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Making Your First Request for Proposal
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Not too far back, we had two customers request a quote within a one week time frame where the similarities of the actual spoken words resulted in the same oblique pricing. The end solution for each of the customers were worlds apart as was the characteristics of their respective business models. The price for each of the generically requested systems was comparably close in the range of $ 110,000.00 dollars. Equally astonishing, the price of the end solution(s) – the one carefully thought out – was also comparably close at $ 30,000.00. This is our first case study; “making sure you are asking the right questions”, and providing enough information that can be delineated into economic and functional reality. Communicating the operating environment is just as important as the functional requirements.
As mentioned above, each customer had a unique system deployment. The first, Customer A, asked for a KVM Network system that would support twenty-five user consoles accessing twenty-seven computer systems. Customer B had a very different requirement with a minimum number of user consoles and one hundred and twenty servers. Both followed generic request with Customer A asking for, “twenty five consoles to twenty-seven computers” and Customer B requesting support for “one hundred and twenty servers accessible by thirteen user consoles”. However, in both cases, valuable information was missing and/or not offered during the initial interview. The results were not only very similar, but also very common - higher than acceptable prices for the KVM Network solution. Further, deployment deadlines had to be extended while a suitable solution could be designed.
By identifying the business model and the operating parameters of the users – the who what, where and when – Tron engineers were able to design and deploy economical solutions no matter how different these customers business models are at more than 70% less than what it would have cost based on their first request for proposal.
The two applications above are the targets for our second and third case studies. They represent common customer situations and effective solutions that can be used to build your own KVM Network while maintaining a good sense of the economics involved. These new case studies will be added to this section of our web as manpower permits so please revisit this page in the near future or call for on-site assistance.
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