OpenShift costs as much as post hike VMware
We have always been hybrid cloud and I don't see that that would change in the future. Honestly the future will probably be what was always predicted: have a set of "core origin" servers that are on-prem and then a cloud membrane around that.
On-prem might still mean using a vendor for the actual care and feeding of hardware, there's no money in us running our own datacenters.
Also...it's still Red Hat. They're owned by IBM but they're still allowed to operate independently.
But back to the original point: you shouldn't be paying as much for OpenShift as you were for the equivalent VMWare offering. We used OpenShift at my last job and VMWare at the one before it; OpenShift was cheaper than VMWare was before the Broadcom acquisition.
And sorry bud, but the whole "operating independently" thing...I don't buy it. I've worked for too many companies that were owned by someone else and purported to operate independently. It's just a flat-out lie.
I don't doubt it, given that this has been Broadcom's MO from the beginning. But IBM is not Broadcom, and while they've definitely messed things up, they've recognized the value in letting Red Hat remain independent.
You're leaving out bending the customer over the barrel come renewal time once services are migrated and there's lock-in.
This is easily resolved by negotiating a longer contract, and planning for alternative vendors prior to the expiration of said contract. The amount of the potential increase at renewal is capped at the cost of switching (see, for example...all the VMWare customers switching off VMWare because its significantly cheaper to take the one-time switching costs than to pay 1000x every year).
This is all part of basic Negotiating 101. It sounds like your company isn't any good at it, and they could save a lot of money by getting better negotiators. (Now you know why Legal gets paid $$$ to play solitaire most of the day.)