The fact that in 2020 you have to fill in a contact form to get a quote for a server price is ridiculous...I just browsed their site and could not find a single mention of pricing without providing them with my full contact information
For a lot of powerful but heavyweight enterprise products, giving people access to pricing isn't worth it because it can cause some buyers to opt out of the process earlier than they would if their hands were held. Especially if the integration process will require some element of digital/IT transformation and hence internal political wrangling. There's tech for smooth onboarding in 2020, but not necessarily tech for helping you to do stakeholder alignment in a sales context.
The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work..
If it doesn't make sense it's because it makes dollars...
It’s also a pun: “sense” / “cents”.
None of those fit in a pricing page. Maybe as a very dynamic calculator it could work, but it's likely the person looking at the page doesn't even have enough context/info to fill out the calculator.
If you don't need to automate, then don't automate!
If businesses categorically rejected working with companies that can't provide up-front estimates, they wouldn't be a thing.
The defining element of enterprise deals is complication: large companies don't tend to buy the product as advertised. They need the vendor to make lots of adjustments and carry out extra processes to deploy (or else those costs fall back on the buyer). So, until the buyer's requirements have been explored, there's not a useful estimate to be had.
There are no easy purchases in an enterprise.
Working with any third party requires an NDA, contract review, and negotiations by our Purchasing department.
For better, or for worse, "enterprise" folk are trying to sell "solutions" and not services. This usually works out well for them, because the people who they're selling to don't usually understand the technical minutae, and will often get the details wrong or incomplete.
Let's say you have your eye on a storage array. You know it's going to cost a bundle but it's exactly what you need and want to know how much to budget for buying one. So you call the company who makes it and ask for a price. They tell you, "Sorry, but we don't sell directly to end users, you have to buy our gear through an authorized vendor." So you ask for a list of their vendors. "Sorry, but we don't give out that information. You could try googling our name for some?"
Once you locate a reseller, you call them up and ask them how much it costs to buy the storage array. "I'm sorry, I don't have the pricing in front of me but do you have time on Wednesday for a 1 hour phone call?" You ask, why can't you just give me a price over the phone? "Well, we want to get to know you and we need to make sure that this solution is the one that fits your needs. Plus we can tell you all about the product and answer any questions you might have." Fine, let's schedule a phone call.
Wednesday rolls around and the phone rings. On the line is your "Account Manager" (salescritter), an Integration Engineer (salescritter who can sometimes answer technical questions), the Account Manager's manager, and possibly a trainee for any of the above. Because whenever there's a scheduled phone meeting, it's never just one person on the other end, it's a whole team. "Why don't you start by telling us about the problem you're trying to solve and by the way, all other parts of your infrastructure that we could possibly sell you solutions for?" So you answer their questions, as diplomatically as you can. Once that's done, if you're _lucky_, you will sit through a 30-minute long sales pitch on the product you already fully intend to buy, if the price is right. If you are unlucky, they will try to schedule a follow-up phone call and webex for it.
As the hour-long phone call is clearly starting to wind down, you grit your teeth and ask, hopefully, how much does this thing actually cost? "I can see your a down-to-brass-tacks kind of guy so I'll tell you what, I'll send you a detailed quote sometime early next week, okay? Great!"
_Two weeks_ later, you get the quote. At this point you are so tired of the resller people and their delays and empty platitudes, you just want to get the damn thing on order before your spending window closes. To your surprise, once they actually have the check in hand, they move a lot quicker and ship the unit more or less immediately.
The thing is, if you offer a product in the enterprise space and _don't_ go through this complicated dog-and-pony show for every customer, they won't buy from you because they won't see you as a serious vendor.
I hate it all.
I’m not afraid to make a few phone calls, or exchange a few emails, to find out how much something costs. It’s not hard, and it’s my job to do it.
As for your guess that “call for price” businesses are always more expensive than those with pricing pages, from my experience you are wrong. All that matters is the company’s willingness to negotiate with me. In my experience there is essentially no correlation between that and whether they publish a pricing page.
Enterprise purchasing is more similar to a marriage than it is to buying a latté. Even down to having to get internal stakeholder buy-in (akin to "meeting the parents"). Price matters but it doesn't matter nearly as much as being able to navigate the evaluation and procurement process adeptly, so it's worth it for the vendor to filter out tourists, and the right buyers are looking for a longterm partner as well so they're down to do the dance (ie they're not just looking for a fling on Tinder).
This feels like a bunch of sales/marketing bullshit, but it's not - it's just a byproduct of the fact that change management at a big company is hard and people are people (ie are difficult).
I work in product/engineering, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how to tune our product to help enterprise buyers make purchases successfully. It's hard but rewarding. Tiny example, having a product that is flexible enough that you rarely have to say "no we can't do that" in a sales cycle is really powerful.
Then we were shocked to find that it would take them two weeks to set up our first machine.
I noped out of it at that point and just paid the penalty to get the hell out of there. A competing service, that we already used, sets up machines in 1-2 days.
When stuff hits the fan and you really need things to happen, two weeks is just a crazy response time. That's like infinity in internet time.
This was about 3 years ago. His company moved everything to AWS.
Pricing laid out up front is more of a consideration for smaller shops which isn’t their target market at all.
Good for them but I am not buying that stock :)
While setting up infrastructure for my current employer I was required to get a quote from them as an existing customer. I expected them to be more expensive than everything else but it was a shock, at the time their IaaS was roughly 4 times the price of any competitor with some extreme limitations such as bandwidth with an expensive per GB rate if you go over. They also recommended dedicated hosting offering to set up an antiquated DB fail over system and claimed to offer 24 hour phone support for a total price I could have hired someone to work as a dedicated sysadmin.
I went with Linode, over provisioning everything for a fraction of the price, I don't expect 24 hour support but stuff gets sorted out quickly when things go wrong on the other side of the hypervisor, Linode are also more transparent in my experience when pushed about issues. With Rackspace they make me feel the way that sleazy salesman that scares you into the extra insurance you get sold with hire cars and then feel like a fool for for afterwards - I can only assume their market is for people who would rather comfort themselves with expensive support than invest in the time to set up a reliable system with a DRP.
... that ended up way more negative than I expected, but, it's just my anecdote.
ISP perspective here: This absolutely has to be intentional. There has been a race to the bottom in pricing for dedicated bare metal x86 servers for close to 20 years now, in the hosting company industry. Very likely they're not going after the market of people who want to pay $165/mo for a server, but some considerably higher amount. A lot of the lower end dedicated server hosters who put prices (anywhere from $39/mo to $200/mo) directly on their website with a shopping cart are not their competition.
g'rackspace pricing' yields: https://www.rackspace.com/calculator