they price-out medium customers so mind-share decreases
But as you lose the smaller and middle-range customers, you're also missing on the trends of the market, while getting shaken up by the big players you can't afford to say no to. If one of your whales needs feature Y, no matter how exotic you think it could be, you'll have to implement Y, bloating your product for the rest of your clients.
And while you're doing that, smaller competitors slowly creep up, eating up the bottom of you market, until you're stuck in a niche.
So what, milking mega enterprise for ossified products is a decently profitable niche. IBM, SAP, that huge American company powering a lot of hospital IT, Cisco itself...
Epic
There's a few contenders for sure.
Basically every ERP technology every invented.
It was super expensive and what I dubbed a "choice bot"
Where you are basically navigating a decision tree and the text box is extraneous
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.
They'll pick up another 10-20% capex/open/cogs on private pricing that Cisco gets.
Great M&A if Cisco manages to maintain Splunk's customer base. I look at Splunk as the Oracle DB of the world now, does anything a giant enterprise can imagine, but is old and costs a leg & arm.
In sales we call this "Ideal Customer Profile." Why do I want a customer with less money to spend if I have a product with enough capability for the gigantic money-is-no-object customers?
Consider, for example, that Akamai's revenues are sitting in a plateau over the last 5 years, while Cloudflare is moving up.
That's not how enterprise procurement works, which is what makes the big bucks for companies like Akamai and Splunk.
Cloudflare traditionally targeted mid-market and is in the process of building out an upper market/enterprise motion (I worked with the guy they hired to lead that in a previous role).
I can dig deeper into ICP, Market Segmentation, and Enterprise sales if interested. There is too much FUD on HN
Akamai has certainly done well over their lifetime, but their revenue for the last 5 years is very flat. That's not "FUD".
In this case the big customers are already using it. Splunk's value proposition for those customer is that they can handle with a massive volume without a hiccup. Small customers don't have the needs where Splunk is uniquely useful.
We loved Splunk, we invested quite a bit in it both for technical monitoring and business intelligence. After a while the price went so high we cut it all, moved to kdb/tableau/elk/whatever crappier system that cost less.
Money is ALWAYS an object and Splunk makes sure to dig a hole deep enough for even the deepest pockets. I too prefer my shareholders to collect the fruit of my labor rather than... Splunk. At least they can reinvest some profit in us. Not Splunk, nope, they keep digging that hole in our pockets.
Personally I can't say if that's actually happening with Splunk, but it's a very plausible scenario.
Somehow companies manage to make it work extracting money from your existing money-is-no-object customers. Oracle and IBM have basically zero mind-share amongst HN reading folks, but yet there they are.
We would routinely switch vendors and it would be an fyi to the end users if that.
It’s one of the reasons myself and huge corps don’t mix!
I think once a customer with a big enough budget is recognized by sales at one of these big organizations they make the sale happen. They talk to the higher-ups and either make them happy, or feed them a lot of FUD (or both), and then they're in, regardless of what the people working with the products (many of whom might be external vendors or consultants!) think.
They're basically focused on more traditional sales & marketing instead of more grassroots sales & marketing (mindshare), but at least in my experience they definitely still get new customers.
Microsoft dominated the nineties especially and the naughts less so but still because the marginal price of their OS was zero - due to piracy. Yes they didn't like business to run unlicensed but if you were a customer, nobody cared, because in 5-10-20 years you'd be a paying business or would work for a paying business.
Splunk doesn't get that. There are no hobbyist/prosumer splunk installations. Zero. Nada. That's also how Linux won in the server space - nobody set up Windows servers as a hobby and 20 years later we're here.
IOW it's medium-term short-sightedness, if it makes sense. Tactically good, strategically so-so to bad, depending on your moat and momentum.
Not true. I ran a free (legit!) Splunk instance in my homelab for years. It's been several years since I shut the homelab down, so I couldn't tell you if they still have hobbyist licensing, but they certainly had it in the past.
I know they have a free license for super small deployments but haven’t heard of anyone actually using it.
I think modern solutions would be any of the recent Clickhouse based solutions.
Loki exists but it seems to have a tragically small market share.
For some organizations what Splunk does well is important but for most of them they really only need much more basic log aggregation and analysis tools.
What splunk has going for it now is that they have lot invested in compliance and security but its only matter of time before other providers start offering the same. Only use case i would consider them for is a SIEM. Datadog logging is so cheap and works and gives me more money to spend on other things.