I plan on selling, but in all honesty, it's because I lack choices. CPQ and HP are pretty much the same with workstations and servers, and our company is both CPQ sales and service authorized but only HP sales authorized. Naturally, I'll push CPQ so we get the high margin servicing work when things go wrong.
That being said, my eyes have been cringing lately every time we sell a bunch of commercial PC's. About 1/7 of them have been coming in faulty as of late, and that doesn't look good to our customers. They are also changing the system specs VAR's can purchase and limiting the many options we used to have when selling to companies. Of course, they are making it easier for companies to buy direct, but resellers still don't have to tell their customers they will service direct purchases. CPQ has also pissed off the entire channel by going direct and as a result, more resellers are building their own systems instead of pushing CPQ. If the dependability of CPQ doesn't improve, we will probably do the same.
I guess I'm a weird pup.If you look at my profile, I own both CPQ and DELL, which seems odd because even investors of the two companies seem to mock each other for whatever reason. While I'm torn, I really do have more confidence in DELL than CPQ.
While I have no data or statistics to back up my claim, I deal with CPQ daily in my full time job and really wonder with some doubt if CPQ is going in the right direction. |
