Cisco's AI Observability Play Signals New Management Crisis for IT

Cisco is strategically leveraging its recent Splunk acquisition to manage its expanding portfolio of AI-powered network agents. This move addresses the operational chaos created by its own rapid AI tool deployment, highlighting a critical inflection point for the industry. As its unified Cloud Control platform is delayed until 2026, using Splunk for observability becomes a necessary stop-gap, demonstrating the immediate challenge of governing increasingly autonomous systems within enterprise environments.

This internal application of Splunk immediately benefits Cisco by creating a powerful proof-of-concept for customers, showcasing the observability platform's value in the AI era. It puts significant pressure on competitors like HPE and Juniper to provide a clear strategy for managing their own AI agent ecosystems. The move signals that the race is no longer just about deploying AI features, but about providing the governance and oversight frameworks to manage them, raising the stakes for the entire AIOps market.