Sometimes, vendors just won’t take customers’ money for a cluster no matter how hard the customer pleads. Last month, HPC technology strategist Ryan Quick, co-founder and principal at Providentia Worldwide consulting firm, told us that while vendors have technologies capable of delivering solutions across the stack, too often they have disconnects between business units that makes buying an integrated solution difficult, if not impossible.
“Unless you’re a tier one enterprise where you can force the right people to be in the room for you, you may never be able to buy that from the company,” Quick said, “even if you can go to the website and say, ‘Look, right there’s the SKU, I want to buy that.’”
In this interview, Quick expands on those comments with more scenarios of solutions that are hard to buy, advice on handling recalcitrant vendors – and some sympathetic perspective on the vendors’ points of view.