The IT infrastructure business is quite confusing right now...we can help

Having been around the IT infrastructure business for almost my entire career, I feel like I'm qualified to make some pretty informed observations about things relating to IT.  Frankly, things are up in the air on a lot of fronts, and it's no surprise that IT decision makers are confused.

Let's start with VMware being acquired by Broadcom.  Well, that one purchase has caused much consternation on the part of end users, as well as VMware's resellers and alliance partners, like Dell and HPE.  End users are ticked off about the price increases and being forced into bundled products that they have only a need for one small part of the product, but now have to pay for the whole thing.  Partners all went around and renewed VMware products early, so now there's not a lot of VMware business for them this year.  They urged their end user customers to go longer term to keep access to the "old" products at what were expected to be lower costs.  As long as Broadcom continues to update the products this might have been a good strategy but time will tell.

Meanwhile, Dell and HPE have both announced plans to introduce their own hypervisor, so that their customers will have a choice to move off VMware and not be beholden to Broadcom.  All of this is happening when the market is moving towards containerization in additional to virtualization, and containerization is growing much faster than virtualization.  So who knows if that's a good move or not?  It could be vaporware, for all we know.

My company, Roundstone Solutions, is a partner of Nutanix, and it's the majority of what we do every day.  We know the platform well, but candidly, many of their announcements are confusing, as well.  At the same time as Dell is saying they want to develop a new hypervisor, they've entered into a new partnership with Nutanix for HCI using existing Dell hardware.  Confused yet?

While all of this is going on, end users keep falling for the allure of "moving things to the Cloud" which is code for putting applications into AWS, Azure, and GCP at typically double the cost of what the workloads could be run on-premises.  Disclaimer...I believe that some workloads belong in the Cloud...just not most of them.

It's amazing that this is still happening...I thought for sure that by now organizations would have audited the higher costs and additional function the Public Cloud promised and forced changes.  We're seeing some of that happen, but people don't usually publicize their failures, do they?  Seriously, in your personal life how often do you and your partner say "let's double our cost of living for no real appreciable improvement?"  I'm guessing never.

Look, we can help with all of this.  It starts with doing your homework.  Most of you acquire IT infrastructure once in awhile; we are involved with it every day.  We've continually advocated doing your homework in advance of making a decision.  Simply saying "we're moving to the cloud" might make you think you're being smart, but without having done an analysis (the homework), it's pretty dumb.  Just calling it like I see it.

As you might be able to tell, we're pretty candid at Roundstone Solutions.  Which, in this time of confusion, is needed.  Reach out and we'll have a conversation.  If you think we're full of it, tell us and go in a different direction.  But that's not likely...you'll be impressed by the depth of our knowledge, and the common sense approach we use.  And we'll show you how to save a fair amount of money.

What are you waiting for?