel.
“That changes things quite materially, so I feel like there’s a lot of things to be excited about,” Patel told CRN.
