Anyone who sold ERP in the nineties can tell you what the software cost against what the project cost, and the answer was never flattering to the software. The license was a fraction of it. The integrators did the configuration, the data migration, the training and the change management, and they billed multiples of the license to do it — which everybody found faintly embarrassing at the time, and which turned out to be the actual business model.
That ratio never went away. It moved.
AWS commissioned research on this and published the number: partners generate up to $7.13 in services and solutions revenue for every dollar of AWS infrastructure sold. Ruba Borno has said the multiplier roughly doubles on AI engagements. Read that as a vendor marketing its own channel if you like, and you probably should — but the direction matches what the ERP era already taught everyone, and I haven’t seen much since that argues the other way.
Which at least puts a number on something people normally treat as a feeling. The work sitting between your product and a customer’s outcome is worth several times your product.
You can try to capture it yourself. It’s specific to every customer, it doesn’t scale, and in my experience the attempt mostly produces a services team that misses its number and a product team that resents carrying it. Or you make it easy for somebody else to do.
[[ BOB → do you have a ratio of your own, from Anywhere365 or SCB? Even a directional one beats the AWS number, because it’s yours. ]]