Shares in Splunk surged more than 10% on Monday on a report that Cisco Systems made a takeover offer of more than $20 billion for the data analytics software company.
Cisco (ticker: CSCO) made the offer recently and the companies are not in active talks, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Splunk (ticker: SPLK) stock jumped as much as 17% in after-hours trading following the WSJ report. The stock, which is down 1.05% in the year to date, rose 10.03% in premarket trading on Monday.
Cisco and Splunk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In November last year, San Francisco-based Splunk announced that chief executive Doug Merritt had stepped down from the role after six years following a series of disappointing earnings reports. The company named chairman Graham Smith as interim CEO.
Founded in 2003, Splunk makes software used by companies’ information-technology and security operations to monitor and analyze data. Last year, Splunk announced that private-equity firm Silver Lake was investing $1 billion.
Cisco, which is set to report its latest results this week, has been expanding its software and services. The company already has a data-security partnership with Splunk.
Shares of Cisco slipped 0.83% in premarket on Monday. The stock has dropped 14.94% so far this year.
A takeover of Splunk would have marked Cisco’s biggest acquisition to date, surpassing its 2006 acquisition of cable TV equipment maker Scientific Atlanta for about $7 billion.
