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Cisco Acquires Splunk

splunk.com

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Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#401

Post by steveBK123 »

dharmab wrote: post #380
steveBK123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a shop that got heavily integrated into Splunk for security use cases and then entered a split brain mode of 'well if you need observability we already have Splunk' but also 'hey stop doing so much observability, this thing is expensive!'. So for 5 years time we used it for observability, we were only half-integrated and also trying to get off of it. Great stuff.

Worked on a piece of software which suffered from years of this split brain. It had some logging and some metrics, but the team was told to be economical about observability. This resulted in the software having many blind spots which led to production issues that had to be manually reproduced. When I become responsible for the software I personally overhauled the logging and the team had to work together to rebuild…

this is an area that gets very political with architects, managers and other non-coders having too much of a say

a lot of paralysis on the app dev side as the status quo is easier than fighting for a sensible outcome

its also something that yes, benefits stakeholders... but only on a 2nd/3rd order effect of outage avoidance & remediation.. so theres not a huge reward for doing it really really well in many shops

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#402

Post by solatic »

ec109685 wrote: post #30
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is pagerduty hard to switch off of? It has all kinds of useless and expensive bells and whistles, while the core functionality is a commodity that several companies offer. We moved vendors a few time and it wasn’t that painful.

Who else will call a POTS phone line when there's an alert?

Fact: I'm not going to hear my phone ping in the middle of the night. I'm much more likely to hear my phone ring.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#403

Post by marcus0x62 »

PeterCorless wrote: post #362
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…

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 equ…

I think they had better success integrating hardware companies, but SA — which was pretty much a hardware company — was a pretty big counter-example. I’d also argue the further they strayed from their core market, the worse the results. See also: Flip and Linksys.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#404

Post by fatnoah »

secfirstmd wrote: post #394
aodin wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought 1-day options, so they knew the timing of the announcement.

Yeah true. Pretty hard to figure out that accurately from open sources.

I don't have the knowledge or the patience to find out, but it would be interesting see the overall pattern of 1 day calls on Splunk stock to see if this was an outlier.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#405

Post by sanderjd »

JAlexoid wrote: post #207
sanderjd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually yeah, closer than most. I think it's a somewhat grudging admiration at this point, increasingly so as they do more and more also-ran services. But yeah, this does seem right for the "core" services; ec2, s3, maybe lambda, etc.

AWS business model is to just literally take a popular OSS system and provide it as a service. It was like that from the beginning. That's why there's much less animosity towards AWS, because they just allow you to run your X without the overhead of infra investment.

That is something they do, which I strongly dislike, but it isn't their business model. Their business model is "pay us to run things on our infrastructure instead of building your own, with an option to be billed based on your usage".

The "take a popular OSS system and provide it as a service" thing is a complement to that business model, because they can say "now that you're using our infrastructure, you can also use all these services, and we'll manage it for you, and you'll only have a single vendor to pay". It provides additional value and lock-in to the business model, but isn't the essential part of it.

And no, that isn't where it began. Providing managed services for open source systems was not a part of their initial value proposition. When I started using EC2 (with EBS and S3), one of the tricky things was getting our own database infrastructure to work reliably on EC2.

It's true that RDS was released not long after, and did the "take a popular OSS system" thing, but they really didn't embrace that model until years later. Indeed, I think RDS still seems like second fiddle to their proprietary non-relational DB service.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#406

Post by theogravity »

onei wrote: post #381
nathancahill wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From an outsider perspective, it looks hard to label this as anything but insider trading. Is that the wrong take?

The not-insider-trading possibility:

It's possible someone was selling contracts as a hedge since the tech market has been really bad this week. A market maker was obligated to buy the contracts.

The person selling the contracts gets $22k in premium, and misses out on the pop. The market maker will absolutely exercise the contracts and profit.

(This is coming from someone who sold APPL calls expiring tomorrow for .08 at a high strike today)

Personal opinion: It's insider trading. You'd need a ton of shares to be able to sell $22k worth of contracts at a high strike unless you're doing naked options selling.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#407

Post by sanderjd »

fragmede wrote: post #323
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…

What's interesting is the substance of the complaints of those products. Most of the comments are complaining that Splunk is expensive, but no comments I've seen are complaining that it doesn't work or do as advertised. Same for Oracle DB. It's ungodly expensive, and there are (many) other options out there, but you don't really see complaints that it's not able to perform (after an expensive consultant has had a go…

I think that's also interesting :)

Although "enterprise chat" is also entirely owned by unloved corporate products now.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#408

Post by optimalquiet »

yetanotherloss wrote: post #366
baq wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A question: where did the hobbyist/small business crowd go?

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#409

Post by kabes »

roozbeh18 wrote: post #391
onei wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an outsider perspective, it looks hard to label this as anything but insider trading. Is that the wrong take?

Easy for sec to identify affiliation to Splunk for this call.

What's the chance the sec will go after this? I guess they don't have the capacity to go after all these cases, even the clear cut ones
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