What does this mean for people who are currently working for Splunk?
Are acquisitions often followed by layoffs?
In my head, layoffs tend to happen BEFORE acquisitions.
Cisco Acquires Splunk
411–420 of 525 posts
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#412Earlier 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
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 $100's a month. That said, every other product in this space is crap. I'm not sure why thou…
what's your take on xMatters?
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#413Wow - I guess I'm both surprised and completely unsurprised. Surprised because Splunk is a pretty big pill to swallow. Unsurprised because they've obviously been interested in the space for a long time (they attempted to acquire Datadog and got shot down). https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/technology/cisco-r... Good luck Splunk folks - Cisco isn't exactly known for their software innovation in the upper stack…
Someone wasn't surprised: https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1704870849831125446?s=20
They better be in Congress, or else they're gonna be in big trouble.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
they price-out medium customers so mind-share decreases
It's better -because it's easier to scale- to sell a single 1M$ license than selling a thousand 1000$ licenses.
I completely disagree with both the spirit of the comment as well as the particular strawman presented.
It is not better at all, by almost any metric other than overhead. Losing 1 of 1000 customers @ $1000 is very different than 1 of 1 customer @ $1M. One is easy to manage, the other leaves you dead in the water. In addition, you'd start to make concessions/unnatural decisions because you're so lopsided in diversity. And you're going to get completely fucked at renewal time. and, and and..
Good M&A teams know this. They build a risk profile when revenue is a component of the acquisition. The acquiring party gets to learn a lot about the fundamentals when putting deals together and it's all factored in.
To put it simply: having a healthy balance of revenue from multiple sources is a premium. Those are opportunities to advance your relationship and grow. Too many eggs in too few baskets are major red flags that will have your revenue working against you.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cisco isn't exactly known for their software innovation in the upper stacks I spend most of my day managing Meraki networks and some of that is seriously powerful and innovative.
They bought Meraki.
> They bought Meraki.
and they're buying Splunk, so if the concern is continued innovation at the upper levels of the stack...
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Depending on the team, a phone tree in twilio could do the trick, with calls made down the list if people do not pick up for escalation.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an outsider perspective, it looks hard to label this as anything but insider trading. Is that the wrong take?
Matt Levine's money stuff offered the hypothesis that it could just be normal gambling. But, it's almost definitely insider trading, and either way, someone will definitely be getting an SEC visit.
They also directly broke Levine's second rule of insider trading.
2. Don’t do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets [0]
[0]: lawsofinsidertrading.com
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#418$28 billion - $157 a share Splunk shares were trading at $119.59, so ~31% premium. Cisco lost 4% in premarket trading.
$28 BILLION? Splunk???? my god
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#419Genuinely surprised anybody would acquire Splunk in 2023. Whenever you hear about Splunk from security engineers, they're actively trying to get off it (edit: yes, primarily because of cost). Better, next-gen SIEMs are either here or around the corner.
So Splunk is too expensive and there are better products and people keep paying. This doesn't really add up.
Inertia can be a strong force in organizations. In good times and without external pressures, it can be easier to keep the status quo.
Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I was wondering about when it comes to this acquisition. Can Cisco make Splunk even more expensive? I have faith they can, I know for many folks, Splunk tops the leaderboards when it comes to spend.
More expensive and less innovative.
AppDynamics is the one thing I've ever used where the auto-tuning actually worked. Wish I could still use it.