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Cisco Acquires Splunk

splunk.com

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Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#151

Post by mschuster91 »

jve wrote: post #19
projectileboy wrote: post #17

Does anyone have an example of an acquisition where the products of the acquired company then became better?

GitHub I'm sure there are tons of other, lesser known acquisitions... looking at what Apple acquires - seems relevant to be integrated into their products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Oh, wow, they even acquired Intel smartphone modem business at 2019 and other Semiconductor businesses.

> Oh, wow, they even acquired Intel smartphone modem business at 2019 and other Semiconductor businesses.

Was the easiest way to put some fire under Qualcomm's arse, RF modems, batteries and displays are the only things Apple doesn't have under their direct control - but for batteries and displays they at least have a selection of competing suppliers. With modems, they're stuck at whatever crap Qualcomm delivers.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#152

Post by TylerE »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #133
nosequel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spott…

Scientific Atlanta… there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Didn’t they use to make crappy cable boxes, back when cable TV meant a box that connected to the antenna input via coax.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#153

Post by poobear22 »

swader999 wrote: post #114
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…

Similar problems with effectively modeling weather or finding the very smallest of things, there isn't enough compute power or even energy in the universe.

Splunk was so expensive we could not use it to monitor our servers used for weather modeling. Seriously. The log files generated were at times too voluminous and you frequently blew thru your bandwidth cap.

Great product, but completely useless utility value with financial considerations for environments with high volume.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#155

Post by hermanradtke »

mschuster91 wrote: post #140
makeitdouble wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> that huge American company powering a lot of hospital IT

Epic

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#156

Post by tkahnoski »

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…

Worked at a medium size enterprise and was trying to get some detailed performance metrics with a legacy tech stack that didn't have a drop-in APM soluion. This was in the age of graphite which was great for aggregating metrics cheap but not getting detail.

Splunk was used by a much larger product (easily 10x our scale) for monitoring events so there was no red tape to start using it.

After launching the detailed instrumentation (1 structured log event per HTTP request with a breakout of database/service activity) I was able to gain all of the insight needed and build a simple user/url lookup dashboard page to help other engineers see what was going on. We went from being mostly blind to almost full visibility in less than two weeks.

The downside was, we increased our billable Splunk usage by 50% since we were capturing so much more data per log event than the other product just consuming standard IIS/Apache logs.

That type of flexibility was totally worth it. Due to some acquisition shenanigans we broke off from that group and wound up on ELK stack which didn't perform quite as well, but was still usable with the same data. In today's day and age we could have just built an OpenTelemtry library.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#157

Post by AdamN »

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…

Sampling via just enabling it for some hosts/partitions is one solution (if you're producing 100M entries a day ... probably could just grab 1/100 of those for parsing).

Another solution is pre-processing (serial dupes are not forwarded).

Another solution is heavily reduced logging (ERR or higher only on prod hosts).

These can be used together and be very helpful.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#158

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

Sounds like something Oracle would love.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#160

Post by glonq »

I loved the hell out of splunk until they priced themselves out of the stratosphere.

I know a splunk employee (splunker?); hopefully she somehow gets rich(er) as part of this deal.

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