I'm trying to keep this vague as our exact situation is probably pretty identifiable. We are in the market for some new storage appliances, replacing our aging compellent arrays. Due to the dollar amounts involved, we put out public bids for the project, and Pure was one of the respondents. We liked their offering, both the hardware and the whole support package that comes with it, as well as all the positive reviews I see here on Reddit, and selected them as the winner.

When we went to purchase the hardware however, we were informed that the price they submitted to the public bid was no longer valid due to increases in DRAM prices, and it would increase by about 100%. We fully understand that the market is insane right now, but our Auditors probably wont. They submitted a public bid with a specified purchase date that they cannot meet.

The reason I am reaching out here is because our experience with the sales team is that they are entirely inflexible. We have been trying to work with them to come up with a solution and they absolutely will not budge on any aspect of the bid. At this point we may as well be talking to a SQL lookup table. Is this normal with Pure? We've had countless meetings with them, including some of the sales managers, and its always the same - get bent. They even went as far as to say that the other vendors probably didn't read the RFP either, and also wouldn't be able to honor their prices, which seemed pretty unprofessional.

I've never run into a sales team that I couldn't bargain with before, or wouldn't at least throw us a bone to make our higher-ups feel better about price increases, and it has us worried about how inflexible they may be with support and customer service inquiries going forward, if we can make the purchase happen. I thought Dell was getting bad, but at least they honored their prices.