Last project I could have spent that money to pay for 3-4 additional full time engineers for 3 years and built a better solution with open source because I still had to devote 2 plus myself to do integration. And then didn't have overpriced SMS for the next decade and licensing headaches and afford to keep at least 1 of the engineers indefinitely.

Is there room in this space for a new no-nonsense vendor? Someone who cuts out all the goddamn middlemen and just asks what hardware you want, how you want it configured, and quotes you a frickin price without all the bullshit?

We sell incredibly complicated systems that necessarily interact with many other complicated systems. We don't work natively with all of them, and sometimes we need to do custom work. Not to mention that we need hardware in many geographical areas, yet still need to work when the virtual space doesn't line up with the physical space.

It's not as easy as "am I buying the small, medium, or large solution". Before you invest tens of millions of dollars into this one product, you need someone from the vendor to analyze your infrastructure and tell you if our product will work, and then how many you need to buy and where you need to put them geographically, and then how many hours of custom programming it will take to get everything working with the other systems.

That's far outside any definition of "salesman" I've ever heard. These people are project architects and their speciality is solution design. It's not a three-tier SaaS solution.