Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cisco Acquires Splunk

splunk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 525 posts

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#131

Post by sanderjd »

davinci123 wrote: post #127
sanderjd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not actually dissonant! HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading. And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc. What is interes…

agreed, i will qualify it more as SV developers which is like maybe 20-30% of the dev population?

Yes, for sure.

But I don't think there's really a great place to get a zeitgeist of the rest of the population. I think they're mostly doing other stuff rather than talking about technology on internet forums. (They're smarter than us.)

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#133

Post by marcus0x62 »

nosequel wrote: post #76
yanellena wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cisco isn't exactly known for their software innovation in the upper stacks I spend most of my day managing Meraki networks and some of that is seriously powerful and innovative.

They bought Meraki.

Most of Cisco's current product suite came via acquisitions[0]. The difference with Meraki, compared to the typical Cisco acquisition, is how independently they were allowed to operate. WebEx was a similar story. Cisco would tell you that acquisition is a core competency of theirs[1], but having worked there for 8 years (including during the WebEx and Meraki acquisitions,) I'd say their track record is far more spotty. A few successes like Meraki, a bunch of mediocre examples and a few really bad ones, like Scientific Atlanta.

0 - Even switching originally came to Cisco via a whole series of acquisitions in the 90s. You could argue -- and Stanford certainly did -- that routing was an acquisition of sorts, as well.

1 - Their M&A guy even wrote a book about it, called Doing Both, which purported to explain how Cisco achieved so many of their goals by refusing to make false "either/or" decisions. Ironically, almost every example in the book was something that Cisco is spectacularly bad at.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#134

Post by silverfox17 »

KomoD wrote: post #119
bane wrote: post #108

To pile onto the Splunk "love" going on here. Splunk is one of those systems that's too "powerful" for small use-cases, but too expensive for the ones it's really designed for. Anecdote, I once worked with a client that really wanted to get Splunk, but produced so much network traffic that the discounted annual costs were more than the entire budget for the rest of the organization combined. That's staff, the buildin…

> That's staff, the building, equipment, power, water, everything...the estimated Splunk cost was more than that. Wow, it's THAT expensive?

You can't really make an informed decision without knowing how much data they were moving. For it to be that expensive, you'd need to be moving a ludicrous amount of data, and you can always parse data down to the required fields before indexing, which saves on licensing costs.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#135

Post by reducesuffering »

sanderjd wrote: post #115
davinci123 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you read Hacker News thread - every single one of them feels like the world is falling apart. Splunk is a dud or so everyone here thinks: https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-stro...

This is not actually dissonant! HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading. And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc. What is interes…

> that are both profitable and mostly admired

AWS?

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#136

Post by ak217 »

I haven't used Splunk in a number of years due to its cost. Splunk seems like a good pairing for Cisco - it's complementary to its other offerings to less price sensitive orgs, like Meraki.

I've used several Splunk competitors (Sumo Logic, Datadog, etc.) that all have various strengths but suffer from a lesser version of Splunk's problem (once you're locked in and up for renewal, watch out). I also tried some ELK-based stuff, which just plain sucked.

The one thing that hasn't sucked is AWS CloudWatch Logs, after they added Insights (a log query engine). It has reasonable pricing and works really well if you're on AWS.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#137

Post by haxxorfreak »

aeonik wrote: post #9
wittekm wrote: post #4

Genuinely surprised anybody would acquire Splunk in 2023. Whenever you hear about Splunk from security engineers, they're actively trying to get off it (edit: yes, primarily because of cost). Better, next-gen SIEMs are either here or around the corner.

Which ones do you recommend? Every one I have tried hasn't really given me the same flexibility as Splunk, most seem to miss the core part of what makes Splunk cool. Though I'd definitely like to see Splunk improve their design.

Microsoft is doing a surprisingly good job with their Sentinel SIEM. The sweetener is they give you free ingestion on most of your Office 365/Azure logs which can add up if you’re shipping out to another platform.

Makes it attractive for enterprises already on their platform and they throw in discounts for E5 license tier customers as well (gotta keep pushing the “give us everything or pay way more for single feature licenses”).

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#138

Post by pramodbiligiri »

bane wrote: post #108

To pile onto the Splunk "love" going on here. Splunk is one of those systems that's too "powerful" for small use-cases, but too expensive for the ones it's really designed for. Anecdote, I once worked with a client that really wanted to get Splunk, but produced so much network traffic that the discounted annual costs were more than the entire budget for the rest of the organization combined. That's staff, the buildin…

I remember this talk about pricing strategy by one of their employees in a conference many years back (2017) - https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/value-based-pricing-s.... What I took away from that talk was that pricing can be unintuitive, for both the people setting it and buying it.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#140

Post by mschuster91 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #120
pantulis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better -because it's easier to scale- to sell a single 1M$ license than selling a thousand 1000$ licenses.

That's fine as long as your product stays competitive. But as you lose the smaller and middle-range customers, you're also missing on the trends of the market, while getting shaken up by the big players you can't afford to say no to. If one of your whales needs feature Y, no matter how exotic you think it could be, you'll have to implement Y, bloating your product for the rest of your clients. And while you're doing…

> And while you're doing that, smaller competitors slowly creep up, eating up the bottom of you market, until you're stuck in a niche.

So what, milking mega enterprise for ossified products is a decently profitable niche. IBM, SAP, that huge American company powering a lot of hospital IT, Cisco itself...

Post reply on HN