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Comment by stackskipton | Hacker News Reader

Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.

Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.

Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.

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Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people

"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"

Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.

Probably had a lot of meetings

Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.

This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"

The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.

They don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.

Before, that could create a moat.

Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.

When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.

That works for small customers who actually want to spend time customizing things themselves. Big customers love having to sign support contracts, because it gives them someone to blame when something goes wrong. Nobody else gets to touch any of the settings or knobs to avoid breaking anything.

Being big is the actual moat.

The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.

plus yearly support maintenance

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