Cisco vs Elastic

Cisco — Hardware · Public · $433.3B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  Elastic — Infrastructure · Public · $10.2B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Relationship

Cisco named as owner of AppDynamics/Splunk.

6 of 17 capabilitiesShared product typeSmaller scaleNamed in filingDetect and respond to security threats

6 of 17 capabilities — Shares agent orchestration, data analysis, evaluation and observability and 3 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship application.

Ludbee product records

Smaller scale — Elastic: $10.2B market cap, against Cisco's $433.3B market cap.

Ludbee scale figures · valuation, market cap or revenue estimate

Named in filing — “such as AppDynamics (owned by Cisco Systems)...and Splunk (owned by Cisco Systems).”

sec.gov · checked 2026-09-18

Detect and respond to security threats — Rivals on this job — Spot attacks across endpoints, email, cloud and identity, then triage and contain them.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Aligned comparison

FieldCiscoElastic
Market cap$433.3B$10.2B Elastic has 43× smaller
Employees86,2004,019 Elastic has 21× fewer
Founded19842012 28 yrs later
StatusPublicPublic match
CategoryHardwareInfrastructure
Stack layerAI agent, Application, HardwareAgent platform, Application, Model API, Platform
HeadquartersSan Jose, USAAmsterdam, Netherlands

Capability overlap

Shared · 6

Agent orchestrationData analysisEvaluation and observabilityModel inferenceThreat detection and responseWorkflow automation

Not verified for Elastic · 11

Accelerator siliconAI compute hardwareCustomer supportData securityGuardrails and safetyInterconnectModel trainingServer systemsSpeech to textSummarizationVoice agent

Recorded for Cisco. Elastic’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for Cisco · 3

Model hostingKnowledge retrievalVector search

Recorded for Elastic. Cisco’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Hand-checked pairing

Cisco

Application

AI Assistant for Webex Contact CenterApplication

AI assistant for contact-centre agents and supervisors that produces call and transfer summaries, live transcription, suggested chat replies, topic analytics, automatic CSAT scoring and agent burnout signals.

Cisco AI CanvasApplication

AgenticOps workspace where teams and AI agents collaborate to investigate, correlate and resolve issues across domains: natural-language querying, multi-step agent workflows, shared real-time visibility, and native Cisco plus third-party tool integration via Cloud Control Studio.

Cisco AI DefenseApplication

End-to-end AI security product that discovers an organisation's AI assets, red-teams models and applications for vulnerabilities, and enforces runtime guardrails against prompt injection and data leakage.

Cisco IQApplication

Agentic support intelligence delivered inside Cisco Support and Professional Services — 'the delivery vehicle for everything Cisco Support and Professional Services knows about your environment, made continuously available before you ask for it' — generally available as SaaS since April 2026 and included with existing support contracts.

Webex AI Workforce Engagement ManagementApplication

AI-native workforce engagement suite for contact centres that forecasts demand and optimises shifts, uses NLP and LLMs to evaluate 100 percent of human and AI agent interactions (AI Quality Management), and runs performance coaching and AI-led onboarding simulations.

Elastic

Application

Elastic AI SOC EngineApplication

An AI security-operations layer that correlates alerts from a customer's existing security tools, prioritizes threats and guides response workflows without replacing their SIEM.

Elastic AIOpsApplication

GenAI- and ML-driven capability inside Elastic Observability that automatically detects, diagnoses and helps resolve operational issues, providing recommended actions for SREs.

Elastic LLM ObservabilityApplication

Monitoring capability inside Elastic Observability for generative-AI and agentic applications: performance, cost control, guardrail tracking and reliability for GenAI workloads.

Elastic SecurityApplication

Agentic security-operations platform unifying SIEM, XDR and native automation, with autonomous agents handling detection-to-response workflows and purpose-built AI skills for threat hunting, alert analysis and detection engineering; supports multiple LLMs including on-premises models.

No counterpart

Cisco sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Elastic yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

AI agent

Webex AI AgentAI agent

Autonomous customer-service AI agent that handles inquiries conversationally across voice, SMS, email, chat and messaging apps and escalates to a human agent with context when it cannot resolve.

Hardware

Cisco AI PODsHardware

Pre-validated modular AI infrastructure bundles that combine Cisco UCS servers, NVIDIA GPUs, Nexus 9000 400G/800G switching and management software into single orderable stacks for AI inferencing, training and fine-tuning.

Cisco AI PODs for CollaborationHardware

Turnkey on-premises AI appliance that runs real-time speech transcription for Cisco collaboration deployments locally, for customers with data-sovereignty requirements that rule out cloud AI services.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AIHardware

Cloud-managed full-stack AI cluster sold as hardware plus software plus service, packaging Cisco 6000 and N9300 series switches on an 800GbE back-end fabric, UCS servers with NVIDIA H200 GPUs and BlueField DPUs, optional VAST storage and NVIDIA AI Enterprise under the Hyperfabric cloud controller.

Cisco Silicon OneHardware

Unified programmable networking-silicon architecture for AI, hyperscale, data-centre, service-provider and enterprise routing/switching, spanning five series (G/P/E/K/A) of chip families.

Elastic sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Cisco yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Agent platform

Elastic Agent BuilderAgent platform

A builder for custom AI agents that answer questions and take actions over data indexed in Elasticsearch, using configurable tools, skills and prompts.

Elastic WorkflowsAgent platform

An automation engine that runs both scripted steps and AI agents which reason through investigations and execute response actions against data in Elasticsearch.

Platform

Elastic AI AssistantPlatform

A conversational assistant embedded in Kibana that answers natural-language questions against a customer's own indexed data across Elastic's Observability, Security and Search solutions.

Model API

Elastic Inference ServiceModel API

Hosted inference endpoint that runs Elastic-managed LLMs, the ELSER sparse-embedding model and third-party embedding models for ingest, search and chat without provisioning ML nodes in a customer's own Elasticsearch deployment.