Networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. reported good news/bad news numbers in its fiscal first-quarter 2024 results this week, handily beating expectations but lowering its outlook. Revenue and earnings for the quarter were $14.67 billion and $1.11 per share, respectively, compared wth Street expectations of $14.61 billion and $1.03 per share. However, Cisco’s outlook was lower than expected.
If data is king of this artificial intelligence-driven world, Cisco Systems Inc. is making a play for the throne with its acquisition of Splunk Inc., long-rumored and finally announced this morning.
Cisco has been expanding from its hardware roots over the past few years, and this all-cash $28 billion acquisition will push it even further on its journey to building its business around recurring revenue.
Today’s organizations typically have some combination of on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and multi-cloud environments. The one common denominator across all of these environments is the network. Due to the importance of networks, it’s becoming increasingly important to use observability technology to understand the performance and other aspects of networks, based on the data they generate.
Observability is a hot tech topic yet has also become one of the industry’s most overused buzzwords. The term means understanding the behavior, performance, and other aspects of cloud infrastructure and cloud apps based on the data they generate, such as metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT). Observability relies on telemetry that comes from endpoints and services in multicloud environments.