Cisco has announced the launch of Cisco Data Fabric, a new architecture aimed at helping organisations unlock the value of their machine data for artificial intelligence applications.

The Cisco Data Fabric is powered by the Splunk platform and has been developed to address the challenges associated with managing, scaling, and leveraging machine data for AI initiatives. According to Cisco, this solution supports organisations in tasks such as training custom AI models, conducting cross-domain data correlation, and driving improved operational decision-making through data and business stream integration.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, said: “Organisations everywhere are sitting on a gold mine of machine data that’s been too complex, cumbersome, and costly to leverage for AI, until today. From sensor readings and factory metrics to checkout system data and event updates from apps, servers, networks and more, machine data drives how businesses operate. Splunk revolutionised data and analytics for the cloud. And now, the Cisco Data Fabric is poised to do the same for AI by making it possible for enterprises to build AI models with their own proprietary machine data.”

The architecture is described by Cisco as purpose-built for the AI era, offering turnkey solutions intended to reduce complexity and cost for enterprises. By unifying and activating machine data from across the organisation, the architecture seeks to address the management of distributed data, allowing organisations to innovate, bolster security, and support business agility.

Kamal Hathi, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Splunk, a Cisco company, stated: “Our goal is to give customers the fastest, most secure path from data to action. By embedding AI across the platform and embracing open standards, we’re not just helping organisations analyse information faster – we’re enabling them to anticipate change, scale innovation without unnecessary complexity, and deliver digital services that are more resilient, adaptive, and responsive to the needs of their users.”

Machine data for agentic AI

The Cisco Data Fabric includes functionalities for intelligent edge data management, advanced filtering, shaping, tiering and federated insights across various domains. This enables organisations to access near real-time, end-to-end operational intelligence. The architecture features an AI-driven experience layer that includes AI-assistants and agentic capabilities intended to speed up resolution of incidents, reduce administrative workloads and empower decision-making.

The Cisco Data Fabric provides a unified, intelligent data foundation that supports DevOps, SecOps, ITOps and NetOps, helping organisations transform data from edge, cloud, and on-premises environments into actionable real-time insights, optimising both cost and efficiency. It offers cross-domain real-time search and analysis, allowing data to be searched and analysed in-situ and federated across various sources such as Amazon S3 (with support currently available), Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake with Spark, Snowflake, and Microsoft Azure, with additional sources planned for future release. The architecture is designed to be flexible and support open standards, plug-and-play integrations and self-service tools for innovation.

Proprietary data capabilities

The solution will soon offer a Time Series Foundation Model, delivering advanced pattern analysis and temporal reasoning features that support anomaly detection, forecasting and automated root cause analysis. Machine data can therefore be transformed into a resource for proactive operations and accelerated incident response. The Splunk Machine Data Lake, part of Cisco Data Fabric, provides an AI-ready foundation for both model training and enterprise analytics. These capabilities are supported by the Splunk AI Toolkit and Splunk Model Context Protocol Server.

Unified user experience

Cisco AI Canvas, integrated with the Splunk Cloud Platform, introduces an AI agent to orchestrate analytical workflows and offers a collaborative workspace. This feature, described as a virtual war room, aims to help teams uncover deeper insights, work collaboratively in real time, and take informed action efficiently. Users will have access to investigation and visualisation tools, collaboration features, and the means to generate new knowledge objects, alerts and reports within a unified interface. The Splunk platform’s AI integration spans the entire data lifecycle, supporting onboarding, management, agentic search and user experience.

Archana Venkatraman, senior research director, cloud data management at IDC, commented:

“The Cisco Data Fabric addresses a critical pain point in today’s AI-driven enterprise: the challenge to quickly and securely unify vast streams of machine data for continuous resilience. By enabling a federated approach that eliminates data movement, it provides a pragmatic solution for organisations operationalising AI at scale. Its focus on real-time search, coupled with a repository for AI-ready data, provides tangible value by reducing complexity and time to insights. This unified architecture is a strong step toward helping customers build more resilient and trustworthy AI systems.”

Availability and future plans

Cisco Data Fabric leverages Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform functionalities, serving as the basis for ongoing enhancements in data management, federation and AI capabilities. Further features, including expanded data source support, the Time Series Foundation Model and Cisco AI Canvas integration, are scheduled for release through 2026. The Splunk AI Toolkit is available now, with additional hosted models due in 2026, while federated analytics support for Amazon S3 is expected to be available from October 2025, and the Time Series Foundation Model will be listed on Hugging Face in November 2025.