Deal of the morning, Cisco striking a deal to buy Cybersecurity Company,

Splunk, $157 a share in cash as part of its push into AI.

That is the focus of today's tech check with

dear d'rebosa. What do you think, Dee? Several different angles baked into

this deal. There's what it says about Cisco and Legacy Tech, what it says

about enterprise software valuations and of course

implications for the M&A market. Let's take Cisco first. At 28 billion

dollars, Splunk is its biggest acquisition and it signals where the company

wants to go.

At its core, Cisco is still a legacy tech hardware company that's trying to pivot to software and

services.

Bringing Splink into the fold, that will not only help with top-line growth, but it gives Cisco more heft in

cyber security and artificial intelligence two of the buzziest sub-sectors in tech

right now. We've seen other legacy tech use the same playbook like IBM and Red Hat.

Whether it works though, that is still very much an open question.

To the deal could suggest that Enterprise Software has bought them.

Splunk is a stock that touched nearly $200 in 2020 and corrected aggressively with the

rest of the space at the end of 21 falling to about 75 bucks a share. The

157 Cisco was willing to pay.

That could really get other SAS companies to perk up and think, hey, maybe we could get closer

to those peak valuations too.

Or, and this brings me to the third implication of the deal, they could be encouraged to do deals of their own.

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