Cisco Makes $20b bid on Splunk | Hacker News Reader

Cisco Makes $20b bid on Splunk

wsj.com

15 pointsfilmgirlcw6 comments

Wow Splunk went public in 2012 and has yet to post positive EBITDA. If your software company has been public for ten years and you are still hemorrhaging money I do wonder if you've got a plan. You can't blame that on hyper growth and such. Their revenue is essentially flat for the last two years.

But it looks like it could work out for the shareholders so what do I know.

I’ve worked for a few companies who all love using Splunk but also have struggles with spiraling costs so try and reduce usage, unsuccessfully. They are non trivial spends at not so small companies.

Similarly with Datadog.

They seem like a service when people start using them they prove to be very valuable so more people in the company use them and so the cost goes up significantly with the usage.

At that point the options are rely less on Splunk which people try to do but almost never happens in practice as Splunk is so useful/tiered logging more hassle than the company wants. Find an alternative which again is hard to do as the options are limited and has associated migration costs, also as long as they keep developing the service they keep giving a reason to stay.

It seems like the perfect business model. For all intent and purposes they give enough functionality/ usefulness to create vendor lock in, in everything but name. Customers usage continue to increase significantly meaning customers are always guaranteed to be increasingly spend more and more.

Unless they are deliberately trying not to make a profit and concentrate on growth it’s hard to see how they are not making money when people are spending 500k-1million+ a month just on log storage.

+1. Have seen this play out repeatedly at several financial institutions. Just enough value to sell it, just expensive enough to avoid using it as much as possible.

Everyone ends up rolling their own Elasticsearch cluster to get as close to parity as possible at a lower cost.

This seems like a pricing issue then, doesn’t it?

FWIW, when I worked at BigCo Splunk was really great for standardization of logs and debugging across teams. We used it a lot when there were major outages to share unified ways across teams of slicing data and deep diving into logs together. I think it’s a fabulous product. The fact that they haven’t been able to monetize it effectively is a bit baffling since it doesn’t seem radically different than other B2B software solutions aimed at large corps.

I’ve seen it go the other way.

The in-house elastic search clusters ended up being expensive to run and a burden with staff / hosting which resulted in rent vs buy and Splunk/Datdog being used to replace the in-house log storage.

In those situations both solutions ended running in parallel with some teams using one service over the other depending what was available when the services where developed and how much hassle it is to migrate. Log migration always being lowest priority for a team if it’s currently working and a backlog full of other stuff.

With revenue in the billions I don't find missing a positive annual EBITDA by 20 million to be enough to put it in the burning money category. The flat revenue over the last 2 years however with the massive drop in net income is interesting though without knowing the background of what's at play there as it was suddenly trending towards Uber levels of burning money if unchecked.

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