Splunk is already very expensive to be honest, with their policy of charging based on indexed logs (hit by searches) as opposed to used logs, and the necessity for a lot of logs to be indexed for 'in case something breaks '. Bit of hearsay there - while I don't work for the team that manages indexing, I have had quite a few conversations with our internal team.

I was surprised we were moving from splunk to a lesser known proprietary competitor (we tried and gave up on elasticsearch years ago). Splunk is much more powerful for power users , but the cost of the alternative was 7-10 times less, and most users didn't unfortunately use splunk power user functionality to justify using it over the competitor.

Being a power user with lots of dashboards, my team still uses splunk for now, and I have background conversations to make sure we don't lose it, I think Cisco would lose out if they jacked up prices, I think they'd add value to their infrastructure offerings using splunk as an additional value add perhaps?