On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:23:29 PDT, Matt Bazan said: (answering the second part first)

to organize just such info. What I will need from all of you out there is your real time quotes (anonymously submitted is just fine, black out all the relevant personal/company info) and just include some general info on location (state for instance) and rough size of company.

I'll take care of the rest. Comments?

Do you plan to include the current going price on eBay? :)

That way, if you wanted to, say, know that latest prices for 2TB fibre channel SAN enclosures from company A and company B

Now, did you want that as all 144G drives, or all 72G, or some shelves 10K RPM 72G, some shelves 7200RPM 72G, and some shelves 5400RPM 300G ATA? And if you have a mix, do you want to license the HSM product with that, and if so, how many gigabytes do you want under HSM management? And one vendor offers redundant heads as separate 3U blocks, while the other has a 5U chassis that you can buy either one or 2 controller cards, and the price points are such one vendor is cheaper if you want each head to manage half the storage and be able to pick up the other half on fallover, but the other vendor is cheaper if you want both heads able to talk to all the disk all the time. And did you want that with just FC connections, or with iSCSI too? Oh, and you can have up to 7 of <these> attached, unless you have a <those> attached, in which case you can have 5 <these> and one <those> or 4 <these> and 2 <those>. You know the configurator drill.. ;) Sure, go for it. :)

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Matt Bazan wrote: I don't know about you, but how many times have you wanted to know the price of hardware vendor a, vendor b and vendor c's product offering only to find out that you have to contact one of their sales reps, give them all your contact & company info (I'm sure you know the drill) listen to a sales spiel (or two, or three) maybe a webinar, or conference call or..etc. before finally getting a quote some time later? Only to then be bothered by endless follow up sales calls? I've resigned myself to it being one of the things I get paid to do. Wouldn't it be great if there was an online, updated daily, website that listed real quotes oraganized by region in the country and company size? No way that would ever happen. Companies especially in this market, thrive on making deals in a vacuum. Availability of that sort of imformation would force them to be slightly more competitive (and have slightly more integrity) I think so. Here's what I propose. I will design and host a web site to organize just such info. What I will need from all of you out there is your real time quotes (anonymously submitted is just fine, black out all the relevant personal/company info) and just include some general info on location (state for instance) and rough size of company. and all zero folks who aren't bound by disclosure restrictions could participate! The more effective and less time-consuming way to solve this problem is a discipline called "vendor management". matto --matt@snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin>< The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Matt Bazan wrote:

I don't know about you, but how many times have you wanted to know the price of hardware vendor a, vendor b and vendor c's product offering only to find out that you have to contact one of their sales reps, give them all your contact & company info (I'm sure you know the drill) listen to a sales spiel (or two, or three) maybe a webinar, or conference call or..etc. before finally getting a quote some time later? Only to then be bothered by endless follow up sales calls?

This isn't an price list or an NDA problem. This is what I call a "vendor BS management" problem. I too hate webinars, conference calls, "breakfast forums" (Who the hell thought that one up? Someone who has never been called out in the middle of the night, probably) and other sorts of BS. If you're in a market where there is some competition, just tell the sales rep that if he wants you to jump through the hoops listening to the marketing BS and wasting your time with webinars and powerpoints, where you're force fed their propaganda, you ain't interested, you'll go somewhere else, and thanks for calling. I find it either a) re-focuses their mind to actually *listening* to you (now there's a shock), or b) they don't get it, and you can then ignore them (e.g. present a wall of voicemail, and fail to return their calls talking about "synergy" and similar BS) while they make even bigger fools of themselves, or until they give up. Yes, I know that option (b) sounds a bit rude, but they have shown you discourtesy by not listening and insisting on ramming marketing down your throat. The fun part about (b) is that if you do call them back after a few weeks, they have become so desperate, they will usually listen to you. The hardest part I find is dealing with companies with a high turnover of account management and pre-sales, where you seem to have to break a new salesman in every few months. That's almost as annoying as the webinars themselves. Cheers, Mike