 |
 |
I prefer to go through the MSU computer store to do all of our purchases, and yes I have done some small value amounts. I think the smallest thing I ordered with a quote from Brian was an internal Bluetooth card. -----Original Message----- From: Tom Rockwell [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 10:47 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] How to purchase Dell systems using Dell Small Business pricing A couple comments... Buying a computer is a bit like buying an airline ticket --- most vendors intentionally obfuscate their pricing structure. When you take a flight, the person sitting next to you might have paid twice what you paid, half what you paid or even gotten the ticket for free. Same with buying a computer. You can buy a $5 cable or $250,000 of servers this way (note that I haven't tried the single $5 cable personally). There are a surprising number of items from a wide variety of manufactures available from Dell (got to get them to sell Apple ;-) Even items that aren't listed in a search of dell.com can be purchased --- we've had Dell add new items from a vendor. (We also asked them to add a new vendor, but the vendor and Dell couldn't work that out.) Much of the stuff that you might buy from cdw.com if available from Dell. We've done multiple purchases of non-Dell equipment (racks, UPS, PDUs, cables) this way that were large enough to normally require a bid. We are careful to make sure that we still get good pricing and aren't paying more by not doing an RFQ. I've been very happy with how purchases from Dell have gone using the CStore. Cheers, Tom