Cisco to acquire Splunk, but concerns over company history make security experts hesitate

Cisco’s announcement on Sept. 21 that it intends to acquire software data-security company Splunk is a major development for the security industry, experts tell IT Brew, but not necessarily one that promises success.

The acquisition is likely to greatly expand Cisco’s data security capabilities; the company said in a press release that together, “Cisco and Splunk will become one of the world’s largest software companies.”

“There [have] been alternatives to Splunk but none that have really been able to compete at the same level that Splunk has,” Allie Mellen, a security analyst for Forrester, told IT Brew.

Cisco’s customers include organizations in the public and private spheres around the world, and the network administration company has been beefing up the software component of its business in recent years. Splunk’s strength lies in data observability and could give Cisco a leg up on the competition with respect to threat management and detection.

Troubled past. Despite the potential, Cisco’s history of acquisitions makes Mellen less than bullish on the new merger. In her view, the company hasn’t quite earned consumer trust. In the security industry, that’s of paramount importance.

“The acquisitions that Cisco has made in the past, particularly on the security side—for the most part, they just don’t live up to the expectation,” Mellen said.

Cisco’s acquisitions of Pirelli Optical and Monterey Networks in 1999 are regarded as failures; a troubled ten-year relationship with Linksys from 2003 to 2013 also left the company’s reputation damaged. Vineet Jain, founding CEO of data governance and software developer Egnyte, referred to WebEx—acquired in 2007—as indicative of Cisco’s poor corporate strategy due to what he sees as Webex’s poor performance.

Capabilities. Jain told us he thinks Cisco and Splunk working together could result in interesting data engineering solutions, but he wonders whether Cisco’s hardware talent will translate into software capability. Splunk, along with Cisco’s acquisitions of AppDynamics (a full stack developer) and software developer ThousandEyes, will help Cisco “broaden their appeal from a dev-sec-ops perspective.”

“But can they make it a world-beating product? Remains to be seen,” Jain said.

Despite the concerns over Cisco’s history with acquisitions, Mellen conceded that the company has also seen success—most notably in its 2018 purchase of Duo Security. She attributes that success in large part to Cisco allowing Duo to “maintain some independence with the brand” which leads to innovation.

“Ultimately, that’s what customers want—they find the Splunk product really valuable because of what they hope is going to be more innovation,” Mellen said.