Even if your customers are software companies, it's often the case that your programmers are better than the programmers that they can deploy to solve the kinds of problems you work on.
For instance, if you have a clever solution to sales funnel optimization, chances are that even your savviest software customers aren't in a good position to deploy strong engineers on that problem; they're too busy making the things your customer wants to sell.
This is true of a lot of business functions: marketing, sales, recruiting, integration testing, devops, project management, bug tracking, log management, reporting, email. Basically take every product anyone ever sold successfully to tech companies and there's a list of things tech companies aren't good at effectively deploying in-house talent on.
For instance, if you have a clever solution to sales funnel optimization, chances are that even your savviest software customers aren't in a good position to deploy strong engineers on that problem; they're too busy making the things your customer wants to sell.
This is true of a lot of business functions: marketing, sales, recruiting, integration testing, devops, project management, bug tracking, log management, reporting, email. Basically take every product anyone ever sold successfully to tech companies and there's a list of things tech companies aren't good at effectively deploying in-house talent on.