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Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

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Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#91

Post by QuinnyPig »

tedivm wrote: post #6

Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave o…

Clearly you misunderstood them; they were going to send a venomous snake to your house and not even charge you for it.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#92

Post by codemac »

steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

It's a classic "dev tooling" play that struggles in downturns.

- Company wants to save money, tells team they're cancelling service that costs them $20k/month to observe their production env.

- Dev team starts building small parts they need anyways, chews up significant engineering resources.

- Company now pays more for highly custom solution no one can compete with.

If the company ends up being successful, they'll probably point to all their custom stuff as why. If they end up failing they'll talk about all the boondoggles they went on. This replays so much.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#93

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lucidguppy wrote: post #83

M&A is noncompetitive and should either be prohibited or heavily taxed. Create a subsidiary? Fine... Buy up all the tadpoles so you don't have to deal with frogs? Noncompetitive...

I don't totally disagree but the consequence would be 80% of VC investment vanishing overnight and a whole class of founders just not bothering.

The chance of a successful IPO is faaaaar less than "bigcorp wants you to go away, so here's some $$"

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#94

Post by kevinmchugh »

dangus wrote: post #19
tedivm wrote: post #6

Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave o…

Worst case scenario? That seems unlikely. Worst case scenario would be employee stock options and RSU grants remaining or becoming worthless, like in the case of a private company that never gains enough traction to exit or exits at a low valuation. Usually in a public acquisition, shares are purchased at a price premium. E.g., many Twitter employees got to cash out at a stock price well above the value of the compan…

Yes, I was part of the Kenna acquisition and got my equity paid out. That was nice.

I've also had a company get acquired by private equity. I got nothing for my shares and they shut the team (and the product) down within two years.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#95

Post by postexitus »

eigenvalue wrote: post #5
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get to peak into a few different financial services org's IT strategies (and where infosec overlaps) and in every org I have seen ruthless cutting (hundreds of millions of dollars in one case) if there is any hint of overlap or the ability to go without. Have also seen aggressively playing VARs/reseller off of each other to drive down cost. I would not want to be someone attempting to GTM in this space right now un…

Yes, and Splunk is likely the most overpriced offering across all vendors, both in terms of absolute cost and in in terms of how overpriced it is relative to how good it is. So easy to see how it would be on the chopping block.

doubts in datadog

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#96

Post by sireat »

foobiekr wrote: post #54
sireat wrote: post #17

I am still amazed how quickly Cisco destroyed Flip from 2009 to 2011 - basically 590Million down the drain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video Sure you could argue that by 2011 Flip was on the way out as phones were taking over, but there was plenty of room to pivot and plenty of good will. Had a relative whose company was to be bought by Cisco but thankfully Flip debacle destroyed that deal.

Flip basically shows up at the same time the iPhone got video. They were dead already and only Cisco didn’t realize it.

Oh Flip was dead in the long run no question about it. It was not only iPhone but Android phones that finally got good enough video quality.

It is just that Cisco cut their losses extremely early. There were still 2-5 years left where Flip could have been profitable.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#97

Post by technick »

It would be cool if there were laws or something requiring the acquiring company to keep all employees on the payroll at their pay rate when the acquisition occurred, for a minimum of a 18-24 months. Sadly the majority of our politicians are glorified fluffers for big corporations, so nothing like this would ever happen.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#98

Post by postexitus »

asfasfo wrote: post #86
tiffanyh wrote: post #61

CFO's will follow suit and Wallstreet will begin to expect tech to make cuts ... It's getting noticed that Twitter/X reduced it's staff by 80%, and also reduced it's cloud spend by 60% ... and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Some might argue that Twitter/X has been able to innovate faster as a result. Now I'm not suggesting that FANG is going to layoff 80% overnight. But I wouldn't be surpris…

> and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Their revenue has halved. That's pretty material.

Not if the revenue that disappeared was unwanted revenue.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#99

Post by geodel »

steveBK123 wrote: post #58
specialp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance. Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now…

Grumpy old developer devils advocate voice: Why does a lot of the modern tech stack seem designed to make you have to pay for a bunch of other SaaS? Like containers/serverless was supposed to mean "cattle not pets" and it autoscales and autoheals and blah blah blah. And then we break everything into micro services and we need to pay for some SaaS to orchestrate it, and another SaaS to observe/monitor it, and another…

These questions are heresies. Just had meeting where discussion was whether system can handle additional 8tps (not 8k tps!) load or they need to stagger it.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#100

Post by steveBK123 »

codemac wrote: post #92
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

It's a classic "dev tooling" play that struggles in downturns. - Company wants to save money, tells team they're cancelling service that costs them $20k/month to observe their production env. - Dev team starts building small parts they need anyways, chews up significant engineering resources. - Company now pays more for highly custom solution no one can compete with. If the company ends up being successful, they'll p…

Argument to be made that it may be a better outcome anyway. Custom solution no one can compete with. Engineers usually have some wiggle room to build things they find interesting & useful in their 10% time.

You build the parts that are most urgent as they come up..

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