Calling all NANOG'ers - idea for national hardware price quote registry

Fri Sep 16 21:29:45 UTC 2005

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Matt Bazan wrote:

> anonymous ;-)  Besides, in today's crap economy, is a vendor really
> going to come down on a client for violating an NDA and throw away $$$$?
> I personally don't have experience with this but I'm willing to bet that
> most NDAs are more bark than bite.

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.

> > 5) Purchasing companies would be less likely to want to divulge this
> > information, as it could hurt their competitive advantage.  If they
> > are getting a 75% discount, and their closest competitor is only
> > getting 50%, they have a lot better advantage.
>
> Well, that's why you don't get the VPs permission ;-).  Anonymity!!

Oh goody, even more reason to get fired...  Given enough ammo, and you'll
get fired, even if the VP does like you.

> > 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...

If you are looking for answers to RFPs, then you probably want a little
more information than just price anyways, and will want to talk to not
only the sales rep, but also someone from their engineering team, or at
least a sales engineer.

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.

I digress, though.  This really hasn't much to do with network operations,
so I'm gonna stop.

 -Sean