Splunk, now part of Cisco, is sharpening its focus on India as it anchors its Asia growth around data localisation, AI-led observability, and enterprise security. The company sees India’s accelerating digital transformation as a catalyst for expanding its unified digital resilience platform across sectors.
“India is at the centre of the data explosion in Asia,” said Robert Pizzari, Group Vice President, Asia, Splunk. “Our goal is to make digital resilience real, both for AI and with AI.”
With Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition of Splunk completed in the first half of 2024, the two companies are working as one integrated unit. Splunk now forms the analytics backbone of Cisco’s global strategy, bringing together AI infrastructure, the future of work, and digital resilience under a single umbrella.
Prashant Chaudhary, Area Vice President – India, Splunk, said the approach is clear: a unified message, clear integration, and targeted solutions for Indian enterprises.
“Splunk today is supercharged by Cisco,” Chaudhary said. “We’re helping customers leverage our integration strengths and AI capabilities to solve complex problems.”
He added that Splunk is working closely with large banks, IT and telecom companies, and public sector clients to manage the growing complexity in their IT infrastructure. “With AI adoption in India already 20 to 30 per cent above global norms, the challenge now is how to manage the resulting data complexity,” he added.
A key pillar of Splunk’s new architecture is federated search, a model that allows customers to query data wherever it resides instead of copying it into Splunk. This shift reduces costs and prevents data duplication across systems.
“You can now keep your logs or flow data in Amazon and still use Splunk as your end-to-end security tool,” Pizzari explained. “We even took a financial hit to help customers manage data better and retain flexibility.”
The model helps enterprises manage data strategically, identifying what to store, how long to retain it, and how often to access it, which is a crucial advantage as data volumes and compliance costs grow.
Data localisation and sovereign models
India’s stringent data localisation policies have influenced Splunk’s design choices. The company now supports multiple deployment models, including self-managed on-prem, customer-managed private cloud, and Splunk-managed SaaS, all configurable for sovereign or air-gapped environments.
“We already have deployments running in closed data centres not connected to the internet,” said Chaudhary. “That level of control is critical for public sector, BFSI, and defence customers in India.”
Strengthening observability and security
Splunk’s integration with Cisco has created what the company calls a Data Fabric, an architecture connecting logs, metrics, traces, and events across IT and security operations. The aim is to break silos between teams like SecOps, ITOps, NetOps, and DevOps and give them a unified view of their environment.
“With Data Fabric, teams can reuse data for both security and observability without breaking the chain of custody,” said Pizzari.
AI canvas and agentic operations
Splunk is also embedding AI more deeply into its operations through what it calls agentic operations, which use AI to predict, prevent, and automate responses to disruptions.
“We talk about trust, predictability, and security,” said Pizzari. “That’s what agentic operations enable, systems that don’t just alert but act.”
Splunk’s AI Canvas allows enterprises to use their own large language models or commercial ones like OpenAI and Anthropic, while Cisco provides guardrails and monitoring for secure deployments.
India will continue to play a dual role as both a growth market and an innovation hub, with R&D and engineering teams in Chennai and Hyderabad supporting regional operations.
“We have a unified strategy for India,” said Chaudhary. “Our message to customers is simple, we have the right teams, the right integrations, and the right technology to help them solve complexity and build resilience.”
As India moves deeper into an AI-driven, cloud-regulated future, Splunk’s vision is to turn compliance and complexity into competitive advantage.
“We’re building for AI and with AI,” Pizzari summed up. “And we’re doing it on foundations that are predictable, secure, and sovereign.”
