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

Sat Sep 17 12:58:11 UTC 2005

> Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:23:29 -0700
> From: Matt Bazan <Mbazan at onelegal.com>
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Calling all NANOG'ers - idea for national hardware price quote
>     registry

> 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

Many a times...

> 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?

Would that be the plain "list" quote or a special quote ?

> 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?

Nope, management would sure like to have leverage when negotiating the 
final price - but hey, they would like to have leverage on almost 
everyone ;D. From an *operational* standpoint I only want to know in 
what price range I should be thinking for vendor A, B and C.

Because I need to weigh my feature list against the price list and 
them I also have to weigh them (a bit later) against the budget.

Each vendor knows the list prcies from it's competitor usually, you as 
a customer can sometimes get that list rather easy, or you have to ask 
a rep for it. You get either a PDF with all their offerings, some lame 
XLS configurator sheet or whatever, just depends on how you ask them. 

Up till now, when I asked a rep at a vendor or a distributor, it 
usually was a matter of giving an e-mail address and hinting at what 
type of stuff I was looking at. That would get me enough information. 
Now if I mentioned that the price was a bit steep, then they're in 
their right 

> [ ... ]
> I'll take care of the rest.  Comments?

Keep It Simple Sir.
Listprices would be something everyone can use. And if vendors have 
issues with their listprices being public, then why set them in the 
first place !?

>   Matt 

Regards,
JP Velders