There's a deep and rich ecosystem of IT consultancies that sell, operate and maintain shrink-wrapped software and appliances from the likes of Microsoft, Cisco,

There's a deep and rich ecosystem of IT consultancies that sell, operate and maintain shrink-wrapped software and appliances from the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, VMWare, Citrix. These consultancies sell "SaaS" in the form of, like, we'll have a technician drive to your site, get the keys to the server closet, and spend N hours checking on and maintaining things every month. You can make a living as the SQL Server guy for Duluth or the Cisco phones guy for Milwaukee. It's hilariously inefficient compared to cloud/SaaS, and no surprise that cloud and SaaS are eating this world's lunch.