Re: IBM... robbers in tweed suits.. (or at least the salesmen are)
>>> IBM... robbers in tweed suits.. (or at least the salesmen are)
... not sure that any IBM sales droid would ever be seen dead or alive in a tweed suit!
However, the point about IBM getting first dibs on sourcing kit and software rings true - based on several years in the SO business (admittedly a number of years ago) where it was clear in a number of situations that IBM's offering clearly wasn't 'best of breed' but was forced down the architect or TSM's throat as the only possible option as running multiple systems by the back end (Offshore) teams might have cost a few rupees^W dollars more.
Many's the time during solution review and risk assessment long hours were spent examining (and arguing over) plans to swap out customer's existing and perfectly adequate stuff and impose our own stuff. What was frequently worse was that this part of the Transformation programme often then ran massively late and over budget and we had yet another troubled contract.
AC for obvious reasons ... and no, I didn't work on or QA/DA Dixons Carphone (or if I did it was only minor growth business on the CPW previous contract- memory fades over the years since taking the redundancy money and running!)