Splunk says this is a transformative milestone and will make the Cisco/Splunk combination one of the largest software companies in the world.

"Together, we will realise our shared vision for the future of security and observability - leveraging data and AI to accelerate digital resilience for customers around the world," the company said.

The combined entity expects to enable organisations of all sizes to access, analyse, and act on their data faster and more securely.

iTWire has been covering Splunk for years, from its early days as a product that aided technical folk in gathering and aggregating their log files from servers, routers, and all other kinds of equipment. The product quickly gained a fan following with its rapid ingestion of raw data in a streaming fashion, in contrast to other, less performant, tools that transformed data into a standard format on load. Splunk also provided its users with a query language, dashboards, and other capabilities to quickly search through the logs and correlate events happening across the network.

Splunk found customers were doing things with the product they had not anticipated, with business users noticing the interesting things their IT teams were doing, and soon putting their own business-oriented data through it too. Splunk changed from being a log aggregation platform to one that allowed users of all types to make data-driven decisions and interrogate their data in new ways.

The company continued to grow through its own product development and through acquisition to provide a robust observability and war room environment, aiding cross-functional teams to gather together and tackle problems in a common way, each delving into the same Splunk platform but working on different types of data, or using the same data for different purposes.

Splunk has continued to grow, and now today has announced that growth is leading it to part of Cisco.

Cisco sees Splunk as accelerating its business transformation to more recurring revenue.

The deal will see Splunk acquire for $US 157 per share in cash. Upon the close of the acquisition, Splunk President and CEO Gary Steele (pictured) will join Cisco's Executive Leadership Team and will report directly to Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins.

"Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability," Robbins said.

"Together we will form a global security and observability leader that harnesses the power of data and AI to deliver excellent customer outcomes and transform the industry," Steele said.

The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Cisco and Splunk. The deal is expected to close by the end of Q3 for the calendar year 2024, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions including approval by Splunk shareholders.