People in IT who work with Dell.

[oddyager]

Our first sales rep was terrible. Kept getting our quotes wrong. Quoted things that HE thought we needed instead of what we really needed. Doesn't get back to you on e-mails and could never be reached by office phone (he even answered a call to his cell once with a WHAT?). We had him for 2 months and it was 2 months too long. We have a nice lady now who takes care of us good.

Regarding HP, if it weren't for Cisco's insistence of slapping their logo onto their machines to run their services we would be all Dell here.

 

[aircooled]

I have a good Dell sales guy. Plus, if something breaks there is a tech fixing it the next day.

 

[Scarpozzi]

We send our quotes in....sometimes they're cheaper than through premier, sometimes not. It totally depends on when you get the quote. Dell is totallly quarter driven. If they are having a good quarter, you won't get a deal. If they're behind in their estimates, you can walk out with a lot of freebies (lower prices, free server racks, etc...)

They've cut their sales force down a lot in recent years. I used to get free lunches from them every 3-6 months, but our reps changed and they don't tend to do that much anymore...

We're actually doing RFPs now to consider IBM and HP possibly as new vendors. (reviewed every 5 years). Dell has been fairly decent on the server end, but they still need to work on their foreign call-centers.

 

[isekii]

Originally posted by: bananapeel42
I'll give you that their pricing is pretty good. However, HP has plenty of bundles that now include monitors as well. Their service is great on the business side for either on site, depot, or just general phone support.


For instance, here is a good deal they have been running lately....

HP DC5800 Core2 E8400 / 3GB RAM / 160GB / DVD+-RW / 22" LCD / Either VB or XPP

At 879.00 List price, really not a bad deal at all on the business end. You could probably see a small discount off list to somewhere around 820.00 with a business account.


What about other stuff though, do you guys have a licensing agreement with MS? Do you buy mostly OEM stuff? What about your backup software like CA or your Symantec stuff?

Do you just one stop shop all through Dell or would you shop around that product as well?

Edit. To clarify..... if you would EVER be interested in getting competitive quoting on ANYTHING IT related I'd be more than happy to help you out, albeit I can't quote Dell anything of course.

The only issue with that is, our users here don't require a 8400.

What we need
E4600/1-2gb ram/80-160gb hd/19"+LCD/Slim Form factor/DVDRW.

that's about it and looking to get the best price possible.

 

[iamwiz82]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
We send our quotes in....sometimes they're cheaper than through premier, sometimes not. It totally depends on when you get the quote. Dell is totallly quarter driven. If they are having a good quarter, you won't get a deal. If they're behind in their estimates, you can walk out with a lot of freebies (lower prices, free server racks, etc...)

They've cut their sales force down a lot in recent years. I used to get free lunches from them every 3-6 months, but our reps changed and they don't tend to do that much anymore...

We're actually doing RFPs now to consider IBM and HP possibly as new vendors. (reviewed every 5 years). Dell has been fairly decent on the server end, but they still need to work on their foreign call-centers.

I love the end of quarter discounts. They go insane just trying to hit sales (but not profit) numbers.

 

[TwiceOver]

I'm on my fourth. The first guy was great! Second was a solid "Meh", third was aweful, now the fourth pretty much reads what the website tells her for price. We don't order a lot so we don't get super awesome discounts. Probably have about 30 workstations two servers and a printer from them.

 

[tranceport]

I'm keeping an eye on this thread.

 

[hanoverphist]

Originally posted by: brxndxn
Our sales rep typically cannot beat our Premier Page discount most of the time.. but, our discount seems decent enough most of the time.

same here. but on occasion he will toss in freebies, so it was all ok. lately ive been getting shifted between people tho, starting to get me annoyed.

 

[Freejack2]

I don't even bother talking to the sales rep anymore, I just go through the premier page. I can get a quote for a customer in a couple of minutes instead of waiting half a day for my rep to mail me back or return my call.

 

[alkemyst]

We are an enterprise level company, about 10000 desktops.

We deal with a third party and get pretty decent pricing. They handle all post sale problems for us which is rare. They usually cover the cost of shipping with larger orders.

 

[bananapeel42]

sent you a PM isekii

 

[WarhammerUC]

0 problems gives good discount

 

[GeekDrew]

I work for a local government agency in Ohio. We just went through a series of sales reps... hopefully we'll keep our current one for a while. Our rep is good in that he gets us decent prices... always lower than what we can get through our State Premier page. He usually responds in a timely manner... but I still don't think it's fast enough. Then again, I doubt that I'll ever be satisfied until we get the absolute best price that will ever be provided to us by creating a quote using the Premier website, rather than having to contact our sales rep. Waiting anywhere from hours to several days is totally unacceptable... particularly when there is no status update or reason why there has been no response for a day or more.

I'll also speak to bananapeel42's questions. As a government agency, we generally get the best service, pricing, and stability by purchasing our CA products (and nearly all other non-MS products) from Global Gov/Ed. Our Global rep is awesome, and the Global website is nice, in that it allows us to create a quote using the website, automatically notifies your appropriate sales rep, who in my case always adjusts the price (lower) on the quote, and re-issues it. For our MS products, we use DELL|ASAP, though I don't believe we have a choice in that matter. I don't think that their service is stellar, but it's not bad. It would be a *HUGE* help to us if Dell and ASAP would completely merge, so that we can use one vendor number for both companies. You wouldn't believe the pain I go through to get a department to issue one purchase order, let alone two.

And don't get me started on purchase orders... I can't take advantage of many good deals I see out there because it seems those sites that have good deals don't accept government purchase orders. Sigh.

/me rambles...

 

[bananapeel42]

I used to work in Gov. / Education sales at CompUSA Corporate and people often came to us because many of the other places wouldn't accept the PO's. I'm out of gov / ed sales now though as it is a big PITA in general with everything that's in place. GSA contracts are a nightmare and the competition is insane, they'll bid you out to 6 different people sometimes and one vendor will be having a bad month and go below cost to win the deal just for revenue.

It was some crazy stuff I went through there. I like the corporate world slightly better, although the economy right now kind of stinks, as I don't see many people doing true capital spending right now.

 

[d3n]

My Company will order 200K worth of server hardware at a time and 10mil+ per year in workstations/servers combined from Dell. Our Rep will do better than the premier page about 50% of the time. Still we have some bundles dialed in for the Premier page that are hard to beat. Our CTO tends to favor Dell products so it would take a really lousy experiance to turn us off completely. I have no complaints with Dell hardware since they fixed up the PERC3 mess a while back. It just gets better and better

Going ultra high density (blades) with Dell has some unattractive points compared to HP but most things I would take Dell first. For SANS we use Netapp or Dell's (new/acquired) Equallogic products. It depends on the workload. EMC is pretty unimpressive overall, same with the quad CPU boxes but for the value 2950s do just about everything, including VMWARE. It's usually easier for use to get 2 or 3 2950s compared to a single ultra capacity box from HP or Dell. For SQL a couple MD3000's w/controllers stuffed in a 2950 cluster are absolutely untouchable by anything on the market for RAW SQL performance. Strange that HP doesnt even offer an alternative but I think they are to focused on bleeding people for upsells on FC and shelves that use slower SCSI disks.

Our Rep will turn around quotes in 2 hours. The account executive swings by our local turf at least twice a quarter. Company headquarters gets more personal attention.

 

[ultimatebob]

I'm curious... how do IBM's hardware sales reps compare to HP's, Dell's, and Sun's?

I'd imagine that IBM won't kick in the big discounts unless you bundle in middleware and services as well, but I might be wrong.

 

[finite automaton]

I don't know who our rep is, but I do know we are their biggest customer.

 

[d3n]

IBM has nice stuff but its always been budget busters for us, besides that they are a direct competitor in the services industry. I think a IBM blade server /Xen setup would be pretty slick. IBM has some nice hardware but we do a lot of modular builds that can never be justified as 'enterprise scale' by themselves. Work for my company is largely image based and not computational, So for these stand alone business units the high density stuff is never really even considered. As far as services they use independent contractors and the quality swings pretty far to both ends of the scale.

 

[spidey07]

I know nobody will like this answer, but this is how I do it. I keep close relationships with manufacturer account reps and deal directly with them and then work the deal directly with the manf rep and a trusted VAR. Meaning you're a named or national or tier1 account. It depends on your spend. But work directly with the manf rep because he is the guy that can work.

So you work the deal with the manufacturer, give the VAR a single point on hardware and let them eat it on maintenance (30-40 points) because that's where their gravy is.

Oh - on the blade server thing...HP and IBM is owning that market.

-edit-
The main reason why I don't work with dell is because they don't understand the environment. They have a lot of great products/services but competitors provide the same for less in the care and feeding department.

 

[Renob]

For instance, you place an order for 100 generic boxes. In that 100 box order, you'll receive the same spec of course, however you may run into 25 Asus boards, some Gigabyte, etc. etc. because they don't standardize manufacturers for their computers.

You are so full of it!!!

Please give of the model of systems you are talking about?

Oh and in the spirit of these boards its not cool of you to come in here as a sales person and start pimping yourself out!!!!

VERY UNCOOL

 

[SpanishFry]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
I'm curious... how do IBM's hardware sales reps compare to HP's, Dell's, and Sun's?

I'd imagine that IBM won't kick in the big discounts unless you bundle in middleware and services as well, but I might be wrong.

IBM's model is similar to HP's. I am a sales rep for an IBM BP and sell servers/blades/storage. We can usually beat Dell and HP's pricing on larger deals. Dell will usually win on the 1-2 server deals due to their direct model. I am biased admittedly, but do think our hardware is the best platform across the 3 segments I sell. HP is good at servers and blades, but horrible at storage. Dell is good for cheap servers, but had zero r&d and lags behind in technology. EMC is good at storage, but not spectacular.

 

[alkemyst]

Originally posted by: Renob

For instance, you place an order for 100 generic boxes. In that 100 box order, you'll receive the same spec of course, however you may run into 25 Asus boards, some Gigabyte, etc. etc. because they don't standardize manufacturers for their computers.

You are so full of it!!!

Please give of the model of systems you are talking about?

Oh and in the spirit of these boards its not cool of you to come in here as a sales person and start pimping yourself out!!!!

VERY UNCOOL

Maybe he is talking about XPS systems and basing this on one his friend has vs his...

We have 100's of GX270, GX280's and GX620's, pretty much all have the exact same hardware across the line up (I think all foxconn motherboards).

If this was not the case most of true corporate enterprise would be screwed with images of desktops.

 

[Renob]

Maybe he is talking about XPS systems and basing this on one his friend has vs his...

Sorry I dont buy that, he said

For instance, you place an order for 100 generic boxes

Not XPS systems.

He just sounds like any other sales person, talk down about others and try to make a sale.

Off Topic is not the place for him to be rounding up business!!!

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: alkemyst

Originally posted by: Renob

For instance, you place an order for 100 generic boxes. In that 100 box order, you'll receive the same spec of course, however you may run into 25 Asus boards, some Gigabyte, etc. etc. because they don't standardize manufacturers for their computers.

You are so full of it!!!

Please give of the model of systems you are talking about?

Oh and in the spirit of these boards its not cool of you to come in here as a sales person and start pimping yourself out!!!!

VERY UNCOOL

Maybe he is talking about XPS systems and basing this on one his friend has vs his...

We have 100's of GX270, GX280's and GX620's, pretty much all have the exact same hardware across the line up (I think all foxconn motherboards).

If this was not the case most of true corporate enterprise would be screwed with images of desktops.

At a University I worked for we had the basic same lineup as above plus a few 240's and 260's, the motherboards were the same brand but sometimes different chipsets or some other different onboard hardware across the same model. It was very annoying.


Now I am at a place where I can recommend the brand to go with but the supervisor stills looks at bottom end price and Dell beats them, even though I don't like them. We previously were using HP Workstations which are hell of alot better than the Dell Optiplexs but the price point can't be beat.

BTW everywhere I've worked I've had to RMA Dell parts on brand new out of the box machines that were up less than a week, the HP Workstations are P4's and I just had to make a few RMA's on PS's. Screw Dell's quality and their RMA process. I can't get a part easily without wasting at least 15-20mins, I can shoot HP an email with Model and Serial and the broken part, I will have one within a day or two. I don't have to talk to some non english speaking book reading idiot. Same goes for when comparing to IBM/Lenovo support, I get to talk to an English speaking person, usually from the south and can get the problems fixed ASAP.

 

[TwiceOver]

Originally posted by: mooseracing

Originally posted by: alkemyst

Originally posted by: Renob

For instance, you place an order for 100 generic boxes. In that 100 box order, you'll receive the same spec of course, however you may run into 25 Asus boards, some Gigabyte, etc. etc. because they don't standardize manufacturers for their computers.

You are so full of it!!!

Please give of the model of systems you are talking about?

Oh and in the spirit of these boards its not cool of you to come in here as a sales person and start pimping yourself out!!!!

VERY UNCOOL

Maybe he is talking about XPS systems and basing this on one his friend has vs his...

We have 100's of GX270, GX280's and GX620's, pretty much all have the exact same hardware across the line up (I think all foxconn motherboards).

If this was not the case most of true corporate enterprise would be screwed with images of desktops.

At a University I worked for we had the basic same lineup as above plus a few 240's and 260's, the motherboards were the same brand but sometimes different chipsets or some other different onboard hardware across the same model. It was very annoying.


Now I am at a place where I can recommend the brand to go with but the supervisor stills looks at bottom end price and Dell beats them, even though I don't like them. We previously were using HP Workstations which are hell of alot better than the Dell Optiplexs but the price point can't be beat.

BTW everywhere I've worked I've had to RMA Dell parts on brand new out of the box machines that were up less than a week, the HP Workstations are P4's and I just had to make a few RMA's on PS's. Screw Dell's quality and their RMA process. I can't get a part easily without wasting at least 15-20mins, I can shoot HP an email with Model and Serial and the broken part, I will have one within a day or two. I don't have to talk to some non english speaking book reading idiot. Same goes for when comparing to IBM/Lenovo support, I get to talk to an English speaking person, usually from the south and can get the problems fixed ASAP.

I highlighted your problem. They may be Dell's "Business" model but I've had nothing but problems with every one I have ever seen, EVER. Also Latitude laptops which are Dell's business class laptops.

Give me an Inspiron, Dimension (by far the best*), Vostro and I've never had any problems with them.

*Were the best for me until they gimped the BIOS to disable WOL