Cisco to acquire Isovalent
isovalent.com
isovalent.com
First Splunk, now Isovalent. Cisco has been busy this year!
That won’t stop a bunch of them from being laid off like what happened during the Splunk acquisition.
You underestimate Cisco's ability to fuck up acquired companies. The entire point is for Cisco to fuck it up by raising prices and entrapping customers to the point where competitors and alternatives will be created where none existed before. It's Cisco's nature and there is more than two decades of history of them doing it.
Cisco has this idea of spin-ins, that they executed on for sometime, although I believe it's no longer fashionable: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-ciscos-star-engineers-def...
>Thomas Graf was at Cisco prior to building Isovalent
>Cisco has this idea of spin-ins, that they executed on for sometime
Generalized:
Work at parent company, create something innovative, start child company to develop that, get noticed by the world, parent buys you ... profit! That is, you profit - if you're smart, and not bamboozled by their acquisition terms.
Very cool documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA
Hopefully they will keep on being awesome - but Cisco acquisitions aren't generally positive for innovative companies
Anyway, good luck to the Isovalent team on their job search. Getting bought by Cisco is not for the faint of heart...
Maybe I should look into Istio again.
Regarding Cilium, there's a backup plan as soon as there's a license change, which would be a herald of things to come:
the fork.
Ultimately I hope to go with Cilium and I hope the recent news around OpenTofu are enough to dissuade Cisco from trying anything funny
Employees might not even make anything depending on the strike price.
Cisco can screw (and likely will) the commercial Enterprise offering, not really the Cilium project
Those big companies are inconsistent so you can’t count on that, especially if the change doesn’t affect them or they’re already maintaining an internal fork. It’s not mission critical for them so I would not be shocked if they decided that some other approach was best for their businesses and their engineers spend time migrating instead of taking over maintainership.
I’m not saying that will or even is likely to happen but I would think about how hard it would be for you if it did because the odds of Cisco screwing up a popular project are a lot greater than zero.
As someone who had the unfortunate experience of going through a Cisco acquisition, there's a familiar pattern.
You can expect that their product roadmap will be torn to shreds as Cisco VPs start streaming in to demand poorly designed integration projects with Cisco's terrible platforms to pad their own resumes. Talent drain ensues as Cisco's low bar for hiring starts to take effect.
The product will keep selling, since Cisco's MO is to leverage its massive sales machine to boost revenue, but there will be little concern for the actual tech itself going forward.
At the end of the day this is a great buy for Cisco, but horrible news for customers. I feel as though Isovalent was a bit too early with their mouse trap, but damn is it a good one.
Now the purchase of anyone by Cisco simply signals a death knell for them. Last words generally heard now are "they used to be cool".
Series A $29M in 2021 by AZ and Google + Series B $40M in 2022 by, among others, Cisco itself.
"Let's go with a word that looks a bit like 'Insolvent' when you glace at it in a hurry."
Some people are great at the research / experimentation phase but not great when it comes to scaling up. Other people aren't great at scaling up but are great during the operational phase.
The operational phase is the only place profit is generated, but the other people need to get paid, too.
Instead, it will lead to the inevitable enshittification as customers are milked for more and more profit while the tech decays because all the good people leave.
I don't think YouTube was profitable before acquisition. Now it's profitable and a great product.
So I'm not saying 100% of acquisitions are shit storms, but so often when you see these old stalwarts buy new, innovative startups, everyone is scared their products will go to shit. Just look at the giant collective sigh of release when the Figma deal fell through.
There's also the case where documentation is poor/nonexistent, but the vendor charges customers for 'training' and all of a sudden useful resources become available. I've always felt it's a weird way to treat _already_ paying customers, but seems common in the networking world.
Too many idealists here.
What are the practical alternatives?
It's just simultaneously true that people are sad about the inevitable loss of a previously open source project, and that people are happy the devs are now getting paid for their efforts.
Imo HN tends to show both once the comments settle.