Splunk Rebuilds Platform Around Agents to Meet Growing AI Data Needs

Cisco Systems Inc.'s Splunk unit has announced a major overhaul of its platform to better handle the increasing amounts of data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The company says this is not just an incremental evolution, but a fundamental rethink of how information is stored, searched, processed and prepared for AI.

The centerpiece of this strategy is Cisco Data Fabric, a new architecture powered by the Splunk platform that can analyze information where it resides instead of requiring customers to copy everything into Splunk. This approach addresses the longstanding criticism of Splunk's high costs associated with ingesting and indexing large volumes of data.

According to Mangesh Pimpalkhare, senior vice president and general manager of Splunk Platform at Cisco, 'Cost is directly addressed by this federated approach.' He also emphasized that Splunk's goal is not to replace frontier AI models, but to complement them with domain-specific models trained on operational data.

The company has also expanded its partnership with Nvidia Corp. to enable customers to run AI in on-premises, private-cloud and air-gapped environments. This is particularly appealing to regulated businesses and government agencies that cannot send sensitive operational data to an external AI service.