[jurjenh]

There's a relationship management issue there somewhere - supporting one-off small volume sales has a definite cost at some point - someone needs to process and fill the order. Limiting sales to "big" customers means you can spend less time dealing with all the order processes and focus more on a decent product (or decent profits, wherever the focus may lie)

[Meekro]

That was my first thought, too, but here's how my exchange went:

1. Contact fortigate, they put a sales guy in touch with you. Ask him some tech questions, turns out he doesn't know anything. He gets a tech manager in the loop. Ask him, he doesn't know shit either, he gets one of his subordinates in the loop. Now there's 3 cc's on the email thread, and maybe they can tell you some details about the product.

2. They put you in touch with a reseller. A "relationship manager" at the reseller puts you in touch with a sales guy at the reseller. That sales guy tells you that you need a higher-end product than the one you expected, for twice as much money. You start questioning that, turns out he doesn't know much about the product and says "let me get fortigate back in on this" and pulls the 3 people from step 1 back into the email thread.

3. Now there's 5 people in the loop, with several of them arguing about what you need. Eventually it gets sorted, and the reseller ships you the thing you told them you needed a week ago.

.. all of this was to sell me about $4000 worth of hardware, total.

Now I'd understand their thinking if the reseller would just handle the customer relationship, but they had to pull fortigate back into it every time I asked a non-trivial pre-sales question, the kind any sysadmin would ask. Makes me wonder what all those "relationship managers" and sales guys are for.

[jurjenh]

How often do sysadmins actually make the call on what gets bought? For a purchasing dept, they'd probably stop at step 2, get the over-priced product and everyone's happy.

The re-seller is obviously the under-performing part of your exchange, it should be their business to know what they are selling. Most likely it shows the current state of the market - not very many buyers ask these technical questions, hence the experience is not there for the reseller. If you'd want to feel better about it, at least the reseller you've dealt with now has some more knowledge of one of the products they are selling.