Keep in mind that a lot of B2B transaction use in tech is about passing responsibility and liability. Executive or director somewhere has to solve this internal

Keep in mind that a lot of B2B transaction use in tech is about passing responsibility and liability. Executive or director somewhere has to solve this internal problem. IBM claims they solve it and provide some degree of guarantee. You're now able to pass that problem, responsibility, and liability off by pointing to the contract and saying legal pursuit is an option. Obviously this strategy isn't great from a business perspective. If the problem is actually critical to the business function, simply having a hired scapegoat to complain and point at doesn't help you get past that problem. If you're this massive inertial machine and the problem is to some degree artificial and a waste of internal resources but someone thinks it isn't, having someone like IBM on the hook gives credibility to the argument that they did their due diligence to solve the problem. Business at scale has a lot of childish fingerpointing. "No one ever got fired for hiring/buying IBM" as the saying goes.