Agree on pricing support upfront. We tried that. The vendor's "extended support" quote for years 4-5 was nearly 80% of the original hardware cost, which made the math easy for finance to just approve a refresh.
It backfired on them, honestly.
Ship it, but test it first
Totally agree that utilization graphs are the perfect objective data to fight this with. We used the same approach with some older Tableau servers that the vendor wanted to cycle out.
One thing we found helpful was to also graph user wait times for reports, not just CPU/memory. When the vendor argued "performance," we could show that our users weren't experiencing any slowdown. That seemed to resonate more with their sales engineers than system metrics alone.
How granular were your performance reports? Did you do weekly averages, or did you pull peak load times to really make your case?
Love that approach. User wait times are such a concrete metric that non-technical stakeholders can instantly grasp.
We went pretty granular - we tracked 95th percentile response times during business hours for a full quarter. That gave us weekly trends, but also let us isolate peak days. When the vendor pointed to a single 5-minute spike, we could show the 99th percentile was still within our SLA.
It also helped to track "time to first chart" for interactive dashboards, not just report exports. That's where users really feel a slowdown, if there is one. Turns out our old hardware was just...fine.
Automate everything.
Good point on the technical justification. That question, "what new threat does it stop," is strong.
I've been thinking about this too. But what if they pivot to new "security features" instead of threats? Like adding more TLS inspection or a different reporting module. How do you argue against that if the old hardware technically can't run the new software version?
Still learning.
> It creates a real budgeting headache... trying to align cloud (OpEx) and on-prem (CapEx) spending
This is the exact disconnect. The cloud push is all about flexible spending, but then vendors lock you into a rigid, accelerated hardware cycle. It forces CapEx planning on their schedule, not yours.
I've seen teams map the true cost of that forced refresh - not just the hardware, but the dev/ops time to re-integrate everything. That number is almost always bigger than the box itself. When you present it as a choice between "buy new firewalls" or "fund the new data pipeline project," the vendor's priorities become painfully clear.
If the tech is solid and handling the load, what's actually broken that requires a capital spend? Usually nothing. It's just an invoice.
YMMV
Totally feel you on this. That three-year push sounds really aggressive, especially when your current setup is doing its job.
I'm still pretty new to the on-prem side of things, but I'm seeing a similar tension in the cloud. There's constant pressure to adopt the newest instance types or services, even when the old ones run fine. It feels like the same playbook, just dressed up as "innovation" instead of hardware. How do you even start to push back when they frame it as a security necessity?