[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?