The development costs are OTC that are amortised during the life of the solution. Whereas in xAAS, they are MRC. The longer your tech refresh cycle, the cheaper it is. It's inherent to the pricing model.
Also when you get down to the cruz if it, these solutions (like openstack or vSphere), are software platform that provides similar features. There's not much development costs, it's just software licensing and PS.
In terms of operations, it's not like you can get rid of sysadmins, they just morphed into DevOps.
>Probably double that once you add in fully-loaded costs as well as the compensation for ~2 managers to manage them.
You might as well add all sorts of additional costs such as egress charges on exit and cloud consultancy.
Yes, you have to manage the hardware, and Y doesn’t automatically go to zero for year two, but the convenience of the cloud isn’t always cost effective. Don’t get caught up with the details. The 2 million figure doesn’t matter as much. It’s finding that inflection point and making the better business decision.
The fallacy is comparing hardware costs to services cost. The hardware is the cheap part.
When you run your own system, you have to develop the entire system up front and maintain it on the backend. The hardware is cheap by comparison to the salaries and development costs you pay.
> $2 million should get you a team of 10 sysadmins and devops engineers.
Probably double that once you add in fully-loaded costs as well as the compensation for ~2 managers to manage them.