@bjolling said:
Situation at my current employer: my current employer sells financial services to their clients. The clients can install an in-house developed package to interface with the back-end. That software requires an existing SQL Server to be installed on premise.
There is no alternative package: either install the SQL Server, do without the package or switch to another service provider alltogether
This is more common than some people would like to believe. I work for the receiving end of that transaction. My employer is a financial institution. The providers of all of our business-critical software packages effectively sell full stacks. You want the product? You have to have the correct OS, database, workflow software, and where appropriate run it on the correct webserver package. Missing any of those pieces? They'll be happy to sell you the licenses where appropriate. In some cases you have to have the proper hardware too.
It's take it or leave it. In some cases you can shoehorn the app into a different stack but typically you null any support contract you may have at that point. Failure to maintain appropriate support for all major packages is not acceptable in any serious financial institution. Hence we maintain both Oracle and MS database installs. Yay.
Perhaps the financial industry (or my little corner of it) is still living in the 90s. I find it hard to believe that this is the only segment where these practices exist. Healthcare perhaps?