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Comment by helldritch | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't.

From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact

They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.

By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.

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>From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form

7 clicks? I count a single click to basic prices and two clicks to full pdf pricelist?

https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...

Germany is generally quite corporate. Yes, there is a large number of small, family owned, niche, businesses, but those don't really play in the IT space that much.

Outside of that, it's just the Deutsche Banks, Daimlers, Bosches and Bayers of the world.

And those are in general much more rigid than the equivalent US companies.

Which in the field of software is suicide. There's a reason we call it "software".

A bit more than half of the added value in Germany is created by companies with less than 500 employees and less than €50M yearly turnover (Mittelstand). There is in fact a lot of specialized machinery vendors providing significant value.

Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

> Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

I'd argue that SMEs are the ideal market for cloud services.

Small shops with even smaller teams comprised of jack-of-all-trades are willing to pay a hefty premium for managed services that allow their teams for get things done without having to do everything themselves.

Once your company grows beyond the definition of a SME, its able to roll their own infrastructure and do their thing in more cost-effective ways that don't involve handing over their core business to external and even foreign companies.

At the beginning, then they hire the likes of HCL, Infosys, Wipro, TCS,.... because IT isn't their core business, and C levels see it as a cost center and distraction.

Eventually the few devs left get "sold" to the contracting company, with the architects left as management for the contractors.

Have seen this happening already several times since 2007.

Which is why most of them hire consulting shops, as they see IT as a pure cost center.

The irony is that a lot of the consulting shops that specialize in assisting the mittelstand are utterly horrendous money pits. In my capacity as CTO for a german mittelstand company I have had to fire over 80% of the consulting shops i worked with for either blatant incompetence (developing a plugin that fits none of the design document, deploying it straight to production and in the process blowing up the entire API) or insane overcharging (24 hours of billed work for an adjustment that took me less than an hour of time to reimplement when the next update inevitably broke their adjustment). Everyone else I have talked to in the field has had similar experiences, with truly positive experiences being very rare, yet all the owners I talk to refuse to hire qualified in-house staff because the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable.

I have been doing consulting in Germany since 2007, after the Nokia sites in Germany went bust.

Usually it boils down to escalations where management gets some goodies from the offshore agency and then everything is good again, from management point of view, naturally.

Sounds like a halfway house of getting good working relations with contractors (as individuals not companies) might be a way out of this. I mean a working relationship, not just one based entirely on pay.

(disclaimer, worked as a contractor)

>the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable

Everything wrong with EU/German tech industry and why it will never catch up to the US, in a nutshell basically.

I guess Lidl targets German Mittelstand and DAX40 companies that already have outsourced to other cloud vendors or are in trouble with their legacy infrastructure.

How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.

Yeah, but the thing is, why would they switch away from AWS/Azure/... unless forced to by regulation? Existing cloud providers can scale to planet sized businesses.

The press releases by the Schwarz Group never even mention AWS, only indirectly by pointing out "digital sovereignty" when using a Germany-based company instead of a "foreign cloud hoster".

Calling Stackit an "AWS competitor" is most likely just editorialization by the 3rd party media.

The target customer are companies which are just barely moving away from self-hosted hardware.

Same reasons some folks in US have US-first mentality.

On top of obvious reason everybody knows damn too well - any US 3-letter agency doesn't give a nanofraction of a f*k about privacy and will use any data to gain any advantage, and specifically treats non US-citizens as subhumans when it comes to several human rights. Geolocation is only theoretical guarantee when stakes are so high.

Some are OK with that, some are not.

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