More generally/seriously how exactly does this conversation go? I've seen deals at my company which have been in the 7 figure range (involving many, many people) but never anything so large. Is this the kind of thing discussed only at C* level?
Others have mentioned whole 50 person deal teams from both sides, multi year processes, all of Google’s most senior execs pressing the flesh etc.
But to your question this type of deal usually goes beyond even the C Suite, to a companies board and shareholders. The bank I was involved with held an ‘Extraordinary General Meeting’ for reps of major shareholders, to present its case and get sign-off. This part of the process was actually the longest, it took ~6 months.
That was because the shareholders of the bank had interests to be accommodated, for instance one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS. They needed to be worked around or convinced choosing GCP would create more value for them than portfolio synergies.
Thank you for highlighting this. It is a reminder to engineers that sometimes the best technical solution doesn't win because there are usually many factors at play.
Did they state that explicitly? Is this legal?
Seems equivalent to asking management to directly transfer money to the pocket of only some of the shareholders stiffing out all others, which I'm pretty sure is generally illegal.
The biggest thing I wonder when these sorts of "probably C* level" deals is how often they get negotiated for political and/or marketing reasons, and then are just handed down to staff to figure out how to make them work. I've definitely seen major shifts in third party products selected long before anyone on the tech side gets involved to find out what the implementation is going to look like. Sometimes by the time you get IT involved, it's too late and way too high level to put the brakes on something if it isn't as ideal as promised.
Of course, the company’s idea of “moving to the cloud” was a “lift and shift” and still having to go through the same procurement process as if we were on prem just to get some EC2 instances provisioned and not taking advantage of any AWS services.
I didn’t realize how dumb that was until it was too late. By the time I learned anything about AWS, the infrastructure gatekeepers had taken over.
There’s a cap to the payout a sales rep can get.