Cisco Made $20 Billion-Plus Takeover Offer For Splunk (reuters.com) 25
Network gear maker Cisco Systems has made a takeover offer worth more than $20 billion for software maker Splunk, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Reuters reports: The offer was made recently and the companies are not in active talks, the newspaper said, citing some of the sources. In November last year, San Francisco-based Splunk announced Doug Merritt has stepped down as its chief executive officer (CEO) and that the company's chair, Graham Smith, would be the interim CEO. Founded in 2003, the software solutions provider has a market capitalisation of $18.2 billion, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.
there goes that option (Score:2)
Sorry Cisco cannot support you.
Re: (Score:3)
Managing alert volume from logs. This is considered a solution to "alert fatigue" for security companies. Tying alerts together and applying more logic to aggregate events. Also device management say setting thresholds on hardware errors letting a single read error on a HD be ignored but alerting to change the drive after say 5 errors in a week.
Re: (Score:1)
Splunk was one of the first "cloud" logging systems, but they seemed to have dropped off the radar recently. I don't know if it's because they stopped advertising, or if it's because they've been eclipsed by other companies.
Re: there goes that option (Score:3)
Funny how these big companies buy off smaller ones for vast sums only for them to be killed off (the smaller ones, that is). I see no other reason than stock manipulation.
Remember when compaq bought off a perfectly fine digital and killed of alpha? Or oracle when they bought sun and killed off pretty much everything sun made. Or when oracle bought atg and killed of a perfectly fine app server.
These things never get better, they only get killed off. So plan for splunk to die a horrible death in the coming ye
Re: (Score:3)
I see no other reason than stock manipulation.
It's incompetence.
One of the theories of "superior" management is that a competent manager can recognize an opportunity, try to build/buy a product, then if it doesn't work quickly kill it. In that way, they are able to keep the "winners" and let go of the losers without them dragging things down too much. They teach this in business schools.
In practice it is only a mediocre strategy.
big companiese have horrible management (Score:1)
What people don't get is that giant companies don't make money because they are full of the best and brightest, they make money because they are big. They can leverage monopolies to make new products money profitable overnight or to support struggling businesses, and they have vast pools of capital and talent and a worldwide salesforce. When Apple announced it was starting in-App Store ads and expected to take $25 billion a year that was a perfect example of how this works. Or Microsoft's continued efforts
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In the Oracle-Sun case, I believe it is incompetence. The conversation between their lawyers went like this:
Os Ls: So this Java thing, is it valuable?
Ss Ls: Fer sure!!
Os Ls: And companies will pay Big Money to use it.
Ss Ls: (looking at each other in disbelief, turn to the other's lawyers, tears welling in their eye). Oh yes, Big Money, Big Money.
Later at Sun HQ:
Ss Ls: You'll never guess what we did, we sold them on Java being a money maker.
McNealy: Bwahahahahahaha....you made my whole day. I guess we aren't
Re: (Score:1)
Its probably because they have been outclassed by homegrown solutions as their prices went through the roof for large data needs. They are ok for smaller operations but doing queries is just so dog slow. Both my team and many of the partner companies i work with on a big open source project that large companies use have all switched to homegrown solutions based around clickhouse which is orders of magnitude faster and more performant, all while being much much cheaper
This seems like a bad bet to me, all it
Re: there goes that option (Score:3)
In the DevOps / infrastructure space, they don't need to advertise - everyone already knows Splunk and their ridiculous pricing. It's a great fit for Cisco - spend nothing on biz-dev, and charge shitloads of money to see your own data.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, thanks.
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From their wikipedia page, it's a buzzword aggregator.
Apparently, they're very effective at it, since Cisco thinks they're worth this much.
Re: (Score:2)
WTF is Splunk and why is it worth $20,000,000.00 to Cisco?
Splunk's market cap is $18B, so Cisco was only offering a 10% premium.
They provide web-based data analysis and visualization tools for machine-generated data.
They are not making money and have a negative P/E of -$8/share which is a loss of about $1B annually.
For doing something so simple, and losing money at it, their valuation seems ridiculous to me. But I don't have enough confidence in my pessimistic opinion to short them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splunk [wikipedia.org]
NASDAQ: SPLK [nasdaq.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Wiki -
By 2007 Splunk had raised US$40 million;[9] it became profitable in 2009...
seems to me they are you your a fucking lying nobody online making up your own verson of the "truth"
go apply at CNN
Re: (Score:3)
By 2007 Splunk had raised US$40 million;[9] it became profitable in 2009...
Splunk was profitable in 2009.
Spunk is NOT profitable today.
Click on the NASDAQ link in the post you are replying to. Look at the EPS. It is negative.
Re: (Score:3)
I looked and saw that they went negative as of 2020. Part of the reason may be:
"Effective November 1, 2019, Splunk will no longer sell perpetual licenses for any new product or service sales globally."
They did manage to achieve revenue growth in 2020, but their expenses seemed to get away from them. They saw a decline in revenue for 2021, and thus pivoted to highlight the recurring revenue instead, to reflect the success they've had to converting perpetual license customers to subscription, meaning they a
Re: there goes that option (Score:4, Interesting)
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Cisco has been a licensing nightmare for a long time. Its just getting worse.
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Sadly, every big enterprise vendor loves that strategy. The more convoluted the entitlement, the more games they can play to trick customers into spending a lot more money than they thought.
Re: there goes that option (Score:2)
Then Splunk is a perfect fit. I'm sorry, you logged too many events today, so you don't get to run reports against it until tomorrow because your license has a data ingestion cap. Site is down and you can't figure out why without your logs? Too bad, fuck you, pay us more.
And they wonder why people are happy to figure out the complexity of grok filters with Logstash or Datadog...
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Cisco probably loved splunk once Splunk wrote this:
" we discontinued offering new perpetual licenses effective November 1, 2019."
Hell yeah, more contorted subscription revenue to extract more money for customers that suck at long-term expense management.
Oh good (Score:1)
Drain (Score:3)
Immediately earning Splunk another "Seal of Disapproval".
Ehhh tried that... (Score:3)
Opinion (Score:1)
Splunk is good software, and I sincerely hope that Cisco does NOT buy them.
Seriously, if you handed Cisco a goose that laid golden eggs, they'd "innovate" until the goose was a rabbit that ate gold, shit lead, and died in direct sunlight.