Observability has become foundational to the success of AI at scale: Robert Pizzari, Group Vice President, Asia at Splunk

India’s digital economy is scaling at a speed few markets can match—driven by population-scale platforms, AI-first ambitions, and an expanding national digital infrastructure that leaves no margin for failure. For CIOs, this growth brings a stark truth: complexity is no longer an edge case. It is the operating norm.

As organisations race to adopt AI, expand hybrid cloud footprints, and secure critical digital services, the real challenge has shifted from innovation to resilience—ensuring systems remain observable, secure, compliant, and cost-efficient at scale. This is where data, AI, and operational intelligence converge.

In this interview, Robert Pizzari, Group Vice President, Asia at Splunk, shares how the combined Cisco–Splunk portfolio is being shaped for India’s next phase of digital growth. From AI-powered observability and security to agentic AI and federated data architectures, Pizzari explains why India is emerging as a proving ground for resilient AI operations—and what CIOs must do now to prepare for the decade ahead.

Some edited excerpts:

India has become one of the fastest-growing digital economies. What makes India a priority market for Cisco–Splunk, and how are your recent global announcements shaping your India strategy for 2025–2027?

India is one of the most dynamic digital economies in the world — a market where AI adoption already outpaces the global average, with nearly 69% of organisations now rank AI as a top IT budget priority, even as digital infrastructure expansion continues rapidly across cloud, data centres, and cybersecurity.

This creates both opportunities and urgencies as three factors are reshaping how organisations operate. First, the explosion of data that demands real-time insights and action. Second, digital public infrastructure operating at population scale where resilience is mission-critical. Lastly, sectoral transformation where compliance and governance are central. These dynamics make India a market where Cisco–Splunk’s AI-powered observability and security capabilities can play a critical role in helping organisations succeed at scale.

How do you see the combined Cisco–Splunk portfolio accelerating India’s national digital ambitions across sectors like BFSI, telecom, manufacturing, and government?

India’s digital economy is on track to contribute nearly 20% of national GDP by 2030. To sustain that momentum, India needs digital resilience engineered into the foundation of its national infrastructure and enterprise infrastructure, ensuring services stay reliable, secure, and trusted at population scale. This, in turn, demands end-to-end visibility across increasingly complex digital footprints, spanning networks, applications, data and security layers, particularly as organisations accelerate their adoption of AI.

This is where Cisco and Splunk are uniquely positioned. Cisco’s strength in networking and network security, combined with Splunk’s leadership in security operations, observability, and data analytics, helps organisations build resilient digital foundations, gain real-time, end-to-end visibility, and become AI-enabled to operate with confidence in the AI era. Together, they deliver a unified platform that allows organisations to act on data in real time, anticipate issues before they escalate, protect and defend against adversaries and operate at scale with greater assurance.

Cisco, together with Splunk, are able to empower India’s critical sectors with greater predictability, intelligence, and resilience. For BFSI and the public sector, this means leveraging AI-driven threat detection to accelerate investigations and simplify compliance, strengthening citizen and customer trust. Telecom operators can unlock more reliable 5G scale with proactive incident response and enhanced service experiences. Manufacturers can advance toward predictive maintenance and secure OT/IT convergence to boost productivity and safety. Ultimately, our shared mission is to help organisations across India achieve digital resilience for AI, with AI.

Cisco and Splunk have been vocal about building “agentic AI” solutions. What does that mean in the Indian context, where enterprises operate at massive scale and complexity?

Indian enterprises operate at true population scale — millions of endpoints, billions of transactions, and critical services such as UPI, telecom networks, and digital citizen platforms. Manual operations cannot keep pace with this complexity. Agentic AI represents the next stage of digital resilience: AI that not only analyses data, but also provides safe, autonomous action options to prevent issues before they escalate. With AI-powered capabilities like Splunk AI Assistant and Cisco AI Canvas, organisations can accelerate investigations, orchestrate response through virtual war rooms, and shift from firefighting to continuous innovation.

With India generating one of the world’s largest volumes of machine data, what challenges do you see around data ingest, governance, and cost management — and how is Splunk helping customers stay in control?

Today, CIOs are faced with more data, but less visibility. As AI adoption accelerates data growth, many enterprises struggle with fragmented tools, inconsistent governance, and rising ingestion costs. This leads to critical blind spots across security, performance, and user experience, precisely when operational intelligence matters most. Our approach is to ensure that customers have choice and control over how they manage and activate their machine data.

For example, with Cisco Data Fabric, organisations can unify logs, metrics, and traces from any environment, to ensure a complete, real-time view of their operations. Splunk Federated Search enables teams to analyse data where it lives, eliminating unnecessary duplication, costly data migrations. Lastly, Splunk’s flexible pricing models enable organisations to scale observability and security capabilities in line with their unique approaches and business needs whether they are early in their digital transformation or operating at enterprise scale. Organisations can pay based on the data load they bring into the Splunk platform and hence allow a simple, controllable, predictable and economical approach.

Where are you seeing maximum adoption in India for Splunk’s observability stack—cloud-native startups, telecoms, hyperscalers, or traditional enterprises undergoing transformation?

As India’s digital needs and AI ambitions increase, there will be strong demand and adoption for Splunk’s observability solutions where uptime directly impacts customer trust and insights influence product roadmaps and business goals.

Globally, organisations such as Singapore Airlines (SIA) have used observability to aggregate logs critical to customer-facing applications in real time, hence providing end-to-end data visibility, enhanced correlation, analysis and reporting. The outcome? SIA received 75% faster issue detection and 90% fewer backend issues in their digital transformation journey.

These use cases have immense potential to resonate in India as telecom providers and digital-native service organisations ramp up for 5G scale, high-performance OTT delivery and experience-led competition.

Not just that, organisations such as NEC successfully used Splunk dashboards to enhance cyber-threat visualisation, driving a cultural shift that improved employee engagement and third-party evaluation scores, while also helping mitigate ransomware risks.

How critical is the India partner ecosystem—global SIs, local MSPs, and telcos—in scaling the Cisco–Splunk joint proposition?

India’s partner ecosystem is absolutely foundational to how Cisco and Splunk scale our joint value proposition. Cisco brings one of the strongest and most established partner networks in the country, and Splunk is deeply committed to local enablement and ensuring our partners are successful. By working closely with global system integrators, managed service providers, consulting leaders and telcos, we can accelerate industry-specific transformation, extend managed SOC and observability services to more organisations, and ensure that MSMEs also benefit from scalable, secure and affordable AI capabilities. This model allows us to deliver India-first architectures, faster implementation, and quicker time-to-resilience for customers nationwide.

If you had to advise CIOs in India on one mindset shift needed for the next decade of AI + observability, what would it be?

The most important mindset shift for CIOs in India is this: AI success starts with getting your data house in order and observability is the discipline that makes that possible at scale. AI does not fail because of algorithms, it fails because of fragmented, low-quality, and poorly governed data. In fact, low data quality is the main barrier to AI readiness, even as organisations accelerate AI adoption. Without clean, accurate, timely, and well-governed data flowing through systems, AI outcomes become unreliable, opaque, and difficult to trust.

This is where observability becomes a business catalyst, beyond monitoring. Observability ensures that data powering AI is continuously validated, contextualised, and actionable across applications, infrastructure, and increasingly, AI workloads themselves. At the same time, forward-looking organisations are shifting toward smarter practices such as data lifecycle management, data quality, data reuse, and federation.These practices not only reduce cost and complexity but improve AI accuracy, bias reduction, and decision-making outcomes.

The next decade will reward those who treat data management and observability as foundational to AI strategy. When observability connects clean data, AI systems, and business outcomes in real time, it moves organisations from reacting to issues toward preventing them and from experimenting with AI toward scaling it with confidence.