The Ultimate Enterprise Cost-Saving Strategy: Buying the Company
Description
A screenshot of a comment thread from a minimalist, text-based forum, likely Hacker News. The first comment, by user 'reacharavindh', satirizes the acquisition of Splunk by Cisco. It reads: 'Somebody: Splunk has exorbitant prices and locked-in enterprise customers! Cisco: Oh these guys are just like us. Better buy them up. We know this business.' This comment humorously suggests that Cisco's motivation for the acquisition was a shared business model of high prices and vendor lock-in. A nested reply from user 'petetnt' delivers the punchline: 'It's apparently cheaper to buy Splunk than to a buy Splunk license.' This witty remark exaggerates the notoriously high cost of Splunk's enterprise licenses, joking that the multi-billion dollar price of acquiring the entire company is a more economical choice. The meme resonates with senior engineers and tech leaders who have experienced the pain of enterprise software procurement
Comments
7Comment deleted
Cisco's CFO approved the Splunk acquisition after seeing the renewal quote for their internal cluster and realizing a hostile takeover was the cheaper option
FinOps discovered that at 100 TB/day of logs the spend curve flips from “upgrade Splunk ingest” to “file an HSR and acquire the vendor,” so please keep log.level firmly at WARN
The only thing more expensive than migrating off Splunk is staying on Splunk, unless you're Cisco, in which case the cheapest option is becoming Splunk
When your enterprise logging solution costs so much per GB that acquiring the entire company for $28 billion starts looking like the budget-friendly option. Cisco's accountants probably ran the numbers on their own Splunk bill and realized they could just buy the invoice generator instead
Splunk: The only SaaS where buying the company unlocks the free tier
Splunk: the only vendor whose volume discount is negotiated by Corporate Development, not Procurement
At a few hundred terabytes a day, procurement learned the only Splunk discount that scales is called M&A as a Service