That's what I've been seeing in the industry as well, and it's honestly pretty disgusting.

We were evaluating this one particular I*M product for infrastructure management, which needed to be installed on top of this other I*M platform, which specifically required to be run on top of a particular version of RHEL and a particular version of OpenShift (no other k8s flavor would do), and they wanted it as dedicated instance on a dedicated physical server (so we couldn't use our existing OCP instance).

The overal system requirements to run the damn thing (which was ultimately just a Ruby app) was enormous, and the bill quoted was astronomical. Customising, upgrading and maintaining it would've been a massive PITA too.

Thankfully our C-suits had a rare lightbulb moment and the whole project was canned. But man, what a massive waste of time and effort it was, we spent hundreds of hours doing the discovery, design and coding for it. Heck, I even ended up having to learn Ruby just so we could customise the app, because I*M were incapable of delivering a decent product.

We then decided to go for another white labeled product from a competing vendor - which was admittedly a lot better than that I*M crap, but during our consultation with them it was decided that we'd need to port all our existing code and tooling to their proprietary platform - a lengthy process that would take several hundreds of hours of effort, with a migration plan set over the course of an year.

Personally, none of this makes any sense to me. I can understand why we wanted to go for a commercial solution, but with the amount of time, money, effort we'd be putting in, we could've just continued to develop our in-house product which leveraged existing opensource solutions like Ansible. The whole insurance for "getting hit by a bus" scenario and "vendor support" is so blown out of proportion these days.

I just want to go back to the good ol' days where being a sysadmin meant you were the one in control.