[dangus]

Are 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?

[xwolfi]

I 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]

Spot 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]

We 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.

[andrewflnr]

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?

Personally I can't say if that's actually happening with Splunk, but it's a very plausible scenario.

[bvirb]

I'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.

[frankchn]

> 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]

Yes 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!

[baq]

That'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]

> 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]

I’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]

It 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]

A question: where did the hobbyist/small business crowd go?

[chucky_z]

Greylog. ELK.

I think modern solutions would be any of the recent Clickhouse based solutions.

Loki exists but it seems to have a tragically small market share.

[yetanotherloss]

Kibana and Graylog on top of elastic/opensearch. Even the commerical licenses on those are usually a tiny fraction of splunk's costs, and Graylog does enough for free that it's a much easier path to stand that up and then buy the correlation functionality if you really need it.

For some organizations what Splunk does well is important but for most of them they really only need much more basic log aggregation and analysis tools.

[hdmoore]

The move to make all free instances unauthenticated (and effectively RCE-aaS) put a dent in that use.

[tyingq]

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.

Consider, for example, that Akamai's revenues are sitting in a plateau over the last 5 years, while Cloudflare is moving up.

[alephnerd]

> 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

[tyingq]

How 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".

[alephnerd]

That wasn't aimed at you. I meant the general discourse of Enterprise Sales and GTM on HN is filled with FUD

[hexo]

Probably deserved. GTM is what, google tag manager?

[tyingq]

I imagine "go to market".

[mardifoufs]

I am super interested! Enterprise is like a rabbit hole to me

[nemo]

>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.

[adrr]

Because 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.

[manicennui]

I doubt that the parent has any idea what "medium-sized" means. A few million in revenue is not medium sized.

[liveoneggs]

I mean 50 - 500 person companies

[moneywoes]

do they not want to onboard these customers and then grow with them