I have a friend who works in a sales role for IBM. He told me that part of his bonus is contingent on being able to prove that the customer has actually installed the software which they bought.
The policy apparently arose because certain public sector entities had refused to consider new deals since they still hadn't got round to installing the software for which they had paid millions of dollars, years before.
It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it.
Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion dollar consultancy companies engage in.
Plus IBM makes even more doing the “integration” than the original sale.
The result was huge margins for IBM and customers scratching their heads afterwards.
Not so great as an actual business.
One of the things I like about SaaS software is that a subscription revenue stream is more closely aligned with actually delivering value than a long-term sales model is. It's still not perfect, but I'll take what I can get.