Dell private cloud lock in would be the death of any company. You don't want to be isolated to one hardware vendor. We've told Dell to kick rocks many times for renewals and would not be able to do that if we were in their Cloud, which requires Dell hardware.

Don't do it

This is the only POSSIBLE rational argument for this approach. 4x price, on 1/2 the customer base is still 2x revenue with less customers to deal with. They want to keep the Big Corp clients that are happy to pay.

Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?