There is one upside to the downside at the moment; that is I'm not currently involved in negotiating any procurement in the Q4 fire-sale! You see some users love the Q4 fire-sale but I hate it! Why? Because some really stupid buying decisions are made which do no-one any favours. And this the analogy which will get me into trouble…
Its like a woman in a shoe-sale; she buys a load of shoes because they are cheap. Bargains! And then get's them home to discover that she has nothing to go with them and then spends a fortune on an outfit, a new bag, new ear-rings etc…so these bargain shoes end up costing a fortune.
And every year, this happens in IT departments and god forbid that your vendor's end of year correlates to your end of year; that way madness lies. I know some poor technical architect who sketched out a design saying something along the lines of 'Well, we probably need 3xp690s, some disk etc'; go on leave and come back to find it'd all been ordered. He'd not actually sized it, certainly not designed the clusters and spent the next several months ordering things which had been forgotten, delaying the project. Some bargain that turned out to be.
I know there's no solution to this but at least this year, we don't appear to be participating in the madness! Yet…I'm sure some sales-man will get to the CIO with a once-in-a-lifetime-never-to-be-repeated-deal-and-I'm-Cutting-Me-Own-Throat-honest-guv! But at the moment, the coast seems clear!
So true – I was discussing this with my manager only today in prep for Feb/March!
A €1 box is still very expensive if you don’t need it!
Every year the best/biggest companies in the world go into a mode of operation that defies any form of rational logic or thought – but makes sales peeps wet themselves with joy…
The qty of assets that are still in their packaging from last FY’s “deal you’ll never beat” seriously scares me.
But it’s not the vendor’s fault at all (that didn’t make me twitch at all – honest!) – just don’t understand why internal mngt continue to allow this sort of thing.
Oh any doors/phones/email to the CIO & CTO from external need to be barred and banned – no conversation permitted until externals has passed my 140 point test and validation and I’ve decide they are truthful enough to speak with CIO/CTO…:)
And how about a fine scheme on the purchaser? Something along the lines of :-
For every person that approves a PO in the last qtr where the equipment hasn’t been deployed 2 months after PO approval, there is a cost (10% of approval value) deducted (inc backdated to approval date) from their budget for every month until deplyed…
And of course the interesting vendor obligation :-
“any price you sell to us at at any time becomes our maximum future buy price”
Might focus some minds on sensible purchasing?