Gary Steele

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Splunk

Search every verified Gary Steele interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Gary Steele, President, CEO, and Director of Splunk, has been focused on the company's integration with Cisco following its acquisition, emphasizing the combined entity's role in digital resilience. At the Cisco Partner Summit in November 2024, Steele stated that organizations must keep systems running to serve customers, noting that "the cost of downtime's insane." He also said there will be "more investment in security" as digital footprints grow, calling security a "massive opportunity" that "creates billions of dollars of economic opportunity." In a January 2025 interview, Steele attributed the swift regulatory approval of the Cisco-Splunk deal to a lack of product overlap and the companies' ability to "do a lot for customers from a cyber perspective." Steele has also addressed the cybersecurity landscape and the impact of AI. In December 2024, he said that "the cyber threat actors continue to up their game" and that "AI is a great advancement for everyone, but it's also an advancement for threat actors," predicting that the situation will "get worse, not better" in 2024. He noted that cyber budgets will likely increase due to new SEC rules requiring public companies to report material breaches within four days. At Splunk's .conf24 in June 2024, Steele described AI as "probably the most transformative technology that we will see in our lifetimes" and stated that the company's mission is "delivering digital resilience across your entire digital footprint."