[nyc640]

A commenter on the thread mentioned the VMWare price hikes, so it could be as simple as IBM sensing an opportunity to poach customers from VMWare (probably more overlap in potential customers than AWS/GCP/Azure) and aggressively selling OpenShift to the C-suite with a promise of "if we can get a deal done this year, we'll give you heavily discounted pricing for X years".

It does seem a bit strange that all of these requests supposedly come specifically "from the CEO" though, as I would expect most companies would have CTOs making purchase decisions like this.

[rootsudo]

Not strange at all, CEO and Finance talk about budget. If cost is going to 10x, by doing nothing then it is going to be an quick decision. Most CTO's would've brought it up in the last quarter and be working on it now.

This reddit post is just a late canary in the minefield that shows a what one sysadmin is doing at one MSP.

[jhickok]

Unless something has changed recently, IBM doesn't push OpenShift but rather Cloud Paks which are tailored solutions built on OpenShift. IBM sellers don't get paid on vanilla OpenShift.

I think if the story is to believed, the Red Hat sellers dedicated to big Fortune 500 accounts were given marching orders to reach out about recent negative publicity regarding vmware and the c-suite is asking for pricing/feature comparisons. This doesn't seem sudden or disturbing but rather what happens multiple times a year.