Rumored $20 Billion Splunk Acquisition Would Make Cisco ‘Overpowering Cybersecurity Giant’

Cisco Systems‘ rumored acquisition offer for Splunk would create one of the largest cybersecurity vendors in the world.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Cisco offered the data observability and security information and event management (SIEM) provider $20 billion. People close to the company said the talks occurred recently, according to the Journal. However, those same sources indicated that Cisco and Splunk aren’t currently talking to each other.

Neither company agreed to requests for comment.

“As a policy, we don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” a Splunk spokesperson told Channel Futures.

360 SOC’s Chris Ichelson

Chris Ichelson, CEO at managed security services provider 360 SOC, said such a deal would make Cisco “the overpowering giant” in the security industry. Ichelson, whose company is a certified Cisco partner, said the deal could help Cisco with its SIEM capabilities. In addition, he said Splunk’s Phantom and SOAR offerings will give security operations centers better availability than Cisco’s Secure X platform.

“Should Cisco decide to make this transaction or another similar transaction, [it] could easily bridge the gap in to the missing components of the Cisco security offering or fabric,” Ichelson told Channel Futures. “A purchase of Splunk would include a leading data-driven platform coupled with a leading SOAR ‘Phantom.’ My opinion is Cisco could win back many lost security customers with this.”

Other Cisco Acquisitions

Splunk would join a host of other companies Cisco has bought in recent years to bolster its software, security and cloud stack. Cisco in 2018 bought Duo Security, which provides single sign-on tools, two-factor authentication and endpoint remediation. The deal cost nearly $2.4 billion. Cisco announced the acquisition of PortShift in 2020 to bolster its security capabilities in Kubernetes environments. Moreover, the company in 2017 spent $3.7 billion to acquire AppDynamics. AppDynamics provides observability capabilities that many pundits describe as similar to Splunk. Cisco has bolstered its AppDynamics portfolio with acquisitions of network intelligence provider ThousandEyes, Kubernetes cost and governance management provider Replex, and other companies.

A $20 billion deal would dwarf all of the prior ones. However, Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, said the price might need to go higher.

Smart opportunistic move by @Cisco to try and acquire @Splunk. The synergies are apparent, but I think the est. offer was too low. Could still happen. I think the premium would need to be higher, likely north of $24 billion to gain traction.https://t.co/OMVgeILvbv $SPLK #Tech

— Daniel Newman (@danielnewmanUV) February 12, 2022

Cisco and Splunk

Gossip about Cisco buying Splunk dates back to 2019, when RBC Capital’s Matthew Hedberg said Splunk could complement the AppDynamic portfolio. He said a deal could create a “premier data management platform.” Furthermore, he said Splunk could bring security expertise to Cisco.

“With around 50% of Splunk’s use cases being security-related deals, buying Splunk would also get Cisco deeper into security,” Hedberg said at the time.

Cisco and Splunk are no strangers to one another. Splunk won …