What SHOULD happen in DEC was your two platforms competing to deliver a better product, and if they crossed into each other's sales turf, whatever.
But of course such things never happen, Middle Management Machiavellis fight for their personal empires and it falls apart.
I personally think large corps that acquire a bunch of separate Datacenter groups shouldn't consolidate them, instead they should set them up for internal competition to serve groups. Well, and AWS, although that is probably a losing battle.
But again at the upper management levels, they can't tell who is doing well, so it goes the way of politics.
The free market... eventually, delivers the death blows.
I think the key thing is to encourage communication and cooperation between internal competitors, even if they're competing.
Maybe datacenter groups A and B have very different ideas about how to run their network, but they probably both need good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid.
They might not want to run as a single AS, but maybe they can share peering contacts or stats, and sometimes pass traffic for each other to tricky networks.
Sometimes, the right thing to do is to consolidate, and if it comes from both sides of the consolidation, then it's more likely to work well.
There's some danger of confusing customers if the competing teams are customer facing, so that needs to be handled with care, but it's doable.
The notion of cooperative competition seems impossible on the face of things. Perhaps an extremely detail-oriented upper management or structure that exists above or outside the budgetary turfs of both entities could do that, but to do that properly would impose an extensive meeting overhead on both organizations to maintain comms with this other group or the upper management.
And then any action taken on that would feel like a sword falling at any moment on groups, often disbanding them or redirecting them in what feels like an unfair and politically motivated moment.
Remember that people in corporations gain some degree of emotional investment in what they are working on simply due to the economic reasons that they are getting paid to do that, and getting paid is survival, especially in the layoff-happy no-universal-healthcare no-social-safety-net American economy. You work or your life falls apart.
So when I say knife fight, of course it isn't literal knives, but the motivations and survival instincts are the same. People can feel like this is life and death.
Probably why back in the day places like DEC and IBM didn't fire people. You can alleviate some of the life-and-death paranoia underscoring budgetary knife fights with the knowledge that you won't be fired and you can work somewhere else in the company.
The incentives come as a package. If you motivate them to compete, it incentivizes them to not help the other team regarding "good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid" and perhaps even sabotage them as long as it doesn't look like sabotage.
What SHOULD happen in DEC was your two platforms competing to deliver a better product, and if they crossed into each other's sales turf, whatever.
But of course such things never happen, Middle Management Machiavellis fight for their personal empires and it falls apart.
I personally think large corps that acquire a bunch of separate Datacenter groups shouldn't consolidate them, instead they should set them up for internal competition to serve groups. Well, and AWS, although that is probably a losing battle.
But again at the upper management levels, they can't tell who is doing well, so it goes the way of politics.
The free market... eventually, delivers the death blows.