Does anyone have an example of an acquisition where the products of the acquired company then became better?
Heroku. Better until it wasn't...
Cisco Acquires Splunk
171–180 of 525 posts
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple Weather may be better, but DarkSky is gone and it has not included all the features it used to have, such as hourly rain probability for any day.
Oddly enough this is the one reason why I don't use Apple Weather. I live in Texas - if you don't have covered parking you will inevitably get hail damage. The 1-2 days per week I go into the office I have to check Accuweather beforehand. Precipitation probability is the most important thing in a weather app to me.
Apple Weather developers in the Bay don't really know or care about your Southern hail or wind storms. R.I.P. Dark Sky. Sorry.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#173Earlier 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…
stripe, cloudflare (ish), github
Cloudflare's verify human challenge screen is so intrusive and frustrating that it will cost them their credibility IMHO, if it hasn't already. Some part of me feels that a properly designed cache should be able to handle any level of abusive traffic like a p2p cache would, and if it can't, then what are we all doing?
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#174To 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 the perfect fit for Cisco
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SA made set top boxes along with a bunch of back-end infrastructure to make them work. It was an acquisition that made sense on paper -- Cisco did (does) a lot of business with service providers, they make cable modem termination systems (the headend devices that handle cable modem connectivity,) had dabbled in IP video, so it was a natural evolution to make and sell the rest of the gear you'd need to operate a cable-based service provider. I don't think they were counting on how rapidly Internet streaming would take over, but in any case, the acquisition didn't work out so well and last I heard they had divested it.
One other thing that I think feeds into these acquisition mishaps is that Cisco has, in my opinion, consistently over-estimated how much intelligence would be needed (or wanted) in the core network. In their view, intelligent network services = expensive network devices = revenue for Cisco. I think what the Internet specifically and IP in general, as well as the evolution of LAN technologies over time have proven is that when it comes to the core network, simple is almost always better and intelligence should move to the edge, where innovation can happen quicker and where services can be implemented in software.
As an example, at one point they had what was, essentially, a middleware system (like Websphere,) which they called Application Oriented Networking. The idea was you would deploy these on your network gear, throughout your network, and it would provide message routing and translation services. They had a whole "architecture" built for it, called Services Oriented Network Architecture[0]. I don't think the people who built it really understood that it provided no real advantage over a cluster of middleware/ESB/MQ servers in a data center and that nobody was going to pay a huge premium to build that capability in their IP routers.
0 - https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/global/it_it/solutions/ent/tecno...
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#176To 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…
This was the sweet spot for the ELK stack really. You could get the main functionality that Splunk had and self manage it (or run out of a Cloud more recently) and scale to whatever you wanted to.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#177Earlier 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…
great point
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#178I hated Splunk so much that I spent a couple days a few months ago writing a single 1200 line python script that does absolutely everything I need in terms of automatic log collection, ingestion, and analysis from a fleet of cloud instances. It pulls in all the log lines, enriches them with useful metadata like the IP address of the instance, the machine name, the log source, the datetime, etc. and stores it all in S…
There's quite a few log ingestion programs that can do all that for you. Did you have some type of specialized log that one of the various logging tools couldn't handle for some reason? It sounds like you recreated the ELK stack lol.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#179> Someone at Cisco did the math on how much a license would cost and some snarky soul, kin to my own, said "Are we sure it wouldn't be cheaper to buy Splunk?"
That's from a friend of mine in a tech chat.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Graylog looks like a good competitor. Certainly won't scale as well, but I've had good experience with it.
The thing that will totally replace splunk (and elastic and snowflake and likely several other whole ecosystems) is some random thing pouring data into clickhouse.
I am nervous about how clickhouse is going to monetize, whenever they decide to turn on the revenue spigot.