Cisco offered to take over Splunk for over $20 billion: report

The report, citing people familiar with the matter, also stated that the offer was made recently and that the companies are not in active talks.

San Francisco-based Splunk had, in November last year, announced the stepping down of its chief executive officer (CEO) Doug Merritt and subsequent appointment of the company's chair, Graham Smith, as the interim CEO.

Meanwhile, Cisco and Rakuten Symphony have established a joint go-to-market model with a common customer offering to help global service providers transform and modernise their network architecture.

The two companies will combine their leading technology portfolios, expertise, and services to develop and deliver solutions for 4G/5G mobile networks based on Open RAN technology, according to a Cisco release.

Cisco and Rakuten are already working together as early champions for Open RAN, driving open networking solutions for RAN, and building the world’s first fully virtualised, cloud-native network for Rakuten Mobile.

The companies on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding to accelerate the delivery for cloud-native, virtualised 4G/5G mobile networks based on Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) technology.

“Building upon the success of Rakuten Mobile’s industry-first innovative cloud-native network architecture, Rakuten Symphony and Cisco are combining strengths to offer solutions which will allow mobile operators to compete more effectively in the cloud era. Together, the companies are addressing the industry need for massive transformation to reduce costs, enhance agility and meet future technical, regulatory and environmental requirements for sustainability.” says the release.

“The companies have crossed many important milestones over the last four years, and they are now applying best practices to develop software-defined solutions that are optimized for the competitive mobile environment, based on automated, agile, high-performance infrastructure,” it added

Notable components of the solutions include Cisco’s leading mobile, routing, switching, and automation portfolios, along with Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN, orchestration and the full suite of Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld applications. The two companies plan to work together to validate and certify these solutions for service providers and deliver systems that perform across the full lifecycle from design to deployment and operations.

“I am very pleased to see both organisations come together and combine strengths. We believe our collaboration with Cisco will bring something quite unique in the industry solving the industry’s current challenges when it comes to deploying new generations of networks. The principles of open architecture, cloud, virtualization and automation are essential elements of the new networks that operators will be rolling out in the near future,” said Tareq Amin, CEO, Rakuten Symphony. “Using open interfaces, virtualization, cloud, and automation from Rakuten Symphony along with Cisco’s well established network footprint and offering will give telcos an opportunity to build and operate their networks in significantly better ways.”

“We have proven what the benefits of an open, cloud-driven, 5G-powered mobile network can do to transform the way people connect to do more and get more of everything today,” said Jonathan Davidson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “Together with Rakuten Symphony, we have the unique opportunity to offer global service providers an alternative to legacy RAN, with a turnkey option to transform their networks to be more intuitive and automated to support the ever-evolving needs for connectivity.”

Rakuten Symphony provides convergence solutions for hyperscale IT and telecom networks.