There are plenty of substitute for everything, it's just that people don't like change.
We have just as many hardcore Databricks users that wouldn't want to move, or hardcore MATLAB users and Mathematica users. We don't have anyone using PowerBI anymore, those all moved to Databricks and Tableau.
Active Directory and GP are a burning trashfire and only can't be replaced if you're stuck without modern MDM on a Windows Desktop construction. The only Windows we have left is VDI based on Citrix and Ivanti, everything else is "do whatever you want" where users have a BYOD choice with no internal access (and in reality they don't need it anyway) or VPN access with a choice of Kolide-based compliance or MDM-based compliance, and either are used to gate connections, in combination with DLP and standard anti malwares.
InTune sucks, Azure AD is nice, but when attempting to integrate with everything that already exists it sucks again. We have everything that is fully-managed or half-managed on JAMF and everything else is just isolated or internet-only (which was a requirement starting 2 years ago anyway). MS Teams never got a foothold here, sucks in so many ways people just rather have physical meetings or use email. Slack on the other hand works well and has been in constant use for over 5 years now. On-prem exchange was deleted and migrated to Google's thing a few years ago, works fine, does everything we need for quite a low price and quite high user happiness. It also ended up being the directory replacement. We no longer need Kerberos, except for some legacy Windows-desktop applications, but those are stuck inside VDI anyway until we can move on.
We used to have large VMware server farms and physical oracle boxes too. The first category was moved to AWS or replaced with microservices on Kubernetes, the second one migrated to Postgres RDS in AWS, but that is an ongoing process (roughly 10TB in table size done so far, and yes that did take tweaks like adding actual indices where Oracle would automagically do that on Exadata machines for you). Even with the human investment the cost is lower, productivity higher and we are less constrained by contracts. The best part is the elasticity we gained which was always problematic, even with the fake cloud (vmware-on-aws for example) or pretend-to-be-hybrid cloud solutions (azure) that never bear the fruit they advertise, or do but aren't actually better in the end.
Perhaps a big difference between the projects at this company and others is the vertical integration where things that are distinguishing to the company are pretty much created from scratch by internal development and maintenance teams. Things that don't matter or are shit no matter how you do it (looking at VDI) are delegated to MSPs but they have to run on our infra so we know the state of the infra no matter what the MSP is trying to tell/sell us. At the end of the day, this works great for us, everyone is happy, and a profit is made. This is in Western Europe if that makes a difference.
We have just as many hardcore Databricks users that wouldn't want to move, or hardcore MATLAB users and Mathematica users. We don't have anyone using PowerBI anymore, those all moved to Databricks and Tableau.
Active Directory and GP are a burning trashfire and only can't be replaced if you're stuck without modern MDM on a Windows Desktop construction. The only Windows we have left is VDI based on Citrix and Ivanti, everything else is "do whatever you want" where users have a BYOD choice with no internal access (and in reality they don't need it anyway) or VPN access with a choice of Kolide-based compliance or MDM-based compliance, and either are used to gate connections, in combination with DLP and standard anti malwares.
InTune sucks, Azure AD is nice, but when attempting to integrate with everything that already exists it sucks again. We have everything that is fully-managed or half-managed on JAMF and everything else is just isolated or internet-only (which was a requirement starting 2 years ago anyway). MS Teams never got a foothold here, sucks in so many ways people just rather have physical meetings or use email. Slack on the other hand works well and has been in constant use for over 5 years now. On-prem exchange was deleted and migrated to Google's thing a few years ago, works fine, does everything we need for quite a low price and quite high user happiness. It also ended up being the directory replacement. We no longer need Kerberos, except for some legacy Windows-desktop applications, but those are stuck inside VDI anyway until we can move on.
We used to have large VMware server farms and physical oracle boxes too. The first category was moved to AWS or replaced with microservices on Kubernetes, the second one migrated to Postgres RDS in AWS, but that is an ongoing process (roughly 10TB in table size done so far, and yes that did take tweaks like adding actual indices where Oracle would automagically do that on Exadata machines for you). Even with the human investment the cost is lower, productivity higher and we are less constrained by contracts. The best part is the elasticity we gained which was always problematic, even with the fake cloud (vmware-on-aws for example) or pretend-to-be-hybrid cloud solutions (azure) that never bear the fruit they advertise, or do but aren't actually better in the end.
Perhaps a big difference between the projects at this company and others is the vertical integration where things that are distinguishing to the company are pretty much created from scratch by internal development and maintenance teams. Things that don't matter or are shit no matter how you do it (looking at VDI) are delegated to MSPs but they have to run on our infra so we know the state of the infra no matter what the MSP is trying to tell/sell us. At the end of the day, this works great for us, everyone is happy, and a profit is made. This is in Western Europe if that makes a difference.