Specialist on specialist on specialist all with competing products and overlapping commisions, fighting for the shrinking On Prem market. It's inevitable that this is reduced. We could do this with half the staff if they just fixed the goaling, merged Server and Storage and started leveraging the broader BU's into bid
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The argument about cloud being cheaper is very valid but it doesnt matter, the on prem market has decreased and sales targets will be harder and harder
Hardware tin vendors cannot sustain huge sales forces of multiple technical specialists for small deals. Customers arent buying $3m DCs, they are buying a couple of hundred grand in HCI after a very protracted review then consuming services as they need it. Or they are using a solution providers DC or cloud. So they are consolidating off their own DC into someone elses managed service cutting staff in the process.
All tin vendors will need to adjust as headcount is looking for things to do.
I'm not so sure about that. As a cloud seller since the genesis of cloud computing I can tell you, even doing it the traditional route (Dell servers/EMC storage/Cisco switches in a colo facility) it's often cheaper to do it on prem when you look at 36 month cost of ownership. Cloud is not cheap, in fact, depending on the vendor, it can be VERY expensive. Now this is specific to IaaS, when you start looking at SaaS, IMHO, the equation changes and it can be significantly less expensive. But, the flip side of that, if you compare apples to apples, instead of pitting a Dell/EMC/Cisco/VMware stack against something like EC2 you do it all with white box servers and a free/open source hypervisor? The cost is dramatically lower to do it in your own DC. There's a reason the "big 3" cloud vendors post record profits Q/Q and it is most certainly NOT because it's a low cost option, especially if you have a full time workload (traditional IT). The equation changes to favor cloud heavily if you only need sporadic compute/storage resources, but that's not the majority of large enterprises today, and likely won't be for the next 10 years. IMHO, of course.
"No one is buying Data Centres anymore - I wouldn't go that far. Oracle is still selling SuperClusters. and from what I have heard the numbers are good. Not everyone wants to jump into the cloud. But On Prem's days of ruling are over."
The quantity of customers doing it is far lower than before and if they are they are buying far less and taking far longer to debate it. Deals that would normally be $2-3m are now 100k . . meaning they cant sustain massive sales forces of on prem and hybrid sales people when customers are buying small local clusters to bounce to a cloud . . or just consuming cloud. No one buys dedicated storage, they are using shared cloud or HCI. It's an old model of sales and they have to change which will mean big decisions around staff and direction for all major tin vendors
"No one is buying Data Centres anymore"
I wouldn't go that far. Oracle is still selling SuperClusters. and from what I have heard the numbers are good. Not everyone wants to jump into the cloud. But On Prem's days of ruling are over.
I'm not a finance person, what does this really mean?
Going to be ugly. Those who think no layoff is just plain stupid
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-13/credit-markets-are-bracing-for-something-bad
https://www.barrons.com/articles/imf-warns-of-possible-trouble-ahead-for-u-s-corporate-bonds-1492632701
who needs layoff if your good people are leaving by the bulk every other day.
On Prem = On Premisis. EG . Not in the cloud. The traditional sales force selling tin basically. Many deals now are the sc-aps that arent being pushed to cloud. (No one is buying Data Centres anymore). Then you have 7 or more highly paid Specialists all trying to shape it their way to get paid or sit on the meeting to look busy.
Anyone in management can see this overhead and irony
OK, have to ask what is On Prem?