| 60k is likely very low for this kind of support. The people calling in are generally IT professionals that have issues a script won't solve. When I worked with VMWare, it also wasn't uncommon for us to have support on site. If we were doing a big migration or had a significant issue, they'd send someone out for a week+. They likely paid a premium to have support willing to travel for significant spans of time, plus now they're paying for hotels, daily stipends, etc. Then you need labs for engineers to try to replicate problems, office space, general overhead like taxes and payroll providers, etc. Then there's costs to the platform itself from some customers. E.g. small customers tend to be less homogenous. Every Fortune 500 has a SAN, many small companies don't. Now you need an "integrates with EMC" storage option for big companies, and an "integrates with everything else" option for small companies. Big companies want a service mesh, small companies want a billion different networking configurations, etc. Basically big companies tend to resemble each other and view their differences as a competitive advantage they will pay their vendors to support so they can keep. Small customers diverge a lot, don't want to and/or can't afford to pay for the changes they need, and are generally more price-sensitive due to their ability and ability to switch vendors. So simultaneously the small clients are profitable, but at a lower margin than bigger customers, and more willing to migrate away. Rather than taking a risk that they can do enough development to keep the small customers, they'd rather double down on the customers that can't switch, raise their margins, and cut their risk. |