[alephnerd]

> is a huge gift to the competition

The issue is the competition does the same thing.

When you buy Enterprise SaaS products (DB, Cybersecurity, Cloud, Networking, Infra) these are backbone products.

If you can't afford to spend $300k a year on a product, you can't afford to hire the in-house staff needed to manage an OSS or internally built product.

There's a reason why Project Borg/K8s was invented by Google, not your local MSP, and why PostgreSQL's largest sponsors are AWS, Fujitsu, Google, Microsoft, NTT, and Broadcom.

And this is why minnows go to MSPs.

[p_l]

The thing is = Broadcom is cutting off the MSPs, too.

Compare it with MS strategy since pretty much 1990 - they not only had offerings centered at small business, and medium business - they also didn't drop them once they truly got into the big league with Windows 2000 and Active Directory (yes, that was very much a watershed moment).

It can be a bit complicated to buy at the lowest end, but it's also been unspoken policy of them to somewhat tolerate software piracy so long as it didn't really impact sales - as well as offering great deals for people who could then get into track to get them more sales over time.

Some companies will cludge together things in house. Some people will learn and make MSPs and VARs. Some companies will become high value clients with white glove treatment from MS directly or designated support partners.

But they always made it so that they could get themselves an in without having to fight a big honking procurement contract to land a "whale".

As for 300k USD a year - outside of Silly Valley, it can be enough money to get custom linux distro developed and supported. Hell, with 300k USD/year, I could get a team to build and support a replacement for all core parts of VMware (compute, storage, networking). And if we didn't need to replicate same level because we were a smaller client and didn't need hyperconverged setup, we could do it for less.

[alephnerd]

> As for 300k USD a year - outside of Silly Valley, it can be enough money to get custom linux distro developed and supported

Erm, not really. One of my portfolio firms landed a multiyear runtime security contract in the Midwest around that much. And it was a mid-market prospect.

If a runtime security contract can land for that alone, including comprehensive Linux distro support will break 7 figures (at least based on the RHEL quote the customer has)

> it's also been unspoken policy of them to somewhat tolerate software piracy so long as it didn't really impact sales - as well as offering great deals for people who could then get into track to get them more sales over time

There's a reason why every vendor is moving to a SaaS and metric driven workflow. We can attribute which customers are break their contracts and gladly extracting a pound of their flesh for breaking the contract (as they would with us)

Even MSPs are consolidating, and there's a reason vendors like working with a Presidio type firm.

[p_l]

> If a runtime security contract can land for that alone, including comprehensive Linux distro support will break 7 figures (at least based on the RHEL quote the customer has)

The world does not end at US borders. Not everyone can exploit that, but it does not mean there's no market to be exploited.

> There's a reason why every vendor is moving to a SaaS and metric driven workflow. We can attribute which customers are break their contracts and gladly extracting a pound of their flesh for breaking the contract (as they would with us)

Microsoft might not have had the metrics originally, but to this day they play the game of getting people hooked on using their products licensed or not, and for all I heard or experienced they never went for inane extraction of pounds of flesh like Oracle does - which I suspect is because someone there might understand how it results in priority 1 becoming "how do we get rid of Oracle products", especially if the lock-in isn't too deep.

> Even MSPs are consolidating, and there's a reason vendors like working with a Presidio type firm.

A big issue with Broadcom strategy is that they are cutting off significant chunk of MSPs as well and preventing a healthy ecosystem of those with how they are changing licensing.