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Cisco to acquire Isovalent
- klooney 3y agoOh no, that's a bad sign for the future of Cilium.
- ABS 3y agoNot too concerned, Cilium was accepted by the CNCF in 2021 and moved from "Incubating" to "Graduated" a couple of months ago.
- acdha 3y agoHow many of the core developers don’t work for Cisco? Projects tend to go where the core team wants.
- ABS 3y agoI would guess the majority of the core team works for Isovalent but Cilium is a mature product by now, used by tens of huge companies (e.g. Google's GKE, AWS, Alibaba). Cisco can screw (and likely will) the commercial Enterprise offering, not really the Cilium project
- acdha 3y agoTwo things to think about: say they make a big product direction change you don’t want – how many people are going to contribute to a community fork? Or say random, senseless acts of MBA happen and nobody is employed to work on it any more. 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.
- houseofzeus 3y agoThey would have had to add a few externals to get to Graduated but it's definitely a minority: https://github.com/cilium/cilium/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md https://github.com/cilium/cilium/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md
- beardedwizard 3y agoin contract negotiations right now. this will 100% be a negative factor like when sophos bought capusl8.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2847 3y agoAlways sad to see a small player swallowed up by Cisco. 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.
- windexh8er 3y agoYes, I was really disappointed to see this. I've pointed a lot of PM and folks to Isovalent and Cillium. I really like the idea of eBPF as it solves a lot of the issues that just are poorly handled by middleware/middlebox solutions. I'm not sure why a company like Palo Alto Networks didn't jump on this earlier. I know that this, somewhat, cannibalizes their core business model (middlebox solutions) - however I feel like it would have been more of an additional layer than a complete product line disruption. 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.
- jen20 3y agoAt least it’s not IBM, I suppose!
- toomuchtodo 3y agoTeams and founders who have built material value deserve liquidity and an exit. It sucks when they exit to these sorts of orgs, propose a better path that maintains the value but still provides the exit. Customers becoming shareholders through a direct offering comes to mind, but there are other avenues.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoAt some point I feel like customers are going to be extremely wary of buying anything from smaller players if they know their filet mignon is destined to instantly transform into a turd sandwich the moment the inevitable acquisition occurs.
- jdorfman 3y agoI love to see stories like this. Inspiring other companies that contributing to open source can have a ROI.
- gtirloni 3y agoDo you like to see these stories as a customer/user or as a founder/investor?
- jdorfman 3y agoAs an open source contributor and community member.
- gtirloni 3y agoMaybe you're not aware of what happens when big companies buy smaller companies that were the main stewards of open source projects. There are many comments in here detailing how much can and usually goes wrong (for contributors, users and the community at large).
- jdorfman 3y agoOh, I'm aware. Cisco will most likely fuck this up somehow. But this story will inspire other small companies to invest in contributing to the open source supply chain which is good for all of us.
- hintklb 3y agoDid they though? No price announced which means it's not even clear if investors and employees were made whole.
- jdorfman 3y agoTrue. Maybe ROI wasn't the right phrase.
- billpg 3y ago"What shall we call our company?" "Let's go with a word that looks a bit like 'Insolvent' when you glace at it in a hurry."
- vuln 3y agoRight? That’s immediately what I thought. Weird.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jimmyed 3y agoOh no, this is sad news. I wish Isovalent had not given in to avarice, for I cannot ascribe this to anything else. They had really good engineers, with the best inhouse eBPF expertise of any company. This news is worse than CoreOS being gobbled up by RedHat.
- ABS 3y agoacquisition (or an IPO but unlikely for such a niche product company) was planned for since day one and likely part of the reason they managed to attract many of those really good engineers. Series A $29M in 2021 by AZ and Google + Series B $40M in 2022 by, among others, Cisco itself.
- jldugger 3y agoAlso, one of the cofounders worked at Cisco previously. I guess this is what it takes to get promoted at Cisco?
- rajaman0 3y agodon't love this framing - capitalism operates on avarice. Every for-profit company "gives in" to it to a great extent, so we shouldn't put undue blame on isovalent for just looking out for themselves and their employees.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- trevithick 3y agoDo Cisco certifications still carry any weight? If not, is there another, non-Cisco cert that's worthwhile? I know CCNA etc. used to have value, but it seems most certifications in general are pretty worthless anymore.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhat are you trying to get into/validate?
- b5n 3y agoIME certs are good for two things, novices who lack fundamentals and vendor partnerships (discounts and/or feature access that requires N certified devs/admins/etc.). 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.
- acdha 3y agoOne other one: you work in an environment where that is required for some reason. I’ve known people who got certs because their company contracted for a client who paid more or required some fraction of the staff to be certified. If you work in that kind of area, not leaving money on the table is certainly understandable.
- pjmlp 3y agoQuite common in enterprise space not only networking.
- wangman 3y agoI guess the new CNCF Cilium Certified Associate (CCA) is a Cisco certification soon :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikecoles 3y ago
- whalesalad 3y agoOh wow these are the folks who brought ebpf to the world. Very cool documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA
- tptacek 3y agoThey did a lot to popularize it, especially among K8s people and Go people, but they did not bring it into the world.
- hacknat 3y agoDaniel Borkmann is at Isovalent, he is definitely co-creator of eBPF.
- whalesalad 3y agoDidn’t mean bring into the world. Meant bring to the world as-in spread the word far and wide.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoYes, I get it, founders, employees and VCs need a "payday". Still, I feel like I want to start leaving one of my favorite all-time comments about how people are baffled how the poor tech folk will get by if they can't sell out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38682717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38682717
- chmod600 3y agoMuch like different companies need a different set of people, the same company at different stages needs a different set of people. 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoBut the point is almost nobody believes a Cisco acquisition will lead to "better execution in the scaling phase". 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.
- chmod600 3y agoThat may be true for Cisco specifically; I don't know. But some acquisitions really go well and make sense for everyone. I don't think YouTube was profitable before acquisition. Now it's profitable and a great product.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoTotally agree with that. I remember reading an article years ago that was talking about how YouTube actually didn't have a ton of runway left before Google bought them - the hosting costs were going to kill them, and they needed someone like Google with their unique expertise at handling massive infrastructure scale (and probably only Google at that time had that experience) to join with. 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.
- cringepuns 3y ago[flagged]
- jay-barronville 3y agoHN can really be quite interesting. Y’all want developers to develop open-source projects. Developers then struggle to financially sustain their projects. BigCo acquires a valuable project, providing liquidity and support to the developers. Instead of being happy for them, HN cries. Too many idealists here. What are the practical alternatives?
- keep_reading 3y agoEveryone wants free software developers to slave away for free. Give away your worldly things, don't worry about feeding your family or keeping shelter over your head -- just keep on cranking out new releases out of the goodness of your own hearts.
- kiddico 3y agoThere are no 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikecoles 3y agoOne can be happy for the devs and founders but also lament the loss of a great product.
- cringestpuns 3y ago[flagged]
- genbit 3y agoEven though Cisco acquires them, I believe this is not going to be a "RIP" story — Cilium is a graduated CNCF project, adopted by all major cloud providers, used by many fortune 100 companies, and have a rich/diverse contributors community. Plus the team at Isovalent is super strong, and eBPF powerhouse, they are going to continue working on Cilium, Tetragon, and other eBPF projects. And they've build a strong and vibrant OSS community. Cisco did a really smart and strategic move to lead a modernization of networking and security.
- jbiggley 3y agoI agree. The team at Isovalent is extraordinary and should continue to be strong champions of BPF for network and security use cases. With Cisco footing the bill, I think we will see even more expansion into XDP traffic processing that is native to hardware vs. the current overlay model. First Splunk, now Isovalent. Cisco has been busy this year!
- randmeerkat 3y ago> The team at Isovalent is extraordinary and should continue to be strong champions of BPF for network and security use cases. That won’t stop a bunch of them from being laid off like what happened during the Splunk acquisition.
- kapilvt 3y agoThose products are at very different maturity points, wrt to continued commercial adoption, aka revenue gen.
- TwoNineFive 3y agoI am a network engineer and have worked with Cisco stuff since the 90s. 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.
- adra 3y agoMan, I read the headline three times and each time I read Cisco is acquiring insolvent. Bad idea naming a company so close to an English word both in length, number of similar characters, and most importantly first and last chars.
- hintklb 3y agoNo price announced which usually means it is not an amazing outcome. Employees might not even make anything depending on the strike price.
- denysvitali 3y agoMixed feelings - Isovalent is such a great company that it's sort of sad to see it acquired by Cisco. Hopefully they will keep on being awesome - but Cisco acquisitions aren't generally positive for innovative companies
- bodyodorcystic 3y ago[dead]
- jeffrallen 3y agoDid anyone else dyslexize that company name into "Insolvent" and then wonder "what kind of sick joke is it to name your company "Insolvent "? Anyway, good luck to the Isovalent team on their job search. Getting bought by Cisco is not for the faint of heart...
- dev2000 3y agoSeems like the price is leaked https://twitter.com/Techmeme/status/1738310519210246346 https://twitter.com/Techmeme/status/1738310519210246346
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _cenw 3y agoOh no, that turns Cilium from a safe choice into... somewhat uncertain. Maybe I should look into Istio again.
- Yasuraka 3y agoFrom what I've read and heard, Istio's complexity makes the bite barely worth the chew. 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.
- rjzzleep 3y agoIstio is really quite interesting of a project it promises everything, has a lot of frequent new engineering solutions, and then people have to hire consultants to make them be able to do a fraction of that. It’s the SAP of the kubernetes world.
- dirteater_ 3y agoIf you try to use every single feature of Istio, sure. If you just need encryption it's not that bad. And it looks to be getting better (no more sidecars, eventually).
- Yasuraka 3y agoIf you just want automatic mTLS, LinkerD is an option. Ultimately I hope to go with Cilium and I hope the recent news around OpenTofu are enough to dissuade Cisco from trying anything funny
- sargun 3y agoThis was likely always the path forward for Isovalent. Thomas Graf was at Cisco prior to building Isovalent (where I believe he was working on eBPF stuff too). Their series A had Cisco in it: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/covalent-io-series-a--7d4b7999 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/covalent-io-series-.... 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-defends-155955255.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-ciscos-star-engineers-def...
- fuzztester 3y agoThis is a somewhat common startup acquisition pattern; seen it before many times, and not just by Cisco: >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.
- rickysarora 3y agoany guesses on what Cisco paid for them?
- bg24 3y agoI think it is a good outcome for Cilium. With the extent of open-source, it would have been difficult to grow their ARR. Good outcome imho, because Cisco is a networking company at heart and they know how to grow a network/security business.