Well, today is pretty much toast. Regardless of the outcome of my current set of woes, I’m going home with at least half my ass chewed off. Moving forward, however, I need some advice on the best way to handle this situation.
We just purchased an Iseries upgrade. This is something that we HAD to do or we would lose our upgrade path and be forced to buy a new system within 12 months anyway at a significant price increase. The issue is this, when our IBM business partner met with us, multiple times, he drove home the point, that one way to sell this upgrade to our parent company, is that if we waited and bought a new box, we would change serial numbers and incur increases from our software vendors. So, when my boss sold the idea of the upgrade, one of the selling points, was that we would avoid additional charges from our vendors.
What has happened, is we have a few vendors that base their tier pricing on something other than processor group (our processor group is actually going DOWN with this upgrade) and I am getting hit with some fairly large upgrade fees. My boss is LIVID. Should I have found this out in advance, yes. I take full responsibility for that. Would we have still upgraded our system? Yes.
My question is this, what can I say to these vendors to convince them to either waive or at least discount these increases? Begging and pleading? Threats to take our business elsewhere? I am of the opinion that it would be best to just ASK, but I haven’t dealt with this issue before and am not sure which tactic to take.
Today, it won’t matter if I get them to waive the fee and send us a check, the state of my ass isn’t going to change. My boss has gone beyond the reasonable stage. My current course of action is, I’m avoiding him as much as possible. (He’s in another building, so it isn’t hard). However, I’ve had to set meetings with these vendors for late this afternoon and we will both be in on the calls, so I’m going to face the music at some point today. My second question, how do you difuse such a volitile situation? I’m considering valium in his coffee, but I don’t have any valium and I’m not sure if he even drinks coffee.