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Rackspace Buys Server Management Platform Cloudkick (YC W09)
- vidar 16y agoPrice anyone?
- paraschopra 16y agoBased on 2.5 mil they have raised, price would be north of $25-30 mil. Great job for a 2 year old company!
- bluelu 16y agoDo you think it's that much with amazon offering a monitoring solution now as well.
- paraschopra 16y agoIn fact, I think the acquisition would have been in $50 mil range simply because VCs otherwise won't allow the sale. If they raise $2.5 mil at say $5-7.5 mil post money valuation, then for making 10x VCs would only say yes to an offer of $50-75 mil.
- bl4k 16y agoVCs may not have had a say - which has become more common, esp after only a single round. Rackspace don't really do inflated acquisitions - they paid $18M for Slicehost and Jungledisk (combined). Cloudkick raised $2M back in April, so you would think that the price would be more around $15-20M. Either way, congratulations to the team, RS and to YC. CK is a great product.
- vidar 16y agoI am going to guess 30m, give or take a few bucks.
- jng 16y agoEven if VCs target at a 10x sale, they definitely take offers to sell at a much lesser multiple. They target at 10x so that with their spread of total-failures/so-sos/big-exits they end up making a nice return.
- mike4u2 16y agoYes, and for free :) Plus there is always Pingdom, AlertFox, Webmetrics, Keynote...
- revorad 16y agoMerry Christmas, YC!
- mbreese 16y agoI wonder what this will mean for Cloudkick's support for other clouds...
- bretpiatt 16y agoFrom the post on the Cloudkick blog, "We are committed to continuing support for multiple clouds within the Cloudkick tools. This means no matter which cloud infrastructure vendor you choose or what data center you have physical servers in, you can continue using Cloudkick." For some background Jungle Disk still supports multiple clouds as well.
- tomhoward 16y agoCouldn't have happened to a better bunch of guys. Really great news, congrats gents.
- johnyzee 16y agoScore another for YCombinator.
- OoTheNigerian 16y agoYC is on a roll. Congratulations to all involved. Now back to work as i wait patiently from my turn. :)
- geekinthecorner 16y agoRackspace is desperately in need of as much help as they can get. Whereas the rest of the industry (Softlayer, etc) spent the last five years building out automated infrastructure, Rackspace spent it mostly on sales. As a customer with dozens of servers at Rackspace, and hundreds at Softlayer, the difference is night and day. I feel bad for Cloudkick as a company, though. San Antonio is a million miles away from San Francisco, culturally. Good job on having an exit, good luck on not hating yourselves in a year.
- Greenisus 16y agoI've been working on mobile apps for Rackspace from San Francisco for a long time, and I have to disagree about the SF/SA cultural difference, at least in this context. While San Antonio is definitely vastly different from San Francisco, the culture within Rackspace is certainly compatible with Cloudkick and most other Bay Area tech companies.
- po 16y agoMy main complaint with cloudkick has always been the wide price gap between the free account and the first paid version. I would have paid for their agent based service for a few of my projects but at $99 a month for the cheapest version, it would have cost over 5x what the server it was monitoring cost. I think they would have grown much faster with a smoother price curve. Make a plan with 2 or 3 servers of full monitoring for $30 a month to grab the low end of the market when people are just starting and putting in the foundational pieces of their technology stack. Overall though, they're really good. They seem to have done plenty well anyway. Congratulations.
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- mathgladiator 16y agoThat's why I am writing my own: http://crondom.com/ http://crondom.com/ I wanted very basic things (namely application event monitoring for fraud), so I built my own analytics package around cron jobs.
- cullenking 16y agoI laughed at the name, but how will someone justify that line item in their engineering budget at a larger company? Catchy though, I'll definitely remember it.
- po 16y agoI saw you promoting this before and to be frank I looked at it and didn't understand what it would be good for. I thought, "Oh, ok so it's like a cron task that's easier to manage but you pay for" and then filed it away deep in my brain under "Maybe someday I'll need that" Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't see how it is even remotely similar to what these monitoring services provide. Can you explain that better?
- nl 16y agoI saw this and I didn't understand what it is for or how it works. If it runs on your server then how does it monitor my application? Is there an agent or something? Why is it better than running cron on (say) Google App Engine? If it runs on my server, then exactly why would I want it? I think I can live with running every 5 minutes or 20 seconds instead of 7 minutes or 17 seconds. So.. I just don't get it? Where can I read more (without registering)?
- joetyson 16y agoCongrats cloudkick! Rackspace is getting an awesome product and even more amazing team.
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- pdx 16y agoThis is nothing against cloudkick. I've never even been to their site. I'm sure their service is amazing. My question is a general question that I ask almost every time I see a company get bought. The question is, "Why buy, when you can build?" Let's say I'm Rackspace. I have a cloudkick account that I used when I was evaluating them to see if I wanted to buy them. I know exactly what they offer. So, let's say I take that and I create an engineering specification. Build a service that does this, this, this, and this, duplicating cloudkick, right down to the screen layout of the dashboards, if you're so inclined. Now, go hire 10 engineers. No, make it 20. Now hire 5 project managers. Pay each engineer $100K + benefits, say they cost me $150K per year. Pay each project manager $150K + benefits, say they cost me $200K per year. So now I have 20 engineers and 5 project managers whose combined salaries + benefits cost me $4 million a year. Let them work for two years. For $8MM, I have my own cloudkick, right? Why would I pay more than $8MM? Perhaps they didn't, I don't know. Again, my questions isn't about cloudkick. It's about why you see companies make the buy decision, when it often seems like it would be well within their ability to build it themselves, if they are so willing to spend money.
- revorad 16y agoLet them work for two years. There you answered your question. Cloudkick's already worked on the problem for two years. Time matters, it's all we've got to sell.
- m0shen 16y agoThere is also the value of Cloudkick's existing customer base.
- dhimes 16y agoAnd Cloudkick's existing engineering team, who know the problem domain as well as anybody at this very moment.
- okaramian 16y agoThere is also the 2 years of opportunity cost of building out that infrastructure, in which case the acquired company will probably be ahead technically, acquired by another competitor, and/or have acquired an even larger customer base.
- dotBen 16y agoAs an on/off CloudKick user (long story) my concern is that RackSpace has purchased the company to obtain performance and metric data for its competitor's serving solutions. If I'm right, expect to see them reduce the price and/or increase the allowances of the free tier in order to obtain more data. This is always a problem when a company is purchased by one of the vendors it sits above in the value chain, esp when impartiality and independence is important in a space such as vendor monitoring. I can't see RS buying CloudKick for internal monitoring of its own customer's servers and instances because they would already have a mature solution by now. I'm not sure I want to be providing RackSpace with performance data of my servers running on their competitor's instances, the CloudKick agent is placed to send (albeit transparently) all sorts of data back to RS. And don't be surprised if other vendors raise concerns to this effect too.
- pquerna 16y agoHi, I'm Paul and I worked at Cloudkick / am now a Racker. I just want to respond to one point. > I can't see RS buying CloudKick for internal > monitoring of its own customer's servers and > instances because they would already have a > mature solution by now. The intention is to use Cloudkick to monitor things like this. Rackspace has many existing internal solutions, but they have many issues that Cloudkick helps knock out, even for monitoring their internal infrastructure.
- dotBen 16y agoWell if RackSpace, an industry veteran with 12 years of serving experience and $600m+ annual revenues, feels that a two-year old venture funded startup offers superior monitoring functionality than that says a lot about the company's internal processes and development priorities. (that's not a disrespect to CloudKick, but an examination of scales of economy) But whatever. If this is about bolstering RS's own monitoring does that mean CloudKick will no longer be monitoring 3rd party vendors? I'm guessing CloudKick will still continue to be more than happy to monitor Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, etc out of the box. And so even if this acquisition is going to help RackSpace's own monitoring, the point still stands that RS now has a massive competitive intelligence operation going on here too. If the data is available inside the company then it even has a duty to shareholders, as a publicly listed company, to make the most out of that data to enhance profits.
- ericflo 16y agoAwesome news for both CloudKick and Rackspace. For what it's worth, I hadn't really tried out CloudKick before, but tried it after today's news...I'm quite impressed. I really hope Rackspace rolls this functionality into their own offerings.
- ConceptDog 16y agoGood for them. Good toolset, good platform. Really needs an iPhone app.
- foobarbazetc 16y agoLet's hope the insane CloudKick pricing is looked at by RackSpace.