Cisco Accelerates Splunk’s Transition to a Data Fabric

Note, this is not a new product.

In Cisco Data Fabric, announced last week, think of it more as an umbrella brand. The one that will guide the future evolution of the Splunk platform.

Various foundations of a data fabric architecture have already been laid. For example, with the federation search integration on S3 and Amazon Security Lake (add-on for Splunk Cloud Platform and Enterprise Security). Or a pre-ingestion data processing service.

On the roadmap, there is federation with Snowflake… for July 2026. We are also told — without a fixed deadline — about Azure, Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.

The promise of AI models powered by machine data

In the first instance, Cisco Data Fabric will be enriched with a foundation model for time-series analysis (publication on Hugging Face planned for November). Its role: to help leverage machine data for anomaly detection and root-cause analysis.

Cisco emphasizes the machine data aspect, promising to foster their use for developing AI models. To support this approach, it plans notably to create links with the Splunk AI Toolkit (formerly Machine Learning Toolkit) and its MCP server.

By 2026, a virtual data lake technology dedicated to these data will be added to the stack. Another promise: a linkage with Cisco AI Canvas. This infrastructure-management service based on an agent-based system is in an experimental phase (early access).