The system vendor's online sale is likely to undermine ongoing deals VARs are negotiating with their customers.Sun Microsystems is offering deep discounts directly to customers on some of its major products in a promotion it is billing as the Sun 25th Anniversary Sale—a promotion likely to undermine deals that Sun VARs may have had underway with customers.
The systems company is promoting the deep discounts directly to customers on a Web page and Sun Staff Engineer Rich Burridge gives a call out to the sale on his company blog.
Among the products offered at the discount are several Sun Fire servers, a few Ultra workstations and several StorageTek NAS appliances.
Discounts offered are large. For example, the Sun Fire X4500, regularly priced at $47,995 is now priced at $24,000. The Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS regularly priced at $44,814 is now priced at $15,630. And the Ultra 45 UltraSparc workstation, regularly priced at $3,695 is now priced at $2,405.
Such discounts, offered directly to customers online, may undermine the pricing VARs are currently negotiating in ongoing deals with customers. And it calls into question whether customers will accept the higher prices again once the sales promotion ends.
The Sun sale Web page says the prices on the "online deals" are good through May 7.
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