But for these business customers, the whole scheme was a huge pain in the neck. Each company had to have its own IT department, which would rack and stack servers, and install and maintain this infrastructure. Most of the software programs were ones that ran back-end office chores, like financials and ERP. These big enterprise software projects were notoriously prone to failure—at one point, more than 70 percent of these big installations were never actually completed successfully. These projects took so long to implement that oftentimes multiple generations of company leaders would come and
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