Ask Slashdot: Do You Trust When a Vendor Tells You To Buy New Parts? 156
Nerval's Lobster writes "Roughly 85 percent of IT managers polled by Forrester said they would hold onto networking infrastructure longer, but vendors retire products prematurely in an effort to force customers to upgrade. In a response that may seem familiar to anyone who's ever been pressured into buying a maintenance contract—either by an enterprise vendor or a major electronics retailer—over 80 percent of the 304 respondents said they don't like the misrepresented cost savings, new fees, and inflexible pricing models—but buy the products anyway. One of the survey's interesting points is that IT decision makers aren't willing to contradict the vendor. The uncertainty seems to come from the fact that the vendor may in fact be right—and a customer who contradicts what they're saying may end up shouldering the blame if the equipment goes south. It's the 'you never got fired for buying IBM' argument, applied to the networking space. The problem, of course, is that the vendor often works for its own agenda. Do you upgrade when the vendor (or reseller) suggests you do so? Or do you stick to your own way of doing things?"
Ask for evidence ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure most of us have dealt with sales reps over the years, and seen all sorts of claims of bigger/better/faster/cheaper, but they're often unsubstantiated by anything.
We had a scenario with a vendor a while back where functionality we were relying on wasn't going to be in their next version until a year after it was too late for us. (Add on component we'd been using for years.)
So, we basically forced them into extending support since the only reason we couldn't upgrade was because of their inability to deliver functionality we already had.
Then they spent the next year constantly asking us when we would be upgrading, and conveniently trying to forget about the signed contract they'd given us to extend support and telling us we were about to become unsupported.
You need to work with your vendor, but you sure as hell don't need to take what they tell you at face value without something to support it.
At the end of the day, most of the salesmen (because that's what your rep is) are more worried about their commission check than anything else, and will certainly mislead your or pressure you to do something which doesn't really benefit you.
Re:Stop buying gear without lifetime warentee (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, dropping $2K on hardware for storage more than once in half a decade sounds insane to me. I upgraded from my 4TB nas box that I filled up in about 2.5 years.