Continuing its campaign to position itself as the control plan for the artificial intelligence era, Cisco Systems Inc. today is using its Splunk subsidiary’s .conf25 to unveil the Splunk-powered Cisco Data Fabric, a network architecture designed to unify stovepipes of fragmented machine data.

Cisco also unveiled Splunk Federated Search for Snowflake. This integration enables users to access Snowflake data directly from within the Splunk interface, combining operational machine datasets with business data.

The fabric is based on the Time Series Foundation Model, an AI engine optimized for time-series analytics and forecasting on vast amounts of data. Cisco said the fabric can be used for anomaly detection, forecasting and automated root-cause analysis to enable proactive operations and rapid incident response. Ingested data is contextualized and turned into actionable insights in real time to accelerate decision-making.

Another pillar of the fabric is a data normalization layer called the Unified Intelligent Data Foundation. It consolidates data flows from security, operations, development and networking to enable more efficient cost management. Layered atop it is Borderless Real-Time Search, which federates queries across data sources such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3, Apache Iceberg, Databricks Inc.’s Delta Lake, Snowflake Inc.’s Data Cloud and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure to route workloads optimally to the appropriate compute engine.

The Splunk Machine Data Lake provides a persistent substrate for model training and enterprise analytics. Together with the Splunk AI Toolkit and MCP server, it handles AI-native services for onboarding, monitoring and self-healing operations. Cisco said the architecture is open and adaptable.

Federated Search can be use for unlimited onboarding of Snowflake as a data source, with Splunk Search Processing Language queries executed across Snowflake datasets. Users can join Splunk and Snowflake data with query execution automatically distributing workloads between Snowflake’s analytics and Splunk’s search layers.

Cisco has struggled to articulate a compelling story for the burgeoning AI market, but the control plane strategy outlined at Cisco Live 2025 in June was “the first time in 15 years that Cisco has shown a truly integrated roadmap instead of a stitched-together portfolio with several acquisitions on slideware,” theCUBE Chief Analyst Dave Vellante wrote following the event.

No longer just selling boxes, Cisco is now positioning itself as an integrated platform spanning network, compute, security and analytics, bolstered by Splunk’s data fabric, Vellante observed.

Cisco’s ambitions to unify data, apply AI analytics in real-time, search across distributed stores, and feed AI training pipelines address the pain enterprises are experiencing as they wrestle with a flood of machine data, ranging from logs to telemetry to event streams. The federated Snowflake search also demonstrates Cisco’s willingness to integrate with rather than replace incumbent enterprise data platforms as it has tried to do in the past.

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