Cisco is reported to have made a bid worth more than $20bn for Splunk.
The Wall Street Journal claims Cisco made an offer recently, but added that there are currently no active talks taking place.
Neither Cisco nor Splunk have commented on the rumours, but the latter’s share price rose by more than 10 percent when the reports emerged.
Cisco has made more than a dozen $1bn-plus acquisitions over its lifetime, but a deal of this size would eclipse these by some way. Its current large takeover came when it acquired Scientific Atlanta for $7bn in 2006.
Splunk was founded in 2003 and is a software platform that analyses big data to identify trends. A key use case for the technology is identifying security threats.
The pair already work together for cybersecurity, which sees Splunk generate insights derived from Cisco’s technology across security, networking and collaboration.
