Mark Ballinger mballinger-at-ballinger.cx |U2UG| wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 07:42:51AM -0700, Dave S wrote:
>> You can purchase it from this company :
>>
>> http://www.sandritech.com/
>
> Yes, I know. I'm just wondering what it costs.
The best way to find out what products cost is to contact the supplier.
Sandritech in particular has a good group of people and I'm sure you'll get
good info, product, and service with them. I'm not one to support
senseless cloaks of secrecy (I hate not seeing a price tag on items in a
store) but there are many reasons to not publish pricing info.
Pricing for some of these software products can vary widely
depending on the VAR, their value-add in terms of support, training, etc,
location, bundling, and many other factors. I might offer a well known
product at cost if we agree to short or long term services or a training
engagement. I might waive support fees for some period of time or offer an
add-on component for less than list cost, not to mention quantity
discounts.
If we let 'list price' stand as any guide by which we judge
products then I dare say we'd consider a whole lot of products unworthy of
further investigation, and these negotiables would never even be put on the
table - I've seen it happen.
A price that's published today may change tomorrow. You don't want
to prospects to be discouraged by a price they see in a forum when the
price isn't what was posted anymore.
Also, sad but a fact of life, many companies use list price as one
of their key differentiators to raise or lower their own pricing to find a
competitive sweet spot. If someone publishes pricing in a public forum it
may mess up the vendor's competitive positioning, and even encourage other
vendors to just raise their own pricing - I've seen this happen too.
Finally, pricing for some products is just too complex and
confusing to put into a public forum. There are often server vs client
costs or concurrency factors, and some products are priced differently
depending on the platform they're hosted on. Any list price posted will
probably be wrong from the get-go. A vendor doesn't want to start a public
debate about "I don't understand that" or "why does the price break occur
there?". These are discussions to be had one-on-one.
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD
.com
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