Yesterday marked the usual end of quarter blowout fun, but I had the extra fun of running a deal headfirst into 3PAR’s end of fiscal year. Finnaly eek’d the PO out at 5:30 on friday.
I’m never sure if I’m dragging out the quote negotiation proccess too far. This one started on 2/8 and just ended in a purchase on 3/30. I did the full three-way vendor shoot-out (compellent and dell), chatted with references, got interface demos, got the 2nd-tier sales engineers in for nitty gritty answers, read what must add up to eight hojillion pages of PDF whitepapers, learned an awful lot about the storage industry and in the end got the same quote, line item for line item, down from 534K to 288K.
Meanwhile, five feet away from me, my boss managed to neg Keynote to a 69% across-the-board discount on all their pricing just by saying “no we’re going with Gomez” a few times.
Three months ago I got Verizon to drop their per-meg price from $143/mb to $51 which added up to around 250K/year cheaper than before.
I honestly can’t see 50 – 75% price swings as discounts. If you can really discount that much your pricing was a work of fiction to begin with.