After 32 years in the IT industry I’ve seen just about every trick a vendor can play on a prospective client. This is the fourth in a series of the most egregiously bad, deceptive or just plain wrong Stupid Vendor Tricks I’ve seen over the years. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
Car dealer pricing, sort of…
I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage that the best time to buy a car is at the end of the month, when the dealers are desperate to make their monthly quotas. This is one reason car dealers have such a lousy reputation – you never really know their “best” price; of course they will tell you that every one of them is. The same is true in the IT industry, but it’s even worse with some vendors. There are some important pitfalls that can cost you big money over the long term.
Imagine you are in the market for a new car. You visit the local dealerships and get price quotes from each of them. One particular dealer gives you a price, assuring you it’s the absolute best he can do. When he subsequently finds out that you are shopping other brands & dealers, he comes back with a price that is 70% lower than his previous quote. Would you trust him? Or would you, quite logically, think “Where was this price when I asked you the first time?”
Unfortunately, this kind of unscrupulous pricing happens all the time in the IT industry, particularly in the storage and backup sectors, and particularly with some of the oldest, allegedly most-trusted vendors. There are important reasons why it happens, and none of them are good for the customer.
Drinking the Kool-Aid…
There is a cynical sales term for what a vendor is trying to get you to do by going for his 70% discount. It’s called drinking the Kool-Aid. What it means is that once you’ve bought his product he’s got you – you’re a slave to his extortionate pricing for everything else you may need from him, including basic things such as customer support.
By the time you add up the cost of support and so-called “options”, which are sometimes basic features necessary to make the solution work at all, they can far exceed to cost of the base product. (By the way, this tactic goes hand-in-hand with most of the other Stupid Vendor Tricks discussed in parts one, two and three.)
I wish I could tell you this game isn’t being played any more…
Last week I met with a prospective client who needed a new 30 TB backup system and had just gotten a quote from one of the oldest, allegedly most respected vendors in the storage industry. The quote had the base deduplication storage arrays listed at an astounding – you guessed it – 70% discount. The vendor apparently hoped the customer was too stupid to notice the price for the second year of support, which was $80,000; over half the price of the base arrays.
The good guys come to the rescue…
The old-line vendors who engage in this subterfuge are losing large chunks of market share in the backup sector to companies like ExaGrid, PHD Virtual, Unitrends and Veeam, who are offering better featured, better supported solutions at prices that don’t require slimy sales tactics. Same is true in the primary storage space with NexGen Storage, Nimble Storage and Gridstore. The world is changing, even if “Mister 70% Discount” doesn’t realize it.
If you’d like to experience what it’s like to not be slimed by a storage or backup vendor, contact me at 888-255-6889 or at mark@southerndatastorage.com.
