Fun fact: Intel uses them in place of bribe^^ uh, I mean as a reward to volume re-sellers for meeting sale goals, and during specific SKU promotions (buy cpu +MB, receive free SSD).
And if you know what you're doing and have a rep at Synnex or Ingram thats willing to play along, you can really get things cranking.
I sold over 2 million dollars worth of Intel SSDs to Amazon customers in the span of a week once. Intel was running an extremely nebulously defined promo for 'new' customers where resellers could get 90% off disty price on enterprise SSD.
I uploaded all the eligibles SKUs to amazon at like 15% off list, wrote up some really gross python scripts to manage orders between amazon and synnex and to submit the deal registrations, and then hit my 6 months sales quota in an afternoon.
The double bonus was 6 months later when I then registered for all the backend spiffs. The backend rebate on some of this stuff sometimes exceeded 10% of list price. To date it's the only deal I've ever put together that had more than 100% gross margin.
Well played, but I'm genuinely not understanding why Intel would do this. If there's consumer demand for their SSDs at 15% off list (as you experimentally demonstrated), why would Intel run a distributor promo that offers 90% (what!) off the even lower disty price? Did somebody just have a KPI of units shifted to hit?
Because "The Channel' sales model provides all sorts of strange incentives from vendor reps through to end users. Everyone is playing everyone off everyone.
Lets say there's two solutions that would solve my end users problem equally well. Both have list prices of 10K, both have normal disty cost of 7K, but brand X is running a promo where I get a 50% off front end discount from disty, but brand y is not.
Now I call the customer up and let them know that not only is brand X the best solution, but because of my great relationship with brand x I've secured them a 20% discount off list.
So now the customer is getting what they need cheaper and I've got more margin in the deal, which is what my commision is calculated out of.
So essentially when vendors do this they're not trying to make things cheaper for the customer to increase demand, they're trying to make sure that their products put the most money in sales people's pockets so that sales people will push their stuff the hardest.
Though on this specific occasion I was following the letter (or lack thereof) of the promotion, but certainly not the spirit. Grabbing existing demand vs generating new demand.
The entire purpose is so that they can juice up the numbers for when they announce quarterly numbers.
For the kind of executives that stay at a company like Intel, the only thing they care about is the company’s stock price, and they’ll do anything to keep it high, even if it’s at the expense of what quite literally is destroying or directly hemorrhaging in the long term to the company itself. It’s how you end up with crazy situations like this.
I actually got scolded by the Intel rep for this one. Mostly she was mad that there was no way they'd let a loophole like the one I abused go through again next year, so her YoY numbers were gonna be awful.
I like Intel SSDs, often these cost a little more but have better 99% latency than competitors. If an Intel Inside sticker meant an Intel SSD rather than Atom or some other hunk of junk, that sticker would mean something.
If you go to microcenters website you can search for SSDs based on their controller chip. Specific controllers and large heatsinks seem to be what's next for the PCIe 4 SSDs that claim 5GB/s or more.
