CNME Editor Mark Forker is on the ground at .conf25, hosted by Splunk in Boston, where Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, declared that they are on a mission to unlock the value of machine data in order to fuel the AI era.
Patel delivered a typically energetic keynote, where he praised the .conf community as the ‘secret sauce’ for Cisco Splunk.
He said that the new AI era we are now immersed in was going to profoundly change our society.
“The message from all of you last year was quite emphatic and clear, and it was Cisco, do not screw up Splunk, but that was a low bar. We are going to make it epic. I think it’s important to stress that we are in next evolution of AI, but what does that mean. The first era was all about Chatbots, then about 3 years ago ChatGPT emerged and it was great for humans to be able to talk to AI, but now we have augmented agents now performing tasks for us autonomously. As a result, AI will make our world of 8 billion people feel like one with the capacity of 80 billion,” said Patel.
Patel stated that the new AI era would result in massive implications when it came to technology architecture, and highlighted the 3 impediments that Cisco and Splunk are going to tackle ‘head-on’ to drive AI.
“I believe there are 3 major impediments that will hold us back, and they are infrastructure constraint, we don’t have enough power, compute or networking. There is going to be a trust deficit, because if you don’t have full visibility then you can’t trust the system, and then there’s the data gap. Data is the essential fuel for AI. I think when it comes to human-generated data to train AI models we have done a pretty good job, but we haven’t done a good job when it comes to machine-generated data, but it is a massively untapped opportunity, and it is clear that we need a machine data platform for the AI era. We are meeting these challenges head-on, and our promise to you is this, Cisco will be the critical infrastructure for the AI era,” said Patel.
Patel made some major announcements, which included the news that users will now be able to ingest Cisco firewalls into Splunk for FREE, and he stressed how Splunk was incredibly strategic for Cisco.
“Over the last 18 months, Cisco and Splunk have worked really well together to ensure that there is a great harmony between the products and the telemetry is being integrated into Splunk. We need to deliver the right level of visibility and trust, and observability for the entire stack. The future of the SOC is going to be agentic, but we also need to have the ability to secure AI itself,” said Patel.
Patel also praised the legacy of leadership that Splunk has demonstrated since its inception, and announced the launch of its Cisco Data Fabric.
“Splunk has always been a leader, and it will be the machine data fabric for the AI era, but we all know that we must unlock the value of machine data to fuel AI, and that is why we’re launching our brand new concept Cisco Data Fabric. Our Cisco Data Fabric operates at ludicrous scale, and enables users to unlock their proprietary data for AI, and unify experiences for humans and agents,” said Patel.
Patel also announced the expansion of their federated search through the form of a new partnership with Snowflake, the Alpha of that will be available in February 2026.
He concluded a brilliant keynote by announcing their Time Series Foundational Model, Machine Data Lake, and AI Canvas in Splunk.
“Our Time Series Foundational Model will be optimised for machine data, that is accurate and scalable, and adaptable to your domain. Our Machine Data Lake is a turnkey solution that is optimised for AI training, and will be secured and governed, but what will you be able to do with this you ask? You can create your own machine GPT, at a scale that was never possible before and done completely in natural language,” said Patel.
