How are Cisco + Splunk tackling digital resilience and AI together? Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Cisco’s Gary Steele, President, Go-to-Market & GM to discuss Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk and how they are partnering to solve their customer challenges around digital resilience in the AI era and the key announcements made at #CiscoPS24. Catch the specifics from Six Five Media on The Road below ⤵️
- The integration of Cisco and Splunk to bolster digital resilience for customers navigating the AI landscape
- Insights into Gary’s new role as Go-to-Market for Cisco and General Manager of Splunk, and the emerging dynamics
- Key announcements from the Cisco Partner Summit and their implications for partners and customers
- Challenges customers face with AI and security, and how the combined forces of Cisco and Splunk are addressing these issues
- The evolution of the digital resilience narrative in the context of Cisco’s AI and networking capabilities
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here in Los Angeles. We are here with Cisco. We are talking AI. We’re talking network. We’re talking data. We’re talking security. And we even heard about compute today, Daniel?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a great event, Pat. We got to spend a lot of time with the executives, some of them here on the show. Make sure you check those all out. And then, of course, in the sessions, Pat. I mean, you didn’t even mention, we also got to hear from a Super Bowl Hall of Fame to-be quarterback. Pretty good announcer too. Although I like seeing him throw passes. But no, I mean, look, it’s been a really high-energy event. We know that $50 billion of revenue goes through the partner channels. We also know Cisco’s been really aggressive in its posture, talked about compute, you mentioned security, and by the way, they made a massive acquisition last year.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. It happened to be Splunk, and we covered that too. One of the biggest conversations around AI is all about digital resilience, which is, I would say, a bigger thing above just saying security. It’s super important, and it’s great to have, back on The Six Five, Gary, welcome back.
Gary Steele: It’s great to be here.
Patrick Moorhead: I know we’ve some remotes with you, and I think Daniel at Davos did a couple of videos, but it’s great to see you again.
Gary Steele: I’ll never forget that. The cold, slushy streets of Davos.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was really nice of your team to let us do that. And it was both of us. Yeah, it was a great conversation because both of us couldn’t have gotten inside fast enough. Nobody understands, and we had a nice sidebar. And all of you out there that are chasing a dream to go to Davos, it’s really all about the shoes. I mean, that’s really what it is all about. But there is actually a lot going on, and AI was the center of attention there. But it was also a big moment. You and I talked. I mean, this was in the transition period, heading into the close after the announcement. Now, you’ve got two jobs. I mean, I don’t know how else to explain it. You’ve got Go-To-Market for Cisco, you still got the GM role at Splunk.
Gary Steele: I’m really focused on integration is what I’m focused on from a Splunk perspective. And then obviously, my go-to-market role at Cisco, really thinking about how do we drive value for customers and ensure that we’re continuing to drive growth in the business.
Daniel Newman: What’s the kind of overall, the… Integration’s a big thing.
Gary Steele: It is.
Daniel Newman: I mean, I’m not going to let you just get off on that one. You’re going to have to tell me a little bit more. But as you’re kind of going through this process, I mean, you go from a company with what, about 8,500 to about 85,000 or more if you account all contractors. I mean, how’s it kind of changing your view, what’s kind of top of mind for you right now overall as you’re going through this integration process?
Gary Steele: Yeah, I think, one, it’s been super fun and super exciting. I think integration at this scale, it’s really about making sure that we’re doing the right thing for our customers, doing the right thing for our partners, and making it as smooth as possible for everyone. So we’re being very thoughtful, very methodical about the integration, but we’re also moving really fast. So a few things. One is, it was really important coming right out that we showed our customers that we’re going to continue to drive innovation. Nothing more important than delivering value to our customers every single day. And so we’ve announced a lot of really good points of integration that we think are driving tremendous value for our customers.
And then sitting here at the Partner Summit, as we look at the Splunk partners, we want to ensure that all the investments they’ve made as they come over into the Cisco Partner Program, that they have a good experience. So we’re being very thoughtful and methodical about this whole process to ensure that we’re bringing everyone along, getting the best of Splunk, but then leveraging the power of Cisco.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So here at Partner Summit, you put your best foot forward. You tie all the product announcements together and you deliver it to the partners. You have great conversations. But what does it mean to customers? You made some product announcements, you reaffirmed products, you also rolled out new partner programs, but what does it mean to customers?
Gary Steele: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, if you look at what got announced here at Partner Summit, it really represents a significant amount of innovation that we think will be beneficial to them as we help them get ready for the AI era, build that AI infrastructure, secure that environment broadly with the security portfolio, leveraging Splunk across that, driving digital resilience, and all of the value that can be delivered through that. So there’s a lot of really good innovation that at the end of the day, I think customers will benefit from that.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And every partner wants to know, “Hey, not only how do I monetize it now,” but also getting ready for the AI age and the rules of being a good partner to customers, it’s changing. And at least, what I was picking up is that partners were excited that you were putting that forward, giving them the guidebook of how to look at even five, maybe six years out.
Gary Steele: Yeah, I think there’s a number of things for partners. One is we announced the Partner 360 Program that really accommodates them in our broad portfolio. That’s super exciting. And then fueling the innovation that they need to be able to drive growth in their business, I think that combination is a really good thing for both our partners and ultimately for our customers.
Daniel Newman: Gary, the AI security trend, when we were talking to Jeetu. We talked a little bit about the compute, the LLMs, and his philosophy on what’s important. He mentioned network and then security. Of course, Splunk adds security and even the observability kind of vision of the company, but the enterprise customers have a lot challenges, right?
Gary Steele: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I mean, this is still really complicated. I’m kind of curious through your lens, as you’ve gone from Splunk to now Splunk and Cisco remits and talking to customers, what are the challenges they’re facing, how does this combined portfolio in your mind address some of these challenges?
Gary Steele: I think there’s a number of things. I think one is as we look at the innovation, delivering complete AI infrastructure for customers, making it easy for them to be able to deploy AI is something that’s absolutely critical, and I think it’ll have great impact in the market. Underpinning all that, you’ve got to have digital resilience, so you have to keep these systems up and running. You need to keep them protected from cyber attacks. But at the same time, they need to deliver the value ultimately for what it was intended. And so these systems have to stay up and running and that’s what Splunk has been focused on. We think about it broadly in the context of digital resilience, bringing together all the valuable assets that exist within Cisco and delivering it as part of our overall solution within Splunk, I think, has been really well received.
Patrick Moorhead: For the audience, can you talk a little bit about how digital resilience is different from, let’s say, security?
Gary Steele: Yeah, sure.
Patrick Moorhead: How has this evolved?
Gary Steele: Yeah, I think it’s actually been… We sort of will watch this evolution from where we’ve been in the past to where we are today. If you go back in time, people talked about business continuity, disaster recovery, and they thought about it in a really siloed way. And what has really happened is as organizations have built out broad digital footprints to serve the needs of their customers, it has to stay up and running or customers can’t be served. Their in-customers can’t be served. And so when an event happens in the middle of the night, is it a cyber event? Is it a application falling over? Is it a bad upgrade? Is it a bad patch? What actually happened? And we probably all witnessed these large bridges in the middle of the night where you have every group responsible that could potentially have an issue trying to figure out what the heck happened.
And the reality is, you can’t afford downtime. Cost of downtime’s insane. And so you have to think holistically about what does it take to keep systems up and running. It’s cyber, but it’s also understanding exactly what’s going on across your broad digital environment. And you’ve got to be able to do that so that you can keep these systems up and running. The reality is because of the visibility this creates, it’s become a boardroom topic, and it’s more important than it’s ever been. And we saw it in the event that occurred around CrowdStrike. People were like, “What the heck happened, and what do I need to do differently to avoid some form of outage?” Digital resilience really matters.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And gosh, I look at AI, and I always like to say, “Hey, explain observability.” People asked me and we fractalized everything. It used to be that all the data would sit on-prem and then we’re fractalizing the infrastructure. The way we even do applications, where there might be four or five APIs as opposed to sitting on it with AI, right? We’re talking about, and you mentioned this earlier conversation with Jeetu, now we’re going to have multiple models. And we’re going to have different types of constructs that we work with the data, just so many different points of failure, and digital resiliency is paramount whether people know that or not, they will.
Gary Steele: No, and I think there’s a broader and broader appreciation for what this looks like, and people want to know. Again, in these complex apps that incorporate AI, you have to be able to see across this entire environment to understand what the heck’s going on. And you need to be able to figure out and be more predictive if there are issues, what do I do to avoid this? And so you don’t have major or significant outages. And it is seen through the application. It’s seen through the AI environments. It’s seen through to the network and the infrastructure and your network and non-own networks, what the heck is happening? And having that visibility is what it’s all about.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think we’re going to start to see ourselves go from the kind of App Economy to the API Economy, because we’re going to start to see all this generative real-time abstractions, and it’s going to be all about, can you point to the data to basically abstract whatever it is you want. We know enterprise software is going to change, but as G2 said, this infrastructure’s only going to keep growing, which puts the Cisco-
Gary Steele: Sure.
Daniel Newman: … positioning into a really good place. I kind of maybe just gave you a glimmer of what I think the future looks like, Gary, but you’re the guest. I’m more interested in what you have to say. Everyone hears from me. With Cisco, with Splunk, what are you excited about? What has got you fired up here in this new role, and as you look ahead?
Gary Steele: Yeah. No, I think there’s a number of things that I’m super excited about. One is I fundamentally believe that organizations are going to upgrade their infrastructure to support this AI journey that everybody is on. And they will leverage their data centers. They will buy infrastructure, and upgrade it to support that. They’ll continue to leverage the cloud wherever they can. So I think that’s one whole area that I think is really, really important. And then, I believe that as this all happens, there’s going to be more investment in security because people have to continue to raise their security posture. The threat actors continue to win. We’ve been living in this world. But as the digital footprint gets larger, attack surface is larger, and there’s probably nothing more important than ensuring that you’re investing appropriately for security. And I hear it here at the partner community, everyone’s trying to help their customers at the end of the day, drive better posture.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, security will be a massive opportunity. It’s going to continue to be a challenge with every innovation. It just creates more… It creates a bigger surface for them.
Gary Steele: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: But you know what? The challenge is fun. It creates billions of dollars of economic opportunity, and it’ll make your role really interesting over the next few years and ours as well, Gary Steele. Thank you so much for joining us here on The Six Five.
Gary Steele: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Patrick Moorhead: Thanks.
Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for tuning in. I hope you check out all the episodes that we did here in LA with Cisco. And of course, be part of our community. Subscribe to all of the episodes of The Six Five. But for this episode, for Patrick and myself, it’s time to sign out and say goodbye. See you later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
