AK>Might be different in America than in Germany

My (tongue-in-cheek) experience on the IT presales side of things (perhaps 10-15 years ago) was that for America the issue is scale as well as delivery timeliness: if they want your widget, they want 750,000 of them *tomorrow*.

Contrast with Canada (and perhaps also Scotland), where if they want your widget, you'll have to agree to let them "evaluate" fourteen of them, on trial, for six hundred years, for free (!), before anyone commits to a decision.

;-)

R.