Cisco spends $28B on data cruncher Splunk in cybersecurity push

Cisco is making its most expensive acquisition ever – by far - with an announcement it's buying data crunching software firm Splunk for $157 per share, or approximately $28 billion (£22.8b). The transaction, which Cisco said it expects to close in calendar Q3 of 2024, was already unanimously approved by the boards of both …

[Anonymous Coward]

HA ha ha

I read that headline and thought that was their license cost :-)

[sanmigueelbeer]

Re: HA ha ha

thought that was their license cost

It is (license cost).

[jamesb2147]

Does anybody get this?

Because I sure don't see the strategy here.

[Yougottalaugh]

Re: Does anybody get this?

If you are splunk then this makes sense - a great premium payout before your decline in market share, precipitated by the desire of CIOs and CISOs to reduce costs. The clues are in the number of products competing to reduce that splunk bill. The acquisition seems likely to accelerate the decline because any effective bundling is going to require an amazing transformation in Cisco’s GTM. The real winner here is probably Crowdstrike, who this week announced their latest cybersecurity platform with their own logging solution. Don't hold your breadth waiting for thousands of CISOs to run joyfully from Crowdstrike towards whatever ‘splunk -enabled security vision’ Cisco are touting. Expect rather the opposite and raise a glass to the Splunk board for selling at the top of their market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco destroy everything they buy.

Our company is now looking for an alternative SIEM system, as a result of this acquisition. Cisco's licensing is the most complex and expensive in the industry for lackluster products.