As far as Canon releasing Solutions Engineers...
Too often top management doesn't understand exactly what an SE does, because its hard to quantify their impact. A good pre-sales SE is to a Sales Organization like yeast is to bread, you only notice when its not there.
Several years ago I was hired by RBS-Boston to reconstitute the solutions team that they had disbanded two years earlier. Of course the branches sale tanked, and they finally figured out they needed Pre-Sales SEs. They brought me on as The Solutions Manager for the Branch and while it took a good year to build the right chemistry between my team and the sales team, by the end of our second year we had hit our triple crown numbers at RBS-Boston. No other direct Ricoh branch did it that year, and that branch (RBS-Boston) had never before accomplished it.
At the end of that year Ricoh merged with Lanier and we had a joint end of the year meeting where they informed me that they were moving my team of Pre-Sales SEs under the Service Department???? It was clear that top management at Ricoh did not understand what we do or the value of quality Pre-Sales SE. So I moved on to my current position. I did however get a phone call from a RBS Sales Manager six months later telling me that my name came up in a manager's meeting and they calculated that they lost one million dollars in sales since I left that (he said) they would have won if I was still there. His words not mine. I of course asked if I could get that in writing, on Ricoh letterhead... I am still waiting for that letter.:-)
So if we have to quantify the impact of a good Pre-Sales SE it can be as much as 2 million dollars of sales a year. It has shown me that the people who make the decisions at the top often don't understand the impact or contribution of their SEs. They long for the "good old days" when they simply moved boxes.So from time to time they get rid of their SEs and then they notice that their sales organization looks a lot like bread without yeast = flat!
That's my $0.02
Vince McHugh