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Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ... To me it

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ... To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

ghc 4y ago
Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office. It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
- nousermane 4y ago
  Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?
  - jjice 4y ago
    > Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it. Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
    - yobbo 4y ago
      > I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one. You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig! And so on ...
      - jnovek 4y ago
        I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point. For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option. For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
- tnel77 4y ago
  Because Linux is fun! /s
- squarefoot 4y ago
  > Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    > if non IT companies had their own IT department I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people. "Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
  - mfer 4y ago
    Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT department and have been hit. But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those. Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    I work in this area and it’s the opposite. Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
- nimbius 4y ago
  but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run. Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC. And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business. "enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
  - amenod 4y ago
    I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea) The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
- yobbo 4y ago
  > but needs software to run its business In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle. Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged. At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    > Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google. That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
    - yobbo 4y ago
      People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
      - hnarn 4y ago
        Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time? The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market. I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.
- indymike 4y ago
  > Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
  - adrr 4y ago
    If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.
  - noizejoy 4y ago
    > … perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines. Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it. And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions. And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by. And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership. So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
- unabridged 4y ago
  Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.
cmckn 4y ago
Throwing money at a problem is an easy thing to do, if you’ve got the money. Lock-in sucks, but having someone to blame doesn’t. A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.
vinyl7 4y ago
It's a big plus in the corporate world to be able to outsource support. It's worth it for companies to pay VMWare, Microsoft, etc. larges sums of money for support contracts so they have someone to call when things break. While Microsoft sells Windows Server, they also try really hard to add on support contracts with it. Paying several thousand dollars a year for a support contract is probably cheaper than paying salary+benefits for someone within the company to maintain it, and you get the façade of talking directly to people who know the product inside and out
- silvestrov 4y ago
  Sometimes for me it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits and techies needs a translation layer between them and anyone else.
mrweasel 4y ago
We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter, cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost of doing the migration. I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.
- jve 4y ago
  Working in a Data Center, we provide various services, including Dedicated Cloud and Shared Cloud. We also evaluated OpenStack years ago... yes, we came to the same conclusion and just use VMWare.
- dangerboysteve 4y ago
  Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is always a pool of individuals to hire.
numlocked 4y ago
I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  whats an „endpoint management solution“
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    Access control/management for corporate networks and networked resources.
  - buro9 4y ago
    Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to access your network/services/applications and execute these commands?" https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-security/endpoint-management/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur... (the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.html https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )
    - sbf501 4y ago
      That's really interesting. So a company would hire Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints, make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide the service to manage the assets and their connectivity? Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do all of this if I could hire some experts with concentrated knowledge.
      - bsagdiyev 4y ago
        Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that realistically. I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.
sleepdreamy 4y ago
As someone who works in the MSP space, Enterprise basically runs this country from a business perspective. I'm not even kidding. Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.
ghaff 4y ago
Whether or not those specific companies are good deals absent legacy requirements, how many engineers can you hire for that $100K+ to DIY? And how are you going to convince your auditors that you're taking appropriate steps to mitigate your risk? Companies broadly need to make build vs. buy decisions about a lot of things and they should generally be pretty selective about what they build.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
There is a whole world outside of silicon valley, crypto, and HN startups. There are huge companies that don't care a fart about open source, the newest buzzwords, or it's go/rust/java or c++. They want something they can get a full solutions from and that is companies like vmware, oracle, IBM, Dell. They want support from those corps when things fail and it's costing them millions of dollars per hour when the system breaks.
deleted 4y ago
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ProAm 4y ago
One thing you are paying for is maturity (in both software and the engineers) and predictable behavior. When you need to run a business sometimes (almost all the time) it's easier to pay people to get out of your way so you can execute. Execution is everything in running a successful and profitable business. Don't be penny foolish.
unixhero 4y ago
The fat bosses above me get more cred by buying something expensive and ha ing everything outsourced, than doing something brilliant and inventing the future. This is the reason for it. I'm this way the fat bosses are left alone and can go home to their families, go on holidays, cabins and whatnot with not a gram of risk and uncertainty.
jnovek 4y ago
Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation: Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?” It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing something that could largely be outsourced. You have the developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary and benefits and some small slice of attention up the management chain and across other functional groups like HR. And it's just one more distraction from the things that actually matter to running the business.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    Everything in this conversation is dancing around the same thing: core competency. Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are. As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business. Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc. There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.
elzbardico 4y ago
Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with boring technologies)
geodel 4y ago
Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.
bonzini 4y ago
Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And when you outsource it - you make finding that next one person someone else’s problem. I’ve had to hire that “one person” before. It’s a pain. And while we were looking for that one person, I had to juggle my day job (software development) with net ops. Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it’s kind of my thing.
gautamdivgi 4y ago
Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers, serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise software" as well. It's just different enterprises.
rr808 4y ago
I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly" You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways. VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware. It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else". You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".
eatYourFood 4y ago
scarface74 4y ago
You should always outsource any part of your business that is not part of your core competency and doesn’t give you a competitive advantage - ie “the undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US. By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud. I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo. I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”. I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS. Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners. As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”. https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/ https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/ I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.
burnte 4y ago
> To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.
alar44 4y ago
Really? I work for a manufacturing company. We lose about $50k/hr if systems are down. Paying for vendor support is a fucking no brainer. "Use proxmox" - fucking lol

ghc 4y ago

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office. It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?

nousermane 4y ago
Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
- FredPret 4y ago
  I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?
- jjice 4y ago
  > Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it. Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    > I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one. You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig! And so on ...
    - jnovek 4y ago
      I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point. For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option. For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
tnel77 4y ago
Because Linux is fun! /s
squarefoot 4y ago
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > if non IT companies had their own IT department I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people. "Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
- mfer 4y ago
  Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT department and have been hit. But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those. Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  I work in this area and it’s the opposite. Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
nimbius 4y ago
but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run. Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC. And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business. "enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
- amenod 4y ago
  I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea) The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
yobbo 4y ago
> but needs software to run its business In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle. Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged. At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google. That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
    - hnarn 4y ago
      Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time? The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market. I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.
indymike 4y ago
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
- adrr 4y ago
  If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > … perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines. Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it. And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions. And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by. And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership. So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
unabridged 4y ago
Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.

cmckn 4y ago

Throwing money at a problem is an easy thing to do, if you’ve got the money. Lock-in sucks, but having someone to blame doesn’t. A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.

vinyl7 4y ago

It's a big plus in the corporate world to be able to outsource support. It's worth it for companies to pay VMWare, Microsoft, etc. larges sums of money for support contracts so they have someone to call when things break. While Microsoft sells Windows Server, they also try really hard to add on support contracts with it. Paying several thousand dollars a year for a support contract is probably cheaper than paying salary+benefits for someone within the company to maintain it, and you get the façade of talking directly to people who know the product inside and out

silvestrov 4y ago
Sometimes for me it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it seems like they pay to "get the façade of talking directly to people in suits" rather than having to deal with technies Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits and techies needs a translation layer between them and anyone else.

mrweasel 4y ago

We did the math at my previous employer. The cost of running OpenStack, in terms of training and day to day operations was higher than just paying VMware their licens fee. We even had a guy from RedHat help us do the cost analysis, didn't matter, cheaper to just pay VMware. This didn't even include the cost of doing the migration. I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.

jve 4y ago
Working in a Data Center, we provide various services, including Dedicated Cloud and Shared Cloud. We also evaluated OpenStack years ago... yes, we came to the same conclusion and just use VMWare.
dangerboysteve 4y ago
Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is always a pool of individuals to hire.

numlocked 4y ago

I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
whats an „endpoint management solution“
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  Access control/management for corporate networks and networked resources.
- buro9 4y ago
  Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to access your network/services/applications and execute these commands?" https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-security/endpoint-management/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur... (the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.html https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )
  - sbf501 4y ago
    That's really interesting. So a company would hire Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints, make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide the service to manage the assets and their connectivity? Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do all of this if I could hire some experts with concentrated knowledge.
    - bsagdiyev 4y ago
      Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that realistically. I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.

sleepdreamy 4y ago

As someone who works in the MSP space, Enterprise basically runs this country from a business perspective. I'm not even kidding. Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.

ghaff 4y ago

Whether or not those specific companies are good deals absent legacy requirements, how many engineers can you hire for that $100K+ to DIY? And how are you going to convince your auditors that you're taking appropriate steps to mitigate your risk? Companies broadly need to make build vs. buy decisions about a lot of things and they should generally be pretty selective about what they build.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

There is a whole world outside of silicon valley, crypto, and HN startups. There are huge companies that don't care a fart about open source, the newest buzzwords, or it's go/rust/java or c++. They want something they can get a full solutions from and that is companies like vmware, oracle, IBM, Dell. They want support from those corps when things fail and it's costing them millions of dollars per hour when the system breaks.

deleted 4y ago

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ProAm 4y ago

One thing you are paying for is maturity (in both software and the engineers) and predictable behavior. When you need to run a business sometimes (almost all the time) it's easier to pay people to get out of your way so you can execute. Execution is everything in running a successful and profitable business. Don't be penny foolish.

unixhero 4y ago

The fat bosses above me get more cred by buying something expensive and ha ing everything outsourced, than doing something brilliant and inventing the future. This is the reason for it. I'm this way the fat bosses are left alone and can go home to their families, go on holidays, cabins and whatnot with not a gram of risk and uncertainty.

jnovek 4y ago

Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation: Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?” It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.

ghaff 4y ago
Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing something that could largely be outsourced. You have the developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary and benefits and some small slice of attention up the management chain and across other functional groups like HR. And it's just one more distraction from the things that actually matter to running the business.
- jnovek 4y ago
  Everything in this conversation is dancing around the same thing: core competency. Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are. As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business. Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc. There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.

elzbardico 4y ago

Legacy. Interoperability with other similar companies. Manpower requirements (far easier to onboard a junior developer with boring technologies)

geodel 4y ago

Yeah, a lot of companies which are raising world's consciousness wouldn't buy the grubby enterprise software.

bonzini 4y ago

Hire one person less and you've already broken even. Applies just the same to to any managed service on the cloud, to Outlook365 instead of your own email server, etc.

scarface74 4y ago
And when you outsource it - you make finding that next one person someone else’s problem. I’ve had to hire that “one person” before. It’s a pain. And while we were looking for that one person, I had to juggle my day job (software development) with net ops. Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it’s kind of my thing.

gautamdivgi 4y ago

Newer companies don't deal with Linux directly either. The vast majority use managed cloud services (kubernetes, containers, serverless, managed databases, etc.). For all practical purposes - most of the start-up players use "enterprise software" as well. It's just different enterprises.

rr808 4y ago

I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly" You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways. VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware. It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else". You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".

eatYourFood 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

You should always outsource any part of your business that is not part of your core competency and doesn’t give you a competitive advantage - ie “the undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US. By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud. I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo. I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”. I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS. Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners. As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”. https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/ https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/ I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.

burnte 4y ago

> To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.

alar44 4y ago

Really? I work for a manufacturing company. We lose about $50k/hr if systems are down. Paying for vendor support is a fucking no brainer. "Use proxmox" - fucking lol