In Denver this week, Cisco Systems Inc. and its Splunk unit made a bet that the scarcest resource in the agentic enterprise isn’t intelligence or graphics processing units — it’s trust. The Splunk .conf 2026 show themes and keynotes focused less on dashboards, widgets and features and more on who or what is authorized to act in the agentic era. Every vendor conference typically has a center of gravity that serves as a unifying theme.
It has been almost a year and a half since Cisco Systems Inc. acquired Splunk Inc. At the time, investors were happy because it was a good financial move. Cisco spent $28 billion and would get back about $4 billion a year in revenue that was accretive to profit margins. Splunk revenue is primarily subscription-based, which would accelerate Cisco’s march toward this model.
Cisco Systems Inc. managed to put up a strong “beat and raise” in its fiscal second-quarter earnings this week, and investors took the news positively as the stock is trading at an all-time high, excluding the overvaluation during the dot-com bubble.
Cisco Systems Inc. provided positive numbers in its fiscal fourth-quarter results Wednesday, and there’s a story behind those numbers. The networking giant posted a modest revenue beat of $13.64 billion, $100 million more than consensus estimates. Gross margin, boosted by the acquisition of Splunk Inc., came in at a whopping 67.5%, the highest number for Cisco in 20 years. Product order growth rose 14% year over year, 6% excluding Splunk.
Cisco Live was held last week in what has become my second home, Las Vegas. I had dubbed this the most important Cisco Live in the Chuck Robbins era, as the company is looking to put a stake in the artificial intelligence ground. Simultaneously, Cisco Systems Inc. is integrating its Splunk acquisitions and reshaping the security business in real time. For most companies, doing one of these things would be all-encompassing, but these are not typical times.