Cisco’s new architecture to transform machine data into AI-ready intelligence

Cisco has announced the Cisco Data Fabric, a revolutionary new architecture that will empower organisations to harness the value of their machine data with AI. Powered by the Splunk platform, the Cisco Data Fabric is designed to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of handling machine data at scale and leveraging it for AI applications, such as training custom AI models, powering agentic workflows, or correlating multiple streams of both machine and business data to extract insights and drive better decisions.

“Organisations everywhere are sitting on a gold mine of machine data that’s been too complex, cumbersome, and costly to leverage for AI, until today,” said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco. “From sensor readings and factory metrics to checkout system data and event updates from apps, servers, networks and more, machine data drives how businesses operate. Splunk revolutionised data and analytics for the cloud. And now, the Cisco Data Fabric is poised to do the same for AI by making it possible for enterprises to build AI models with their own proprietary machine data.”

The Cisco Data Fabric is purpose-built for the AI era, enabling organisations to innovate faster, strengthen security, and achieve greater business agility. By unifying and activating machine data from every corner of the enterprise, the framework delivers turnkey solutions that reduce cost and complexity while overcoming the challenges of managing distributed data at scale.

“Our goal is to give customers the fastest, most secure path from data to action,” said Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM, Splunk, a Cisco company. “By embedding AI across the platform and embracing open standards, we’re not just helping organisations analyse information faster—we're enabling them to anticipate change, scale innovation without unnecessary complexity, and deliver digital services that are more resilient, adaptive, and responsive to the needs of their users.”

The Cisco Data Fabric transforms streams of data into actionable intelligence that helps customers accelerate decision-making, reduce operational risk, and fuel innovation. The framework’s intelligent edge data management enables advanced data filtering, shaping, and tiering, while powerful federation capabilities correlate insights across various domains – helping to provide near real-time, end-to-end operational intelligence. With a next-generation experience layer driven by AI-assistants and agentic capabilities, organisations can achieve dramatic gains in speed to resolution, reduce administrative burden, and empower teams to make faster decisions.

With the power of the Cisco Data Fabric, organisations will be able to -

·         Operate on machine data at extreme scale

o   Unified, Intelligent Data Foundation: Simplify transformation of data across edge, cloud, and on-premises, including SecOps, ITOps, DevOps, and NetOps, into real-time, actionable insights while optimising for cost and efficiency.

o   Cross-Domain Real-Time Search and Analysis: Quickly search and analyse data where it resides, federating across sources like Amazon S3 (available now), Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake (with Spark), Snowflake, and Microsoft Azure, while intelligently routing data to the most appropriate storage or analytic engine for the workload. Additional sources will be available in 2026.

o   Flexible, Open Architecture: Adapts to multiple environments, spanning on-premises and cloud deployments, including high compliance with open standards, plug-and-play integrations, and self-service tools to empower innovation without limitations.

·         Unlock the value of proprietary data

o   Time Series Foundation Model (coming soon): Powers advanced pattern analysis and temporal reasoning on time series data, enabling advanced anomaly detection, forecasting, and automated root cause analysis across the Cisco Data Fabric. It drives proactive operations, accelerates incident response, and turns machine data into actionable intelligence.

o   Fuel for AI Innovation: Unique capabilities such as Splunk Machine Data Lake provide a persistent, AI-ready foundation for both model training and enterprise analytics. Together with the Splunk AI Toolkit (formerly known as the Machine Learning Toolkit) and Splunk Model Context Protocol Server, these innovations help to transform machine data into a fuel source for advanced AI capabilities.

·         Unify the experiences for humans and AI agents

o   Cisco AI Canvas: Integrating with Splunk Cloud Platform, Cisco AI Canvas provides an AI agent to orchestrate the analysis workflow and a workspace for team collaboration. This new virtual war room experience helps teams discover deeper insights, collaborate in real-time, and take decisive action faster than ever before. Splunk users can access advanced investigation and visualisation tools as well as effortlessly collaborate with peers and extend findings with new knowledge objects, alerts, and reports within a unified and intuitive interface.

o   AI-Native at Every Step: The Splunk platform includes built-in AI capabilities to help at every stage of the data lifecycle – from onboarding and data management to agentic search and user experience – driving unprecedented productivity, agility, and innovation.