This is not a problem of hardware vs software. It's a problem of vendor's money vs your own. Of course he doesn't care. Actually, the more you spend on hardware the cheaper the software seems.
My day job sells integrated solutions to Japanese universities. We would care very intensely how much the hardware costs in a circumstance like this. (Which we wouldn't be in, because we try not to deliver software which is an abomination against all that is good and holy in terms of database use, but still.)
The math is simple: the university typically has a budget of X million yen to Get This Done. It doesn't matter what the line items are on our invoice -- we can't charge them more than X million yen.
Given that constraint, what do you think we want to charge them? Software license fees for our solutions, where our margin is anywhere from... crikey, I can't tell you the numbers, but "high to higher". Software license fees for third party providers like a certain Enterprise Database, where the margin to the reseller (us) is from low to medium? Or the margin resellers get on hardware, which compared to our software is small enough we could use it to remove food from between our teeth?
I mean, once the contract is signed. I know how sucky it is to go into such a relationship with a vendor. Custom apps are always risky... and hardware costs are one of the risks.
In your situation, actually in most situations when the client can compare the costs for both software and hardware before, it's logical to optimize the software.
My day job sells integrated solutions to Japanese universities. We would care very intensely how much the hardware costs in a circumstance like this. (Which we wouldn't be in, because we try not to deliver software which is an abomination against all that is good and holy in terms of database use, but still.)
The math is simple: the university typically has a budget of X million yen to Get This Done. It doesn't matter what the line items are on our invoice -- we can't charge them more than X million yen.
Given that constraint, what do you think we want to charge them? Software license fees for our solutions, where our margin is anywhere from... crikey, I can't tell you the numbers, but "high to higher". Software license fees for third party providers like a certain Enterprise Database, where the margin to the reseller (us) is from low to medium? Or the margin resellers get on hardware, which compared to our software is small enough we could use it to remove food from between our teeth?