I 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."<p>Most people assume that this sort of demand would 'kill the deal' but sometimes there are exceptions.<p>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.<p>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.
Interesting given the prior acquisition of AppDynamics. If true, I think they should have taken the deal.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.
I 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:<p>[X] Server / cloud resource monitoring and alerting [<a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/dashboarding/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datadoghq.com/dashboarding/</a>]<p>[X] Logging [<a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/</a>]<p>[X] APM (application performance) [<a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/</a>]<p>[X] HTTP/API endpoint checks and alerts [<a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/</a>]
Interesting 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.
People 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.<p>Either way, I've had a worse experience with Cisco products so good for them saying no.
I 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.
Unpopular 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.
Wow. 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 <i>more than 7 Billion dollars</i>. I guess when you're offered that much money, it's hard not to get greedy.