-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Sean Figgins
Most of the vendors I know of like to wine and dine the VPs. If a NDA gets violated, the vendor will not be forced to stop dealing with the company, just get the employee that violated the NDA to be fired. Companies are getting very, very picky about this kind of information getting out. And, if your company is publically traded, I am sure that some consultant will claim this is a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley.
I can see your points here. But, I think there still is value to the medium and small companies that are not bound by these types of agreements.
6) Such a list is likely actually cause companies to have to pay more.
Not sure about the logic here...
Logic goes like this: Company is seeing that it's prices are getting out. Company stopps giving the good discounts to anyone, as they will have to give them to everyone otherwise...
Not sure I buy that line of reasoning. Hasn't happened in the myriad of other consumer product lines that have open pricing. In fact, just the opposite happens. Open pricing drives pricing down - not up. This is exactly the type of culture these hardware companies want. When you have closed pricing - in any industry - the buyer is always at the disadvantage. It's time to open this up.
If you are already doing business with a company, and just want to have some incremental additional devices or services, then you probably don't have to talk to a sales guy much to get a quote from him.
If you are shopping for the best price, and don't care about support costs, or technical specs, then go shop at CDW, or dell.com. Their prices are published.
Actually, not the case. CDW and Dell (and all the others) only publish their prices for the low end gear that they sell. Anything else requires a call to a rep and establishing a relationship. Matt