> I'm just fascinated by the fact that in 2016 there are still huge companies like this making their money on ancient tech that is insanely overpriced to the alternatives.
It is basically about switching costs. Even if you have the money you don't want to disrupt your operations because IT is doing a monster migration to different technologies.
I guess what I'm saying is: the companies that are in this situation should hire top-notch developers to solve the problem. But the whole problem is that these companies can't hire top-notch developers because of who they are.
You've just answered your own question. It makes no sense for a company to hire "top-notch developers" to solve "the problem" that storage vendors have already solved (because they have truly top-notch developers with vast experience in this specific domain).
That would turn out to be way more expensive than just paying what you consider exorbitant prices, and way more risky, i.e., it's not like it's easy to find top-notch developers, and even if a company could hire some, it's very unlikely that whatever they developed would compare well, by any metric, including cost, to what the company could get by buying a ready-made solution from EMC, HPE, et al.
I think that's a fairly narrow view of the options. Sometimes you want to focus your company on the markets you are interested in and have cultivated talent to excel at. Not everyone wants to be a software company, or wants to write internal software. Some companies have a division of lawyers, some interface with an external firm. At some point, depending on the work being done, it makes sense to use one over the other. I don't see any difference between that and whether you have your IT department assembling your own hardware and/or developing your own software, or outsourcing that to some other company. It all comes down to how much money it saves, and how many more options it opens up, and how much it increases or decreases operational complexity.
> : the companies that are in this situation should hire top-notch developers to solve the problem.
This is a simplistic view. You can even imagine that all the issues can be solved with free open source development but the organization works in a specific way and changing the way they work, in that scale, involves a lot of risks.
It is basically about switching costs. Even if you have the money you don't want to disrupt your operations because IT is doing a monster migration to different technologies.