Re: Lies, damn lies and bundling...
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate. There are a few misconceptions in there and I would like to correct them
* Storage vendors might be able to finance a deal with a possible follow up deal and it might have been possible to do this under old accounting rules but Cisco does not do that. I can't speak for what happened perhaps ten years ago but there is no such thing as a negative margin deal. Doesn't matter if it is a single SKU or the entire deal, the controllers will nix it during discount approval.
* The HX Data Platform is a software subscription per controller and per year. You stop subscribing you stop using. During the subscription you are entitled to support and upgrades. This is not some crazy stuff, this is how software is sold nowadays. If the customer is no longer satisfied they stop subscribing and use the HX nodes (which are full blown UCS servers and not some weird appliances) with some other SDS, like VSAN, Pivot3, or MS Storage Spaces Direct for instance. This gives the customer flexibility to choose the optimal platform for their use case and it keeps Cisco on their toes to deliver features and support that make it worthwhile to keep subscribing. There is no real stickiness in the SDS layer, the customer can migrate quite quickly into another cluster, right?
* Thank you for identifying as Vmware employee. However, I have to call you out on omitting your employer from the examples of companies that throw in free stuff or change their compensation model to speed up or enable market adoption of certain product ranges. VSAN was given away for the first several hundred customers. It was four years or so ago when VMW finally had VSAN dedicated overlay sales reps. NSX was given away like skittles because no-one wanted to pay and use it, the first thousand installs were either snuck onto the BOM as seeds or given away. And let's not even go down the route of VMW reps no longer getting commission for naked vSphere sales. In order to get paid they had to sell the VSOM bundle so they discounted it so hard it ended up being the same price like VSP EPL.
I have no qualms with you guys, but please, VMW has been the -worst- offender in seeding products, you can't possibly call the kettle black. With that said, using your market position and revenue streams to enable market adoption of a product is just normal. Apparently it's only bad when the other guys are doing it.
* As to HX being sold or seeded, it's selling very well. Perhaps not as well as VxRail (which IMHO has fatal design flaws, not in the product but VCE's engineering structure) but already as good as Nutanix, and that's after one year on the market. People are slowly starting to understand the fact that HX is not a separate product or appliance but merely an option to UCS. It will take a while for the implications to fully transpire but the picture is MUCH bigger than just software defined storage.