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Cisco Acquires Splunk

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Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#361

Post by prepend »

missedthecue wrote: post #165
projectileboy wrote: post #17

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

There are exception, but Microsoft seems pretty good at this. GitHub, Minecraft... Skype got a lot better for me in terms of reliability after the acquisition too, of course they've been competed away by other voips like Facetime and Whatsapp these days. LinkedIn is better than ever for finding a job, or advertising a job, even though lots of people here don't like it because of the LinkedIn poasting culture.

> Minecraft

Is so much worse under Microsoft. As a parent, it’s funny how much Microsoft hate is in the house because the Minecraft fuckery. They made new versions, migrated accounts, added micro purchases, made mods harder.

My 5-year-old had a Mojang account and could download and install Minecraft. Migrating to a Microsoft account was very hard and took multiple attempts and my direct help. And for some reasons “sucks.”

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#362

Post by PeterCorless »

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…

I sat in on the all Cisco acquisitions teams from c. 1994 - 1999. Even during that heyday there were awesome acquisitions that took off and others that went nowhere. Cisco was historically always better at hardware acquisitions than pure-play software. It would often kill the software products entirely — Internet Junction, TGV, Precept come to mind.

The one other rule that John Chambers lived by was "no merger of equals." It was always about a big fish swallowing a smaller one. Cisco's market cap is an order of magnitude greater than Splunk's, but this is as close to breaking that Chambers Rule of Acquisitions as anything they've done to date.

Here's the full history of Cisco acquisitions. Maybe someone with more M&A lore would scorecard it to see which were dreams and which were duds.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-offic...

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#363

Post by singingfish »

xwolfi wrote: post #85
dangus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are medium-sized customers valuable to Splunk? In sales we call this "Ideal Customer Profile." Why do I want a customer with less money to spend if I have a product with enough capability for the gigantic money-is-no-object customers?

I work in a 100+ year old giga bank, systemic in the country it comes from, in their Hong Kong investment bank branch. We loved Splunk, we invested quite a bit in it both for technical monitoring and business intelligence. After a while the price went so high we cut it all, moved to kdb/tableau/elk/whatever crappier system that cost less. Money is ALWAYS an object and Splunk makes sure to dig a hole deep enough for e…

We moved a business from splunk to ELK a couple of years ago. The actual work of doing so took less than a day. The maintenance processes changed, and some things are not as good. But aside from the beefy machine we run ELK on it costs next to nothing, and is very reliable.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#366

Post by yetanotherloss »

baq wrote: post #344
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Splunk doesn't get that. There are no hobbyist/prosumer splunk installations. Zero. Nada. Not true. I ran a free (legit!) Splunk instance in my homelab for years. It's been several years since I shut the homelab down, so I couldn't tell you if they still have hobbyist licensing, but they certainly had it in the past.

I’ll call you an unicorn :) I know they have a free license for super small deployments but haven’t heard of anyone actually using it.

It was at one point usable but they drove off the hobbyist/small business crowd a long time ago. We do some work setting up elasticsearch tools that aggregate and filter data later sent to central splunk purely to affect a large reduction in license costs.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#367

Post by unmole »

trallnag wrote: post #327
bufferoverflow wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% that's insider trading.

Will there be consequences?

Buying short dated far out of the money options is a guaranteed way to get caught. If this actually was insider trading, there are probably a bunch of SEC officials suffering from high-five induced palm injuries.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#368

Post by Corrado »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #14
willk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re trying to get off of it because it is so freaking expensive.

I used Splunk at a previous job and that’s one of my few/only complaints with it. Great tool but extremely expensive for what you get. Datadog is the same way as well as Pagerduty. There’s not enough competition in these spaces

That's super true of PagerDuty. It's a pretty good product and cheap when you only have a few people on it. However, the jump from the basic license to the next tier is HUGE and any add-ons you might need (ie. webhook triggers) bump the price up even more. Just having a simple monitoring solution with >10 people could cost you $100's a month.

That said, every other product in this space is crap. I'm not sure why though. This seems like a pretty good market for disruption. Maybe there is some hidden "problem" that I don't know about.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#369

Post by pr10 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#370

Post by nathancahill »

tw04 wrote: post #11

Wow - I guess I'm both surprised and completely unsurprised. Surprised because Splunk is a pretty big pill to swallow. Unsurprised because they've obviously been interested in the space for a long time (they attempted to acquire Datadog and got shot down). https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/technology/cisco-r... Good luck Splunk folks - Cisco isn't exactly known for their software innovation in the upper stack…

Someone wasn't surprised: https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1704870849831125446?s=20
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