https://www.disruptionbanking.com/2025/08/01/was-ciscos-28-billion-purchase-of-splunk-worth-it/
17 replies (most recent on top)
@vv Splunk is one of the few acquisitions that actually makes sense. Earnings would be in the tank without it. VMware would have been a good acquisition as well, surprised Cisco didn't go for that one. Networking sales are trash. UCS is going to tank over the next 3 years with all of the VMware bullying, pushing more and more to the cloud. See Arista to find out where all the network customers are going. Cisco is not a networking company anymore, nor do the leadership want it to be. Find a single customer that likes Cisco's subscription and licensing models. Find a customer that is happy with the quality of the platforms and products. Cisco lost the spark that made it great.
Cisco has history of purchasing some really over-valued companies at their peak...
Who remembers :-
Scientific Atlantic 7.0 billion - Where is that now..?
NDIS $5 billion - Where is that now..?
AppDynamics $3.7 billion - Where is that now..?
None of these made any sense whatsoever at the time to employees who looked at the companies for even the initial meetings, so god only knows what level of vetting these had...
Cisco buys companies for customers and to take competition off the table. Over and over again.
Cisco’s skills at software are the equivalent to the pope’s skills in dr-g dealing … None existent. Cisco does not have a culture in deep software development and cross architecture software innovation like MS or Google do. It is a HW company and everyone except the ELT knows that. Why can’t Cisco just do that and excel at it like Nvidia have and not try to be all things to everyone and be so-so at all of them?
Long term yes. AI uses data and both Splunk and Thousands Eyes
Cisco is weak at software and can't even manage keeping acquired codebases running, do you really think it is capable of aggregating and sanitizing telemetry data and building AI models against it? Cisco has no ability to do deep development like that.
Both orgs you mention have been subject to LRs and will be forced into the same corner as every other software team at Cisco - minimal staff to keep services at basic operational continuity and nothing more.
The AI angle is a "story", nothing more.
We’re getting a LOT of pressure to include Splunk in everything.
I get the feeling that serious questions are being asked about this acquisition in the boardroom and management are desperately trying to prove that the money wasn’t wasted.
The article is months old, still referring to Steele as Splunk's former CEO; he left Cisco in May.
Getting Splunk was great, for the amount no.
wait till the next multi-billion purchase.. these are the games billionaires play with public money ....
PAN isnt much behind with their most recent acquisition of CyberArk sh-t. They are following in Cisco's footsteps
The market likes it.
Long term yes. AI uses data and both Splunk and Thousands Eyes has data that AI will use to automate network and security.
No. Cisco overpaid big time; it time, people will realize it was a huge waste of money.
Punked on Splunk.
Nothing-$28Billion-Burger.
yet another G2 F@rt. Loud, with a permanent stink that won't go away.
There’s no focus on it whatsoever any more. I hear nothing about it in sales.
This was Cisco's version of AOL/TimeWarner; an acquisition that was understood as awful even on the day the paperwork was signed...but the deal had taken on a momentum all its own and everyone involved just signed.
Cisco paid a needless 100% premium for a company that was floundering in a commodity market segment. Cisco looked like fools overpaying so much. Why? Who were the competing bidders? NO ONE.
In typical Cisco fashion, Splunk was immediately hot by layoffs...because of course the first thing you do with the company you wildly overpaid for is to destroy its morale. We as Cisco employees were bombarded with emails about Splunk.
But then nothing. All of a sudden, no one was talking about Splunk other than a pathetic attempt to recast it as an "AI buy".
We are given to hyperbole here in these discussions but I think Splunk easily makes the top ten worst acquisitions in US history.