Cisco Acquires Splunk • Hacker News Board

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#351

Post by flounder3 » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #303

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...

It's pretty wild to read some of these comments. Splunk is one of the best products I've ever used, bar none. The price is another matter (it's bloody expensive, no doubt about it), but the tool is amazing. I think all the people talking about how much it sucks and can be easily replaced are so far off base they aren't even in the stadium.

You've clearly never run it at scale nor have you migrated between Enterprise (on-prem) and Splunk Cloud at scale. Managing .conf files and eliminating intermediate IDM logic was absolutely not "amazing."

https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Plat...

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#352

Post by baq » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

radiator wrote: post #325

baq wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is your business' core competency building a distributed grep or actually selling useful stuff?

Well, according to what people write in this thread, a distributed grep or some other way to organize a decent central logging system might be a necessary part of the core competency. Because if they buy splunk instead, they might go bankrupt.

You don’t have to be splunk to make money out of distributed grep but it turns out to not be that easy… as proven by the fact that there are quite a few competitors

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#353

Post by prepend » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

kbutler wrote: post #214

throwawaymqsh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All technical workarounds for bad pricing.

Processing that amount of data is going to be expensive, regardless.

I think it’s a situation where splunk doesn’t have a motivation to reduce cost as they can charge a lot and customers pay.

So it doesn’t need to be expensive, naturally, it just is.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#354

Post by aiwv » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

davidu wrote: post #20

projectileboy wrote: post #17

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

Meraki and OpenDNS both became better post acquisition, and in both cases I’d say it was because Cisco let them continue to maintain a lot of control, the leaders stayed around, and the majority of the engineering teams did, too. Cisco has a long list of successful acquisitions. The release says Gary will report to Chuck directly, which is a strong sign Chuck will make sure Splunk succeeds. (nb, I was CEO of OpenDNS)

Like you said, Meraki got better because the core team, including engineering and sales as well as the founders, stuck around for about two years. Things did go significantly downhill once the founders left but by that point the company was already so successful that the exodus of great people that followed their departure probably didn't even impact their bottom line that much. I will say that I personally found working for a Cisco subsidiary pretty terrible relative to working for a startup but, hey, the checks cleared.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#355

Post by prepend » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #158

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.

It works too well for Oracle.

Oracle isn’t just expensive, it also has to be technically horrible but still operational.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#356

Post by hunter-gatherer » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

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…

I'm in a fortune 100 and we are looking at replacing splunk for sentinel because of cost of splunk. I don't use either in my day to day and have no horse in the race, but if my company is doing it then the cost of splunk must not be trivial.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#357

Post by manvillej » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

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...

Epic, ServiceNow, Workday,

Basically every ERP technology every invented.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#358

Post by prepend » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #53

strunz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DarkSky seems to be a big exception to this

I disagree. Apple Weather has become an amazing app since the DarkSky acquisition. I especially like the hourly charts.

Apple Weather is better, but not as good as DarkSky. And DarkSky is gone.

It’s one of the few apps I bought and it’s frustrating that Apple bought them, picked a few features, killed the rest, and shut everything down.

I’m not even complaining about killing the api, that makes sense since Apple doesn’t care about this.

But Apple Weather’s maps don’t work as well, the precipitation views aren’t as detailed, the user supplied precipitation reports are gone. It just does different things.

But, yes, Apple Weather is now a better app because the acquisition.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#359

Post by prepend » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #122

strunz wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

From my perspective as an Apple Weather user, it went from basic and barebones to feature-packed almost overnight. The cost also went down. DarkSky was $4. I wasn't ever willing to pay for a weather app. I see hourly rain predictability for today, and for future days there are hourly precipitation charts in inches. I can't imagine that precipitation beyond the current day on an hourly basis has any chance of being ac…

> The cost also went down. DarkSky was $4. I wasn't ever willing to pay for a weather app.

I was the same way. Then I broke down and paid the $5. Best app purchase I ever made. One time fee and used it for years. I wish there were more apps like this.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#360

Post by BatFastard » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #152

marcus0x62 wrote: post #133

Earlier 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.

I worked at Scientific Atlanta in the 90s, designing stealth radar systems. Some very cool tech they developed. They also did a lot of satellite comms. And a lot of telecom tech.