Guild Companies - Shaking IT Up: VARs, Now That's Funny

I was recently involved in selecting hardware at my employer's, and it was an eye-opening experience. I knew it would be. I'm a software guy. I know very little about the details of the hardware that my software runs on. I became involved in making this decision because of my experience in selecting software. I looked forward to the education, but what I didn't count on was that not only was this going to be eye-opening, but it would turn out to be a side-splitting experience, too.

There are a few differences between sales of hardware and software, and these differences add to the humor of selecting the hardware. One difference is that hardware sales involve value-added resellers, or VARs. I wasn't accustomed to this. In my experience with selecting software, I usually dealt directly with the vendor selling the software. No third-party was needed.

With hardware, you barely work with the vendor. Sure, there is usually a representative from the vendor present during the sales process, but the VAR creates the proposal, runs the show during the presentation, and is the primary contact during the sales process. What's even more interesting is that you may have to select a VAR before you get to select the hardware. We actually had to listen to sales pitches from two different VARs for one hardware vendor and make a decision on which VAR to use before we could even start the actual hardware selection. Then, once we were ready to go, we had to be very careful when discussing the different VARs, because two of the three had exactly the same name. As funny as this may seem, I haven't gotten to the real humorous stuff yet. More on VARs in a minute.

Another difference between buying hardware and software is that, with software, the vendor usually has to back up what he is saying right then and there. This is called a demo, and without one a software vendor is sunk. This isn't easy to do with hardware. VARs can't very well haul in a bunch of servers, plug them in, and let the selection committee watch them run. Even if they could, what would that do?

"Yep, Bob, they run. Wow! And listen to that hum. Very nice. Can I get them in green?"

So because of this, the hardware sales folks might have an advantage over their software counterparts. Although, it could be that software vendors have the advantage. They can talk all they want, but the proof is in the demo. You can walk out of a software demo with a pretty good idea of what the software can and can't do. With hardware, you have to trust the sales team. You heard that right: "trust" a sales team. Maybe that's where VARs come in handy. These people are not only sales professionals; they are also gain-your-trust professionals. And in the process of attempting to sell you hardware and gain your trust, they make you laugh, too.

Without a demo, a VAR has to talk you into buying the hardware, and when there are millions of dollars at stake--man, do they talk. My company was planning to make a major hardware purchase, so we invited three different VARs and their vendors to make proposals, based on information we had given them.

The first VAR was very convincing. According this VAR's presentation, its vendor was number-one for running the type of software we would be running. That seemed good. Then, once we got into the discussion of the hardware, I was bombarded with enough acronyms, performance measurements, and model numbers to make me want to toss down millions of dollars right there just to make them stop. All I could think was: "Give them the darn contract!" God, do I love software. In between the bragging and slamming enough technical terms down our throats to make even technical people sick, they would make little stops during their presentation to let us know how committed they were to the project and how this was much more to them than simply taking an order for hardware.

They also talked a lot about fruit. They kept saying that when measuring the necessary performance, memory, and storage that it would take to run our software, we should make sure to measure apples to apples. It got so bad that our own team started to walk around talking about apples to apples. What? How about gigahertz to gigahertz or gigabytes to gigabytes? Leave apples out of it. I heard that expression so many times during the week that I can no longer eat an apple. In fact, to look at one makes me want to measure how fast its processor is. What's more, they kept talking about forklift upgrades. Forklift upgrades? We weren't buying a forklift. A forklift wouldn't even fit in our computer room. I thought maybe the room was too hot, and it had affected their brains enough to make them think they were selling forklifts to our distribution center. But, no, a forklift upgrade turned out to be an upgrade that requires a computer, a box, a server--whatever you want to call it--to be replaced, as opposed to just slapping in more memory, storage, or processing power. The forklift upgrade referred to the physical removal of a machine. It took me a while to figure that one out.

One down, two to go. I didn't think I could handle it. Then I started to realize how funny the whole thing was. The buzzwords, the constant bragging about being the best for this and that, the apples, the forklifts, the commitments, recommitments, and over-commitments to us--it was all very funny. I went from dreading the next VAR to eagerly looking forward to it. Would it be the same experience, or was this first VAR a revelation? I had to know.

Well, I wouldn't be disappointed. In fact, I almost laughed out load a couple of times because it turned out that they were all amazingly the same. The order of humor may have changed, but each VAR was representing the "very best" hardware for our software solution, and each had plenty of slides to show it. Each VAR would try to impress us with processor clock speeds or acronyms like "LPAR" and "SAN" hooks and units of work measurements (I can't even remember that acronym, but our software vendor made up its own and we used it). Then their voices would get a little softer, they'd make more eye contact, and would pronounce their commitment to the whole project, not just the taking of the hardware purchase order. Then each would warn us to make sure we were comparing apples to apples when looking at the other vendors' proposals, and, of course, each had an upgrade path that did not include a forklift.

What an experience. I sure learned a lot about hardware. I also learned a lot about hardware selection. More important, I had a blast.

I don't mean to totally make light of the situation. There were lots of dollars involved, and this was a big decision for my employer to make. I also want to say that the VARs knew their stuff, and what they didn't know about, they would quickly investigate and get back to us. Also, they were very good at following up and answering our questions days after the presentation.

One last thing about VARs is that they are very powerful. You have to be careful to choose the hardware on its own merit, not necessarily because of the VAR. This trap is easy to fall into, and, all hardware aspects being equal, it makes sense to take a good look at the VAR. You should ask questions like, which VAR will service you better? Or which VAR has the better track record?

But don't forget the most important question: Which VAR will make you laugh the most?