[yokaze]

> Large customers are sticky. You can't migrate your hypervisor or cloud provider overnight. These are multi-year projects.

Yes, but that scale, everything is an multi-year effort. The contracts likely as well. That doesn't mean, it's not going to happen.

And it's not like all has to happen in one go.

So before you were all in VMware, and that vendor is practically promising to hike up the prices to make you bleed.

What are you gonna do?

I'd rather start early to have a migration path, even if it is just for negotiation purposes. And if it's someone who has the resources to that, it's large customers.

[alephnerd]

When you have a sticky existing customer who's about to churn, you end up discounting below the price of the migration, then slowly rise the cost again, then do the same thing again (this is easy because margins are 80% in our industry).

All vendors do this - you can't escape it. This is why companies began leaving for the Cloud - sure it's upfront more expensive, but the negotiations are not as protracted.

[benterix]

> All vendors do this - you can't escape it. This is why companies began leaving for the Cloud - sure it's upfront more expensive, but the negotiations are not as protracted.

I don't get your point here: if you mean the public cloud, it's the synonym of vendor lock-in now.

[alephnerd]

Everything is vendor lock-in. The difference is negotiations are not as protracted, the muscle to develop a multi-cloud strategy is fairly well built in our industry, AND cloud purchasing offers multiple different styles of billing (eg. subscription driven, multiyear, credit driven, etc) whereas with on-prem you have only a single type of billing model.

[markus_zhang]

Sorry just to clarify, leave for the cloud or leave cloud? Looks like in this case it is indeed leave for the cloud (leave VMs) but I also heard a lot about leaving cloud for self hosting.

[alephnerd]

Leaving/left for the cloud. There is some scaling down of cloud resources for self hosting, but as a whole all CSPs have seen growth in users across all buckets.

On-prem doesn't give you flexibility, and leaves you open to getting arm twisted by vendors. Similar stuff happens in cloud ofc, but it's easier to implement a multi-cloud strategy than a multi-hypervisor strategy.

[markus_zhang]

Gotcha, thanks for the insight.

[mbesto]

Also, where are ESXI customers at the enterprise level going to go? Do we really think they're going to magically switch over to HyperV (and get Win admins) or Proxmox (and have a lack of IBM-enterprise level support)?

[yokaze]

Funny that you say that. In my personal experience, the degree of support is one of the reasons to switch. Like any large vendor, it takes almost more time to convince them that it there is a problem, then it would take to fix it, if you have the technical skills in house. (That was enough for Google to switch to their own switches).

Haven't worked yet with IBM, but if they are of equal level, then I'd rather avoid them.

But since you say IBM, they have IBM Cloud Manager, and through Redhat also an Openstack offer, and with Openshift a K8S offer. Various vendors offer either or both.

There are also companies which operate internal cloud providers for other companies. Various public cloud providers offer you to operate your datacenter with their API in-hose.

Yes, it comes with their hardware, but guess what, in three years chances are half of your hardware is deprecated and has been replaced anyway.

Yes, all that requires effort. Considerable effort. But it is a one-time effort (i.e. fixed costs) compared to a X-fold increase of licensing costs. So, you look at the ROI, consider the risk of having that degree of exposure, and guess what...

To reiterate: It doesn't have to be all in one go, it doesn't mean it has to be all of it. Maybe some of your payload will always stay on vmware, but thinking you can ask the big companies for 20x the license costs, and expect 20x the revenue is rather odd.

You may guess, where I know that from.

[mbesto]

Let me say it differently - from what company does the CIO procure from so he doesn't get fired because he can't call up a company to support his corporate ERP running on VMs?

[nunez]

VMware isn't just VMs. They are deep, deep, deep in the stack at some places. There isn't a realistic migration path away from VMware for the customers that Broadcom is interested in keeping. Or, put another way, the time it will take for those customers to move away from VMware (which they won't) will take Broadcom to make their money back on this acquisition a few times over.