alt Hacker NewsI'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license, all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired, becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this quarter.
It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.
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> It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.
This always shocks me. I moved a company off of Salesforce in 45 days without a big issue. Day 1 was a bit slower but by day 2 folks were back at full speed. I've pulled off EMR migrations, ERP, accounting, etc. Moving is scary but doable.
Sometimes the execs will just pay rather than risk anything. At my last job I spent 7 months researching and building a migration plan for an app that was literally costing us customers/patients because it was so bad. Came back with a plan to move to a better system (of of 38 I researched), 6 month implementation, $800k/yr savings directly, another $400k indirectly from other tools we could cancel because the new tool would do all of that. The board ignored me and the rest of the C-suite, and went back to the vendor and signed a new agreement that INCREASED the yearly bill from $1.2m to $1.8m/yr. They completely cut me out of all the negotiations, I didn't even know it was happening, and I was the CIO. I quit, and they're now being sold at a firesale price.
The number of corporate IT departments got caught when VMWare licencing shifted from Dell EMC to Broadcom https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-v...