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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I can't find your email address, I'm interested in that idea :-)

Is there a way to contact you? I couldn't find it in your profile, unfortunately.

Believe me, I'm really not interested in taking part. For the product that was deprecated you can see here: https://www.ovirt.org/ https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-virtualization I wish you luck.

Yeah, Red Hat put a fair bit of money and investment into a direct VMware takeout using oVirt/RHV. Pretty much went nowhere. There's presumably some money int here post-Broadcom acquisition but Red Hat is mostly betting on Kubevirt and OpenShift. Some (presumably smaller-scale) customers will prefer more of a like-to-like lower-cost replacement but personally I wouldn't bet on it as a business.

Yeah, my feeling is that if you're a billion dollar business with associated high overheads, then a few million is not worth it. If you're a zero dollar start-up with focus and a tolerance for selling boring software to boring companies, then there's money in it.

I still remember something someone from IBM told me during my prior analyst gig. Don't remember the specific but something to do with Linux and Power I think. Basically, he said that if it's not a billion dollar opportunity it's not worth all the costs and distractions up and down the line to pursue.

You're right that the million dollar opportunity is a lot more interesting for a startup. Of course, it's also going to be a lot harder for that startup to displace VMware (which the potential customer probably is using). I'm not sure going after those crumbs is a terrible idea but there are already other option like Xen too.

I doubt doing oVirt is a million dollar idea. One of the biggest reasons for going with oVirt was redhat being behind it. rh will keep rhev on life support for its customers (thus staying in competition for a bit longer) and there are plenty other more popular opensource alternatives already. I mean, sure making millions isn't impossible, but you would not need good software so much, but good connections instead to make it work.

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