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Discussion on: Why the Accenture/Hertz affair is no news to me

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II • Edited

Ah, yes, Accenture. Technically middling but they're great at the softer stuff – sales, politics and convincing the unaware that they've got the best people for the work.

...even if the backend is a 30 years old AS400 behemoth.

Never really thought of an AS/400 as a "behemoth". They're far smaller than the systems they were designed to stand in for.

Let's pay these 20 people 200k a year (which is a huge salary) to do it.

That really depends where the people you're paying that money are located. Sure, in Cleveland or Arkansas, $200K/yr is huge. In NYC, SF bay area, Chicago and even the DC region (particularly the western half of the region), that hugeness is greatly reduced (each of the named regions have mean household incomes in well in excess of $100K/yr and having stratospheric housing costs).

Let's put 2 millions of related costs,

As noted previousy, Accenture is great at the softer stuff. They love to get face-time with customers. Lots and lots and lots of meetings. What's more, they love those meetings to be face-to-face – even (especially?) if being able to do face-to-face means lots of airfare (and we're not talking tickets on Spirit or even even Southwest; nor are we talking "base" fares) or rides on Acela (and associated hotel and meal expenses). All shit that adds up very quickly. All stuff that, with a team of meeting-goers would easily eclipse $2Mn in the course of 12 months.

Simply put, when customers are willing to pay stratospheric rates, companies are more than willing to structure contracts to milk every last ounce of that willingness. Rarely does it meaningfully trickle down to the people that do the grunt-work. Even more fun is, because there's a ton of money to be made on the lifecycle of a solution, solutions are often sub-optimally implemented so that there's a big, fat recurring-revenue stream for keeping a fragile solution going.

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duncster15 profile image
duncan gilchrist

as a weekly 10 year customer (company policy not by choice) everything hertz does is screwed up, accenture must have recognized this messed up management and decided to fleece them idiots