Cisco on Thursday announced an agreement to buy cybersecurity and observability company Splunk for about $28 billion.
The big picture: Legacy tech giants are usually the last to recognize they’re being disrupted, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with AI.
Expect a lot more of these sorts of mergers, even if the targets aren’t AI-native. Details: The $157 per share offer represents over a 31% premium to Wednesday’s closing price for Splunk shares.
The last time Splunk traded above $157 per share was in early 2021. It’s the networking giant’s largest acquisition. Cisco says the merger will add roughly $4 billion in ARR, boosting its subscription and recurring revenue efforts. The purchase price will be financed via a combination of cash and debt, with a final closing by the end of Q3 2024, the company said. What they’re saying: “This will help our customers move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins during a conference call Thursday morning.
“In terms of observability, our complimentary capabilities will offer observability for the full IT stack, from the application to the network, across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.” Editor’s note: This story was updated with additional details about the deal.
It was cheaper for Cisco to buy the company than a license, presumably
This so true. I’ve had some quotes for Splunk over the years and every one I get is so ridiculously expensive that it can’t even be considered.
Somehow I don’t see the license fees for Splunk going down after this acquisition …
Poor Splunk - such a useful tool does not deserve the upcoming enshittification.
I’ve found Graylog to be a much better solution anyway for what it’s worth.
I’ll second Graylog as an alternative. Haven’t had any issue with it in the 3 years since I deployed it.
I’ll have to look into it - thanks for the suggestion.
Graylog has been mostly solid here too.
Splunk was so amazing for an old app that I worked on. The log dissection and alerting was so useful. Cisco will fuck that up somehow.
God damnit. They ruined Viptela, absolutely fucked the licensing model for ThousandEyes, kneecapped OpenDNS, and now this shit. Stop Ciscoing good companies, Cisco!!
Don’t they own Duo too? I don’t think that one’s been cisco’d yet.
They’ve owned duo for like five years.
Antitrust laws were demolished so tech giants could acquire whichever company they feel like and kill competition from day 1. Coro Doctorow addressed this in detail in his book
One more reason for me to learn ELK stack, sweet!
Noooooo! Splunk was awesome :(
