> provided by IBM in June 2011
In Czechia we have a system where all sellers have to log bills to prevent tax evasion. IBM also provided the system. It cost ~ 15m$ to set up and ~15m$/y to run.
Given the rate of ~millions of bills submitted per day, of which the government only gets the total price and taxes, you have like ~hundred bills per second.
I could scale a gunicorn+sqlite on my 2014 MacBook Pro to be able to receive this rate of requests with a payload which could fit inside a single TCP packet. Sure, there is auth/backups/analytics... etc. Yet, I still just do not see how could IBM charge the extra 14m$ to set that up...