Big Data is the way of the future for any tech business, but all that information has to travel from the source to the user. That means Cisco Systems, Inc. has positioned itself as major player in the networking side of the Big Data revolution. Now Cisco has joined forces with Big Data analytics company Splunk, Inc. To shed some light on what this means for Big Data customers, John Furrier and George Gilbert, coshosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined Raghunath Nambiar, distinguished engineer and the chief architect of Big Data and analytics at Cisco, during Splunk .conf2015 for a conversation about Cisco and Splunk’s partnership.

The discussion opened up with a question about what this new relationship between Splunk and Cisco means for customers. Nambiar replied that as the two companies work together, the latest version of Splunk has seen a huge performance increase on Cisco hardware. This gives customers more processing per server.

Unity and new value

The discussion turned toward the issue of unity. Many services and products have been claiming to unify things for customers, but what does that actually mean in practice? From Cisco’s point of view, unity means bringing computing, storage, connectivity, and access all under one roof. This is necessary because customers demand speed in their analytics applications, and the time costs of moving data between applications is too great.

As for Splunk, it brings a new value to Big Data by allowing companies to provision and manage high-performance servers. Cisco can take advantage of this by combining Splunk’s power with end-to-end, out-of-the-box deployments.

A unified future

The relationship between Splunk and Cisco will help define the future of both companies. Cisco has worked with Splunk to create two reference system architectures, one based on speed and the other around capacity. These can be deployed as a single server or a cluster as the customer demands.

Cisco is all about connecting people, Nambiar said. The company wants to be part of the next generation of enterprise and Cloud applications. In this, Splunk gives them an edge in the Big Data analytics market.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2015.

Also, join in on the live conversation at https://www.crowdchat.net/SplunkConf.

Photo by SiliconANGLE