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Cisco Is Said to Have Offered $7B-Plus for DataDog
- SteveNuts 7y agoThank God they didn't take it. Cisco turns awesome products into crap.
- lame-robot-hoax 7y agoDoesn’t Meraki still make good products? Though as far as I’m aware Cisco pretty much has just gave them money and left them to do their own thing.
- _AzMoo 7y agoI don't work in ops so I can't talk for the Meraki experience from that perspective, but I can tell you that their python SDK is beyond shocking.
- q3k 7y agoNo IPv6 routing, VPN or firewall support on the MX: https://documentation.meraki.com/zGeneral_Administration/Other_Topics/IPv6_Device_Compatibility https://documentation.meraki.com/zGeneral_Administration/Oth...
- salmaanp 7y agoopendns, duo, meraki, appdynamics?
- kelnos 7y agoOnly one anecdotal data point, but: We use OpenDNS (now Cisco Umbrella) at work. I'm often hit with Umbrella pages denying access to random websites. The usual message is that the site "distributes malware", but none of the sites it blocks actually deserve that block. Our security team says they can manually add exceptions, but they have no visibility into why Umbrella blocks particular sites. We used Meraki WiFi APs at a previous office, and they were abysmal. We had networking consultants come in several times to do site surveys and attempt to fix things, but we were still plagued with connection drops, poor throughput, and weird dead areas that made no sense. Eventually we trashed the Meraki gear and went with one of Cisco's other product lines, and everything works quite well now. (Well, now we just have issues with macOS being terrible at WiFi radio management.) I don't have any experience with the other two. I also didn't have experience with OpenDNS or Meraki pre-acquisition, so it's possible they've always been bad products, and Cisco has either maintained status quo, or made them better but still bad.
- yardie 7y agoWe use another firewall solution and it happens just as frequently with some sites getting caught up in our malware filter. The initial bad sites lists are originally crowdsourced, I believe. I've used Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, and Cisco Aironet and have had no problems with any of them. They all have a duty cycle and radios don't last indefinitely. Usually what I find is someone brings in an old Linksys G-band AP and that squelches an area, the older radios are a lot noisier.
- signa11 7y agostarent anyone...
- sacredcows 7y agoDatadog? Is that even legal
- mc32 7y agoGuess there’s still copper egg for them to poach.
- jaboutboul 7y agoTheir team is incredibly smart and it would have been a tragedy for them to have picked apart by Cisco.
- dev_dull 7y agoI’m sure they’ll be sobbing from the driver’s side of a Ferrari.
- Lordarminius 7y agoPaywall
- buraequete 7y agoCan't wait for the bubble to burst... Wherever you look, there are generic overvalued companies
- almost_usual 7y agoI don’t think Datadog falls into that category..
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoThey may be great, but are they 7.8 billion dollars of great? For comparison, Hanes (the underwear people) has a 6 billion market cap and Dish Network is 18 billion.
- whateveracct 7y agoThey charge $15/host and their service is good enough that you can often say that's well worth it, so I think so.
- socialist_coder 7y agoThe $15 a host thing was only true before they started charging for custom metrics. Now they want you to add APM to your plan and it's much more expensive. I'm transitioning off of DataDog right now because of this change. My contract came up for renewal and they want to charge me a TON more because of my custom metrics. All my custom metrics do is track the time of each request. It's basically APM but I've had it setup for years, way before they rolled out APM. So yeah, $15 a host would be awesome if that's actually what the price was. But why would you pay $15 a host and only get CPU/memory charts? That stuff is built into AWS... So I'm not even sure what the $15 gets you that is actually useful.
- lizthegrey 7y agoWhat're you moving off to, out of curiosity?
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI always wonder in these situations if there is a counter of the form, "Sure, we'll take the cash, up front please, and nobody on the team will be required to go with the company." Most people assume that this sort of demand would 'kill the deal' but sometimes there are exceptions. The reason I wonder about this is because it could create what is essentially a very wealthy core team that can already work well together which could then self-fund their next thing without all the hassle of fundraising etc. I suppose they can do that post IPO as well, but the IPO adds a bunch of work that can really take the 'fun' out of running a company.
- aggie 7y agoA core team of pre-millionaires won't necessarily, or even likely, work the same as a core team of post-millionaires.
- Railsify 7y agoI would expect this exactly. Why work at all when I can drive my Ferrari collection, all damn day.
- meddlepal 7y agoI'm not a millionaire but I play golf and belong to a prestigious country club (US Open and Ryder Cup host) with plenty of millionaires in the membership list. Sitting at the bar over the years and chatting with these folks that don't need to work a lot of them do work for a handful of reasons: 1. They're bored and want some challenge. 2. They can't stand being near their wife, husband or kids. 3. They like making money. 4. They're genuinely passionate about whatever niche topic they picked to focus on. You can only use your toys so much before they get boring.
- Railsify 7y agoI'm golfing Saturday, at a local public course.
- nodesocket 7y agoI am very keen on picking up some $DDOG shares tomorrow when it IPO'S. As part of my DevOps consultancy I recommend DataDog to nearly all my clients. They check all the boxes in one unified platform: [X] Server / cloud resource monitoring and alerting [https://www.datadoghq.com/dashboarding/ https://www.datadoghq.com/dashboarding/] [X] Logging [https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/ https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/] [X] APM (application performance) [https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/ https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/] [X] HTTP/API endpoint checks and alerts [https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/ https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/]
- Bombthecat 7y agoWhat do you think about sysdig?
- dev_dull 7y agoThe licensing costs were never feasible for me. What size shops do you typically consult for?
- nodesocket 7y agoStartups. < 40 servers typically.
- mrweasel 7y agoThey can give you discounts that makes licensing costs acceptable, if you have something like 10,000 devices. The pricing isn't unreasonable, but it adds up pretty quickly if you have lots of devices. The issue isn't unique to Datadog, other similar service have the same pricing structure and price levels.
- mandeepj 7y ago> I recommend DataDog to nearly all my clients. Big difference in commentary in today’s thread and following one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782870
- bdcravens 7y ago
- petre 7y agoCan't Cisco buy DDOG shares if they really want control of the company?
- abvdasker 7y agoFor most companies it's either very difficult or unattractive to acquire a controlling stake without negotiating a deal with the company's management. The alternative is a hostile takeover which requires enticing shareholders with above-market tender offers. Hostile takeovers become borderline impossible if a company like Datadog has implemented a poison pill as part of their shareholder rights plan. Yet another alternative is a creeping takeover wherein Cisco would try to gain a controlling interest by gradually buying shares on the open market, but this can take a very long time.
- ako 7y agoInteresting since Cisco already owns AppDynamics. Apparently they think or even know AppDynamics is not good enough to compete with Datadog. Very bad news for AppDynamics.
- StreamBright 7y agoWorth. DataDog is my favourite monitoring tool that even comes close to those internal systems that Amazon or Google use internally.
- Tilks 7y agoPeople seem to generally have very positive comments on DataDog - maybe it's me but I've generally found it frustrating. The sampling and retention rates for tracing mean I rarely see the errors that actually matter. I dislike not having an actual date/time picker in the APM section too. Either way, I've had a worse experience with Cisco products so good for them saying no.
- antod 7y ago> People seem to generally have very positive comments on DataDog - maybe it's me but I've generally found it frustrating. We hadn't used DataDog, but after our whole team kept getting endless semi personalised buddy buddy like spam from their sales people, we all swore off ever even contemplating using them.
- Tilks 7y agoI'd forgotten about that! They sent me pictues of sad dogs to try and convince me to use them. It was a bit strange, and at times passive aggressive.
- alien_ 7y agoBetter not to sell than to repeat the fate of Wunderlist, the founders wanted to buy it back to avoid the shutdown.
- zerop 7y agoI think agent based monitoring product companies like Datadog doing very good and selling the company eventually. The problem they solve is perennial and there is no Amazon/Google in this domain. Early example I saw is boundary acquired by BMC. One company I worked earlier where we built agentless monitoring.
- machbio 7y agoWhy do you think Amazon/Google is not in the same space - with Cloudwatch, X-ray and other similar tools from Google - they are in the same space - even though the egress cost associated with Amazon/Google are low for constant data export from your server.. If I was looking from security perspective - its easier to integrate internally when you are running on any of the cloud providers
- neilv 7y agoHow does this news report relate to the quiet period?
- peterwwillis 7y agoWow. They got offered over 7 Billion dollars, in the face of a looming recession, strong industry competitors, and an uncertain IPO. They're willing to gamble their future, just because they want more than 7 Billion dollars. I guess when you're offered that much money, it's hard not to get greedy.
- inthewoods 7y agoInteresting given the prior acquisition of AppDynamics. If true, I think they should have taken the deal. My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there appeared to be an upper limit to how much companies were willing to spend on APM and related technologies that caps the opportunity. In general, the charging per agent/server model runs into trouble on big infrastructure - do I cover production? What about staging? If I don't cover staging, then am I creating a testing/QA problem? Etc. It just becomes a much tougher sell when you get over $500k. Hell, over $200k. I would regularly hear companies say things like "well, we can cover half of production because I can't bring that to our CEO - he'll freak." So I think that might be part of what we're seeing with New Relic's recent revenue performance (they recently cut guidance on full year revenue). New Relic does about $600m a year and is valued at $3.5b - their max value was about 2x that - so $7b. Caveats: - Are they growing faster? Absolutely. - Are they a great company? Absolutely. - Does taking the deal and giving up full control of your company always make sense? Of course not. - Is money the only metric of success? No of course not. - Does it matter when you're talking billions? Probably not.
- lmeyerov 7y agoYep, and a ton of rapidly growing competitors in the overall it ops space (scalyr, kentik, honeycomb, grafana, riverbed, and probably 10 more, and even bigger dev efforts at Google/AWS/MS) means a race to the bottom revenue wise and many easy alternatives for sub-1B acquisition (im guessing most will be < 50M for the startups or say 6X on revenue for bigger, if you are considering working at one and need to value stock growth)
- swasheck 7y agoUnpopular take incoming ... but I find DataDog useless. I’m biased as I’m a DBA and comprehensive workload metrics are what I need, but the broad use of DataDog or AppDynamics or NewRelic really do data layer performance monitoring a tremendous disservice. Good luck for Cisco that they were shot down.
- yourapostasy 7y agoWhat do you use as a DBA? I see some DBA's turn to Toad, but I'm not a domain expert in that direction so I don't know what the go-to's are these days. Anecdotal: one of my teammates used AppDynamics to track down that our Oracle DBA didn't enable the fix for the LOB extent allocation bug (#6376915) in our 12c database, which manifested as an application performance issue and the DBA team insisted there was nothing wrong on the Oracle layer. I'm thus interested in what DBA's use to monitor so I can better monitor the databases I rely upon myself.