How are leading organizations truly fortifying themselves against the escalating security threats of a hybrid, AI-driven world?
At Cisco Live! 2025, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Cisco‘s Kamal Hathi, SVP & GM, Splunk Products & Technology, for a conversation on how Cisco and Splunk are revolutionizing the approach to building digital resilience. As organizations navigate the complexities of hybrid environments and AI-driven innovations, the partnership aims to fortify enterprise operations against increasing vulnerabilities.
Key takeaways include:
🔹Synergy Unleashed: Witness the rapid convergence of Splunk and Cisco technologies and how this powerful synergy amplifies organizational capabilities across the digital landscape.
🔹Innovations in Action: Explore the most exciting developments born from the Splunk-Cisco
collaboration, with a sharp focus on groundbreaking advancements in observability, security, and AI.
🔹Fortifying the Future: Gain direct insights into key updates and announcements from Splunk right here at Cisco Live, highlighting pivotal advancements shaping the industry, complete with valuable feedback and reactions from customers on the front lines.
🔹AI at Splunk’s Core: Dive into Splunk’s dedication to AI innovations, uncovering current projects and their visionary outlook for the future of artificial intelligence in enterprise operations.
Learn more at Cisco.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in San Diego for Cisco Live 2025. Dan, no surprises about AI. We heard a lot about AI, but we also heard about the importance of security and observability and trust.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And of course, the network can’t go to a Cisco event and not hear about the network, but
Patrick Moorhead: You can’t.
Daniel Newman: You know, you said no surprises. And I would say from the standpoint of it being very focused on the AI roadmap, absolutely no surprises when it comes to the amount of announcements, the enthusiasm, the excitement, and sort of the really powerful messaging that Cisco has come out with. And you and I both kind of said, hey, it took a little while. But walking away from today’s keynote and depending when you’re watching it, is very encouraging.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. And whenever you’re moving big, big amounts of data around and you have new people trying to break in and steal your stuff, observability, security, and the two are really interlocked here. And Cisco made this massive acquisition of Splunk, and they’ve really done a good job integrating the company together. And we’d like to go through that today. And we’d like to welcome Kamal to The Six Five to go through this.
Kamal Hathi: Thank you so much. Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Good to see you.
Kamal Hathi: Amazing.
Patrick Moorhead: But the most important question, though, is what does your T-shirt say?
Kamal Hathi: The reveal.
Patrick Moorhead: Okay.
Kamal Hathi: It says, commander, report to the Cisco symbol bridge.
Patrick Moorhead: This is cool. Dan, why don’t we get some cool T-shirts?
Daniel Newman: I have them.
Patrick Moorhead: Do you?
Daniel Newman: At home.
Patrick Moorhead: Are you sharing them with me?
Daniel Newman: You paid for them.
Patrick Moorhead: Okay, good.
Kamal Hathi: I tell you what, we’ll get you Splunk T shirts and we should wear them.
Patrick Moorhead: Cool. I would wear them.
Daniel Newman: We did some very cool things over the year with years of splunk F1 races. I’ve got lots of great swag. Shout out to the person that made that happen. Won’t say names in public. She may not appreciate that. She might like it.
Patrick Moorhead: Maybe she does.
Daniel Newman: Maybe she does. So talk a little bit about coming together. I mean, it was fast and furious. It’s been about a year now. But, like, it’s been very impressive. A lot of times when a company as big as Cisco buys a company as big as Splunk, people are like, oh, that’s gonna take forever. It hasn’t.
Kamal Hathi: That’s been amazing, actually. And there’s three parts to it. Part one. Cisco has made sure that Splunk continues to fire in all cylinders. The roadmap, the delivery, the timing, everything just smooth, no interference there. Really made sure that we are successful. So it’s really important for companies to come together. Sometimes the big companies start to say do this, do that. Cisco’s been just absolutely amazing. Guys like Jeetu were really visionary, making sure that we are delivering what we said we would. The second thing we’ve done is combine tactically immediately things like Thousand Eyes and together with ITSI, you can see us with XDR and Splunk Talus, we have all these adapters that connect to various things. Today we announced the keynote Meraki Catalyst. So it’s a fast and furious integration of what we’re doing. And then the other thing that’s happening is we are already working on some very interesting things about House Splunk. So it becomes a key part of everything. Cisco really unlocked the value of what you can do with Cisco devices as well as try to combine all that together with Splunk into a really holistic, overall correlated view. So there’s been just, I think, astonishing how well it’s gone. Fingers crossed. It’s been really, really good.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So I’m going to put you on the spot here. I know you love all your children the same, but what are some of the things that excite you most about the synergy? I mean, you did talk about the integration points that are there, but what else gets you going?
Kamal Hathi: A little bit about me is I’m a data guy, so that’s what keys me off. And if you think about it, I would say a chunk of the world’s machine data flows through Cisco and arguably with Splunk, that combination is just, to me, is beyond exciting. Just think about it. You’ve got this ability to look at machine data, start to correlate it, start to build a view end to end of. By the way, Splunk is great at dialing in not just Cisco data, but third party as well. So it’s all the data that you have in your Cisco infrastructure combined with, let’s say, I don’t know, Palo Alto or CrowdStrike or Juniper, whatever it is, into one view, which on top of it, you can start figuring out what happened. Was there any lateral movement attacks? Was this a problem with infrastructure? We can talk more and more about what all that enables. But that is, I think this data, what you call a fabric of data, is most interesting to me. I think it’s fascinating.
Patrick Moorhead: Pretty much knew you were a data guy not just because of the T shirt, but because of the three sensors you’re wearing to monitor your health data.
Kamal Hathi: That’s right.
Patrick Moorhead: So you’re pretty much a data guy. I mean, I kind of have three and actually I only have two. I’m not as much as a data guy, but it was good to see.
Daniel Newman: You don’t monitor your stress with an app and decide how you feel.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, I kind of do. It’s right on the face.
Daniel Newman: He looks happy. But the watch says I’m sad, so I’m going to be sad. That’s a lot of data.
Kamal Hathi: That’s my AI. right now.
Patrick Moorhead: Right now I’m very low stress, so that’s good. I just want to let you all know.
Kamal Haith: That’s why we’re having fun here.
Daniel Newman: The Splunk acquisition, though, also really rounded out a portfolio. I mean, when you kind of think about the big picture, right. The idea of the AI era. Right. We talked about this a little on some of the other shows, but is that like it’s an all new architecture. And so in the first kind of competing architecture, there was lots of data, mostly to make it a usable structure.
Kamal Hathi: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: In the AI era that we’ve completely flipped it on its head. Most data is not structured. You need to have the kind of a system that can look at data across. So in your world though, and what you’re managing, it’s like the systems need to be able to see all of it.
Kamal Hathi: Yes.
Daniel Newman: And I mean, in my opinion, that is probably the biggest key to winning in this particular space. You mentioned crowdstrike, you mentioned other things. It’s like no enterprise is homogeneous. It’s not in terms of its data state. So that’s got to be the biggest thing on your mind right now is really there’s kind of how we use data for things like the productivity side. We talk a lot about that, LLMs and applications, but your world is all about all the data that enables you to.
Kamal Hathi: So let me answer that in a couple parts. Part one, I think, is being able to get at all the data. Right. When you think about it, data, as you said, is everywhere. It happens sometimes to think about data puddles or data ponds or data lakes. Right.
Daniel Newman: We love those.
Kamal Hathi: I love those. Indeed. Last time I walked through a data puddle, I don’t know what happened. But anyway, to get these things and in these kinds of environments, the key is not trying to get the data to the compute, to Splunk, but to get the compute to the data. So you heard a little bit in the keynote today, but what we’re trying to do there really is this notion of federation, which means we Federate the data, no matter where it is, without moving it, and start to correlate it. Inside Splunk, we form the index, we can correlate, we can analyze, we can search. But it allows us to scale in this new world where data is literally everywhere. So that becomes really important as a thing to think about, that we can do. The second thing, which is a little bit more forward looking, and I just started drifting a bit here, is that you talked about the world where there’s LLMs. They all want text, text data, Wikipedia, whatever. I think that’s done. That data is finished. No more poetry should be written, no more haikus you can create. But machine data, the machine data is untapped. There are petabytes and petabytes and petabytes and Cisco and Splunk together, I would argue is the world’s largest source repository of machine data. So what we can enable there, new kinds of AI, new kinds of models, that I think is the future. And that’s super exciting.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, the amount of data coming in, I mean, some people forget there’s 300 million Cisco endpoints out there just with its security software. And then if you look at the industrial edge and what Cisco does on the networking side and, and all that data being moved back and forth, the amount of data is pretty amazing. And the cool part about LLMs is the more data it gets, the smarter it gets and the better it can activate and knows what to do and to see patterns more quickly than ever. Having GPUs on the edge in your networking equipment, doing some of these things is impressive. And on the federated side over a period of time, history always shows that the compute ends up going to the data. You just have to be able to manage it effectively, to be able to do something with it and pull it together. And if you have fast networking, the ability to move the data, or let’s say snapshots, characterization of that data, you can use some amazing stuff. You announced some enhancements to digital resilience recently. And I’m curious what’s new and if you could turn up the contrast ratio. Sometimes analysts go to conferences. I was on the road 42 weeks a year, probably attending 50 conferences. Sometimes it all kind of starts to sound similar.
Kamal Hathi: Yeah, yeah, look, right?
Daniel Newman: We only go to like a thousand events a year.
Patrick Moorhead: No, I know, I know.
Daniel Newman: Make it different.
Kamal Hathi: All right, let’s start with turn up.
Patrick Moorhead: The contrast rate and digital resilience.
Kamal Hathi: Vivid the color some more. Saturation.
Daniel Newman: Exactly. Use that data.
Kamal Hathi: Yeah, let’s do that. So there are a few things that we talked about. Some are just, I would say, economically makes sense if we think about it. Firewall data is a huge source of what goes into Splunk. And people ask us, like, I’m a Cisco customer, you’re a Splunk guy. What do I get out of it? So today we announced essentially free ingestion of firewall logs into Splunk, with some caveats to it, but, you know, it’s a big deal. And we heard that, like when it’s announced, there was a spontaneous massive applause. And that sort of sets the stage for what happens when these two companies come together. There is value from Cisco data being special and the firewall logs are the first instantiation of that. So there was a big announcement.
Patrick Moorhead: I did hear that cheer.
Kamal Hathi: Right.
Patrick Moorhead: And I was like, should I be cheering too? I think I should.
Kamal Hathi: And you said, there is no AI in that. They’re still cheering, so what the heck, right? I mean, yeah, so that was a big deal. The second interesting announcement, which I think, really, if you think about, you know, about 50% or maybe less of what Splunk customers do is on premises, right? So then we are in the cloud, obviously, we’re a big cloud provider, but when you’re on premises, you now need to get hardware, you need to get Splunk, you need to get support. Figuring out the procurement, the sales, the support, the configuration is complicated. And what we announced today is this notion of a Splunk pod. This is this preconfigured reference architecture. They can go to Cisco and say, give me a UCS server, set of servers, here’s the reference. And you buy it from one company and something happens. It’s all there. You don’t have to go to four different places. So that’s a big deal. And over time, they’ll become more and more automated. So what you’ll see is that it’s becoming, I would say, turnkey, almost like a cloud, like on premises. And for Splunk customers, that’s a big deal. And again, you heard some interesting cheers there.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s the easy button. I mean, UCS has always been. You add that to the inner site.
Kamal Hathi: That’s right.
Patrick Moorhead: You’re adding this to Observability. It makes sense.
Kamal Hathi: And the third thing, which got pretty interesting reactions was into Cisco Observability Splunk, which is Cisco, obviously, Observability and ITSI, our IT service intelligence applications. We are providing direct native support for Meraki and Catalyst Data as well, so it was pretty big. So those are three sorts of interesting things. And the fourth one, which I think is very relevant to all this AI discussion that we’re having, because if you think about it, AI is burgeoning and there are special applications. LLMs are different, agents are different, and how do you observe them? So observability for AI that knows how to understand vector databases, knows how to understand LLMs, GPUs, all those things. That’s something we announced today and we’ll obviously keep refining that, but it’s a pretty big deal for anyone who’s got a big investment in AI infrastructure.
Patrick Moorhead: You definitely did turn up the contrast ratio.
Kamal Hathi: Well, there we go.
Patrick Moorhead: Even Dan understands it now.
Daniel Newman: Do it again.
Kamal Hathi: All right, go backwards.
Daniel Newman: So let’s sort of pull this all together. You know, you covered a lot of the announcements, you made AI, right. We started the conversation. We’re going to enter all this data, all this machine day is going to create a number of great opportunities. Talk a little bit about how you are leading the Splunk business in its future, are thinking about AI innovation and kind of what do you see for the AI roadmap ahead for the business?
Kamal Hathi: I’ll talk about it in four parts. Part one is this notion of AI to help with resilience, help with security, help with observability and these topics. These technologies are complicated. They’re conceptually hard. SPL and if you ever tried using it, it’s not easy. So AI can make it conceptually easier with these agents, agentic software assistance. Think about making it more automated. Agentic soc. Those are the kinds of things we deliver. And that’s sort of the AI for digital resilience. The second part, what I just talked about before, is resilience for AI. AI is complicated. AI is special. It has to be secured, it has to be observed. So that’s the second part, which is resilience for AI. And a third part is sort of in the native part of something like Splunk, just transparently using AI to make it just easier. For example, Splunk people do extracting fields. They try to understand what is what. So just make it automatic. With AI, there’s this notion of schema drift. You connect up a thing and the schema changes because the source AI can recognize that, make it automatic, take away the burden of running something like Splunk. We have this thing called a machine learning toolkit. Always been there, hook it up with LLMs. So that all makes that all easier. And the last part, what I talked about before and that’s more in the future is this notion of unlocking machine data as a source of new kinds of AI models. So this is sort of our direction ultimately. Look, Splunk helped many people make the transition. When we got into sort of digital systems, telemetry was difficult to handle. We sort of unlocked it. As you make the transition to AI systems, we’ll do the same exact thing, but here the scale is 10x. And so we’ll have AI to help with that as well. And so just think about it as that next generation of Splunk with the next generation of AI that our customers are using.
Daniel Newman: Makes sense. Well, Kamal, that’s all very, very exciting. I want to thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Kamal Hathi: Thank you so much.
Daniel Newman: Cisco Live, very impressive event. Congratulations on the role.
Kamal Hathi: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Good luck. We’ll be tracking you.
Kamal Hathi: Thank you so much. And I’ll be tracking you.
Daniel Newman: AI for us. And us for AI.
Kamal Hathi: And T-shirts for you. Don’t forget that.
Daniel Newman: Track those T shirts to my door.
Kamal Hathi: I got it.
Daniel Newman: And thank you, everybody for joining us for this episode of the Six Five On The Road. We are here in San Diego at Cisco Live 2025. We appreciate you being part of the community hit. Subscribe. Look at all of the coverage here from the event. But for this one, we gotta say goodbye. See you all.
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.
