Cisco Data Fabric Transforms Machine Data into AI-Ready Intelligence

Global network infrastructure provider Cisco announced the Cisco Data Fabric, a new architecture intended to empower organizations to harness the value of their machine data with AI. Powered by the Splunk platform, the Cisco Data Fabric is designed to 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.

The Cisco Data Fabric is purpose-built for AI. By unifying and activating machine data from across the enterprise, the framework delivers solutions that reduce cost and complexity while addressing the challenges of managing distributed data at scale.

Unlocking the Power of Machine Data for Agentic AI

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

The Cisco Data Fabric is designed to help organizations:

Operate on machine data at extreme scale:

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

• Cross-Domain Real-Time Search and Analysis: Enables rapid search and analysis of 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.

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

Unlock the value of proprietary data:

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

• Fuel for AI Innovation: Capabilities such as Splunk Machine Data Lake provide a persistent, AI-ready foundation for model training and enterprise analytics. Together with the Splunk AI Toolkit (formerly known as the Machine Learning Toolkit) and Splunk Model Context Protocol Server, they help transform machine data into a resource for advanced AI capabilities.

Unify the experiences for humans and AI agents:

• Cisco AI Canvas: Integrated with Splunk Cloud Platform, Cisco AI Canvas provides an AI agent to orchestrate the analysis workflow and a workspace for collaboration. This virtual war room experience helps teams discover deeper insights, collaborate in real-time, and take quick action. Splunk users can access investigation and visualization tools, collaborate with peers, and extend findings with new knowledge objects, alerts, and reports within a unified interface.

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

Availability

The Cisco Data Fabric is built using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform capabilities and is available today. It will incorporate future advances across data management, federation, and AI. Additional features will be introduced through 2026.

• The Splunk AI Toolkit is available now, with newly hosted models available in 2026.

• Replay S3 for Federated Analytics will be available in October 2025 across the Cisco Data Fabric.

• The Time Series Foundation Model will be listed on Hugging Face in November 2025.

• The Cisco AI Canvas integration with Splunk and Splunk Machine Data Lake will be available in 2026.

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