This is half the reason I build my own servers. It's impossible to decide what tradeoffs to make when the true cost of those tradeoffs is hidden behind some sales asshole.
My preferred vendor is Silicon Mechanics: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/
They sell SuperMicro equipment, they list prices, estimated power draw, etc, all up-front. You can add machines to your shopping cart, checkout, and you're done.
They've always provided us with fantastic customer service, and stepped up to replace/repair anything that didn't work right, even if the cause wasn't entirely clear (such as a hard drive issue that could have been OS related, but turned out to be a Seagate firmware issue).
I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)
That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:
1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.
2) Slash their prices on demand.
Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.
Then Dell gave us a sales manager and all sales had to go through him - to be fair he would often return our calls within a week or t least send an email saying he would call. And quotes through him were generally only 10-20% more than the website price once you had removed all the Server CALS and Office licenses that got added to every machine you asked for.
But of course he wouldn't sell you Latitude or whatever they were calling their low end machines because you were now a medium size customer. In the end we resorted to buying anything for the dev team from the outlet on credit card.
We needed to purchase some blades a year or so ago, and they initially quoted us 45k (which seemed to be well under their website's price). Since we were comparison shopping, we let them know IBM's quote, and after some intense back and forth we got the price down to around 37k (and with some ADDITIONAL components not in the original quote)... a significant savings.
Along those same lines, if we need a new laptop or desktop, the refurbs are usually well-priced, but if speed is important we just shoot them a list of specs and get a quote quickly (instead of spending time on the website comparing optiplexes vs. latitudes, or whatever the different models are.)
Most businesses don't feel the same way - they like sales guys, because the orders are larger - and it gives them the feeling that they are getting a special, one-off customized offer. No matter what the listed discounts are on the website, they'll always feel like a custom quote is a better deal (because it's part of the salesman's job to give them that feeling).
AFAIK Dell does offer automated quotes (I found these http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/servers/rack_optimized/ct... for example) - and even he says "I even put the $4000 server that I want to buy in my shopping cart".
So what I think he means he gets the automated quote, but since it's not the 'special offer' he's used to getting directly from the sales guy, he's unhappy.
So it seems that the blog author loves the hardware - but not enough to purchase it at the price listed on the website.
My question in general is, how good are the discounts you get from these a sales guys, typically?
And my question to the blog author is: How much of a discount are you losing now, that you'll compromise on the hardware you wanted.
The reason is that if you use a sales guy, you're considered a "client", and they can get a good idea of your total profitability based on a collective snapshot of everything you buy. If you use the web, they don't.
No matter; I usually pay less than half buying parts (which are usually sold in a rational manner) and assembling myself.
But then again, the salesguy might be there to ensure future business. The next time you need a server, are you going to pick on the phone and give Mick a call, or are you going to waste your (presumably) valuable time doing some comparison shopping?
Maybe it's worth it to give the through-salespeople orders a discount because there's a person to person relationship built that encourages future sales.
In fact, I'm working on this subsystem right now. For large catalogs and large numbers of customers, this becomes quite challenging. There's a huge volume of data, and keep it current while product pricing, availability, licensing terms, etc. change, is tough.
I used to think this way until I started running a business and realized that people are people and they do things like give discounts, while web apps do not.
When we order with a web app we generally follow up with a call to a sales rep to see if we can get a discount (now, or in the future).
You should look into talking to people sometimes.