[unabridged]

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]

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?

[nimbius]

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.

[nousermane]

Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.

[squarefoot]

> 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.

[yobbo]

> 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.

[unabridged]

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.

[indymike]

> 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.

[tnel77]

Because Linux is fun! /s

[JohnJamesRambo]

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?

[numlocked]

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.

[throwaway19423]

I'm in a senior position but not CEO. I'd pay VMware for virtualization as it just works compared to the complexity of opensource solutions. For endpoint mgmt, I'm curious about your use case? Is it about managing virtual endpoints in the cloud, on-prem servers (physical or virtual) or are you talking about laptops/workstations?

[sbf501]

Grove.co is a great example because it is totally not a software company. Is your role as CTO primarily the ERP & storefront, or just one or the other? I'm not following what you mean by endpoint (other than "storefront" because ERP would all be a SaaS right?)

[unabridged]

It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login, data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud apis) for at most $20 a month per user.

[MrBuddyCasino]

whats an „endpoint management solution“

[mrweasel]

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]

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]

Also factor in the people trained to use VMware. There is always a pool of individuals to hire.

[jodrellblank]

> "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".

[vinyl7]

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]

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.

[stjohnswarts]

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.

[cmckn]

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.

[sleepdreamy]

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]

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.

[jnovek]

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]

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.

[rr808]

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.

[ProAm]

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.

[scarface74]

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/

I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.

[gautamdivgi]

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.

[burnte]

> 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]

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

[bonzini]

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]

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.

[elzbardico]

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

[unixhero]

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.

[geodel]

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