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What makes you say Splunk is a dead player? Not arguing with you, it's genuine curiosity on my part.
by akulbe 3y ago
What makes you say Splunk is a dead player?
Not arguing with you, it's genuine curiosity on my part.
- liveoneggs 3y agothey price-out medium customers so mind-share decreases
- dangus 3y agoAre medium-sized customers valuable to Splunk? 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?
- tyingq 3y agoI believe the idea is that the big customers are interested because everyone is raving about it. If you price out the smaller customers, there's nobody to rave about it. Consider, for example, that Akamai's revenues are sitting in a plateau over the last 5 years, while Cloudflare is moving up.
- alephnerd 3y ago> I believe the idea is that the big customers are interested because everyone is raving about it. If you price out the smaller customers, there's nobody to rave about it. 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
- mardifoufs 3y agoI am super interested! Enterprise is like a rabbit hole to me
- tyingq 3y agoHow is what I said "FUD"? I know what it stands for. I don't see where I went with any of those three themes. Akamai has certainly done well over their lifetime, but their revenue for the last 5 years is very flat. That's not "FUD".
- nemo 3y ago>big customers are interested because everyone is raving about it. 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.
- xwolfi 3y agoI work in a 100+ year old giga bank, systemic in the country it comes from, in their Hong Kong investment bank branch. 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.
- cityofdelusion 3y agoSpot on. I also work in a 100+ year old gigantic corporation with big money and we are also moving off Splunk due to rising costs. Enterprise customers do not just pay whatever the sales folks ask for. Splunk is dead growth wise if they don’t fix their pricing.
- singingfish 3y agoWe moved a business from splunk to ELK a couple of years ago. The actual work of doing so took less than a day. The maintenance processes changed, and some things are not as good. But aside from the beefy machine we run ELK on it costs next to nothing, and is very reliable.
- moneywoes 3y agodo they not want to onboard these customers and then grow with them
- andrewflnr 3y agoMindshare is valuable, was the point GP was making. If midsize customers ignore you because you're too expensive, and then implement something else before they get big enough to afford you, where do you get new customers? Forget growth, how do you replace attrition as your existing customers die? Personally I can't say if that's actually happening with Splunk, but it's a very plausible scenario.
- frankchn 3y ago> Mindshare is valuable, was the point GP was making. If midsize customers ignore you because you're too expensive, and then implement something else before they get big enough to afford you, where do you get new customers? Forget growth, how do you replace attrition as your existing customers die? 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.
- jamiek88 3y agoYes but Oracle and IBM have much mind share amongst executives and all these mega corps are top down. 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!
- bvirb 3y agoI've recently dealt with multiple companies who started using IBM Aspera (which as a vendor to them means we have to use it too) only for it to work miserably. I've also seen a couple tiny, perfectly functional MySQL databases replaced by expensive, slower Oracle databases with much higher maintenance costs. 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.
- baq 3y agoThat's why companies die in the long run. 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.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago> Splunk doesn't get that. There are no hobbyist/prosumer splunk installations. Zero. Nada. 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.
- baq 3y agoI’ll call you an unicorn :) I know they have a free license for super small deployments but haven’t heard of anyone actually using it.
- yetanotherloss 3y agoIt was at one point usable but they drove off the hobbyist/small business crowd a long time ago. We do some work setting up elasticsearch tools that aggregate and filter data later sent to central splunk purely to affect a large reduction in license costs.
- optimalquiet 3y agoA question: where did the hobbyist/small business crowd go?
- manicennui 3y agoI doubt that the parent has any idea what "medium-sized" means. A few million in revenue is not medium sized.
- liveoneggs 3y agoI mean 50 - 500 person companies
- adrr 3y agoBecause those medium-sized customer become large customers and getting more people to use your product builds up skill set in people. Switching cost is very expensive. This is why we'll probably see DataDog and Newrelic dominate the logging space because of their no contract plans that you can scale up to negotiated rates when you become larger. Even getting a POC of splunk is expensive and sales team will push for a contract. 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.
- pantulis 3y agoIt's better -because it's easier to scale- to sell a single 1M$ license than selling a thousand 1000$ licenses.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoMore efficient considering the typically long and drawn out enterprise sales cycle efforts as well.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThat's fine as long as your product stays competitive. 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.
- mschuster91 3y ago> 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...
- hermanradtke 3y ago> that huge American company powering a lot of hospital IT Epic
- vdqtp3 3y agoCerner? BD? McKesson? AllScripts? There's a few contenders for sure.
- 3y ago
- manicennui 3y agoTheir revenue is increasing and their losses are decreasing. They are fairly close to profitability. This is just nonsense.
- liveoneggs 3y agoidk it's just my anecdote
- ckdarby 3y agoThey're profitable now with Cisco acquiring them. They'll trim the company by at least 20% through restructuring either out or to other places of Cisco. 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.
- ransom1538 3y agoI have never. Once. worked somewhere that could afford splunk. But I have used it on trail many times, very cool.
- markstos 3y agoSplunk bought VictorOps and the product has been stagnant or even worse since then. PagerDuty is significantly better for about the same price and demonstrates ways in which the product could have kept improving.
- pbjtime 3y agoThe software seems very lazy. The interface belongs in the 90s. They've been resting on their laurels for eons. The fuckin basic ass PowerShell IDE that comes with windows is about seventeen trillion times more well designed and user-friendly.
- everdrive 3y ago>The interface belongs in the 90s Maybe this is why I actually like Splunk. Everything is simple an intuitive. Modern UIs seem to be universally terrible.
- threeseed 3y agoThe companies that buy Splunk don't care about its interface. They care about its capabilities and its on a different level than Datadog, Elastic etc
- cliffcrosland 3y agoYeah I think this is where Datadog excelled and Splunk struggled. Design is clearly better at Datadog, especially the onboarding UX and workflow.
- kortilla 3y ago> The interface belongs in the 90s That’s… a compliment? There have been very few positive interface developments in the last 2 decades for power users. If you want to rip out 95% of the functionality and 99% of the usefulness so morons with iPads can navigate it, then it probably needs adjustments.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoThink US airlines UI rather than good examples of 90s design.