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Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

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Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#51

Post by pm90 »

dehrmann wrote: post #49
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

> what do people think of the "observability" space from here? I don't think it's cut entirely, but when you're looking at your cloud spend, it's got a target painted on it. It doesn't produce revenue on its own, so people will ask a lot of "do we really need X" or "can we lower retention."

100%. Obs tools are still needed for debugging, incident recovery and just being able to make better products, but there is a lot of optimization going on.

The market still does seem big. Datadog is needlessly very expensive and the experience is just ok.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#52

Post by vkou »

chii wrote: post #36
tedivm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

> an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically. at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

If behaving ethically didn't cost anything, everyone would do it.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#53

Post by jacobr1 »

keiferkif wrote: post #41
BobbyJo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics an morals have financial upside, for people and groups of people (companies). For instance, do to their past behavior, and its publicity, Cisco is likely to lose many more competent employees during an acquisition than had they behaved otherwise.

I would say that a lack of ethics has more financial upside

There are probably several local maxima on the distribution curve. At some point having dogmatic, extreme ethics probably hampers getting everything down, and the worst, most cartoonishly evil company also is leaving money on the table. In the less extreme, I think you probably have three schelling points. 1) High-Integrity companies that promote and use the culture of ethics to attract customers and employees. It probably is industry specific if this works. 2) You have "ethics agnostic", but legal" companies that just do focus on near-term profit maximizations and while they may have individuals trying to make ethical choices, the organizational structure won't reward that outside of the whatever profit it generates. Non ethical behavior that gets bad press or crosses idealogical lines, gets dropped fast if not profitable and arbitrarily depending on leadership otherwise. 3) Then you have companies covering up illegal/fraudulent issues, where the incentives are to double-down and reinforce the behavior.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#54

Post by foobiekr »

sireat wrote: post #17

I am still amazed how quickly Cisco destroyed Flip from 2009 to 2011 - basically 590Million down the drain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video Sure you could argue that by 2011 Flip was on the way out as phones were taking over, but there was plenty of room to pivot and plenty of good will. Had a relative whose company was to be bought by Cisco but thankfully Flip debacle destroyed that deal.

Flip basically shows up at the same time the iPhone got video. They were dead already and only Cisco didn’t realize it.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#55

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chii wrote: post #36
tedivm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

> an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically. at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

> at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins

This is wildly oversimplifying. For example, it theoretically rules out principle-agent problems.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#56

Post by marcosdumay »

orochimaaru wrote: post #7
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

It’s hard to get application performance monitoring (APM) tools using FOSS because of the complexity of writing libraries. You could ideally work most things with FOSS. Use opentelemtry extensions to a time dries DB of your choice. Use elk or opensearch for logs, osquery for Linux, native cloud monitoring tools that come out of the box, etc. Problem is it takes a lot of setup and maintenance. It can bite you back in…

Or you can spending a day or two creating enough things to track the "end to end" numbers and debug problems the hard way when they appear.

Modern APM is completely out of proportion, and most people that use it do absolutely not get enough benefit for paying for those systems. My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes that survive as a meme on the high-management minds and don't survive touching the ground.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#57

Post by marcosdumay »

specialp wrote: post #14
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance. Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now…

SIEM like in SolarWinds?

Yeah, I imagine insure companies still require this.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#58

Post by steveBK123 »

specialp wrote: post #14
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance. Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now…

Grumpy old developer devils advocate voice: Why does a lot of the modern tech stack seem designed to make you have to pay for a bunch of other SaaS?

Like containers/serverless was supposed to mean "cattle not pets" and it autoscales and autoheals and blah blah blah. And then we break everything into micro services and we need to pay for some SaaS to orchestrate it, and another SaaS to observe/monitor it, and another SaaS to...

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#59

Post by jacobr1 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #32
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.

The savings only really works at scale though right. I've worked in plenty of engineering departments with 200 engineers and essentially 5 operators. You need bare minimum 3 of them for holidays/timezones and key man risk reasons. So you can maybe help a 200 person org save 0.5-1% of their lower paid staff? Is your bill + engineering integration costs going to be less than $200-400k/year?

Depends on how much the non-operators are using the data. In SaaS companies it is common for the engineering teams to own the performance of their sub-systems, which entails the need for instrumentation, monitoring, dashboards, alerting and investigative tooling. The trend has been to combine things like logs, distributed tracing, APM, error collection and general metrics collection into the same toolset so that you can more easily cross-coordinate between them when tracking down what is happening in a large system. microservices architecture and "devops" make this a much bigger thing requiring every team to take on some aspect of operational capability.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#60

Post by downrightmike »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #16

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same pl…

Bungie just did 8%
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