Thank you for taking the time to respond to my concerns Bren. To answer your question, I work with many vendors on a daily basis, software, hardware and network device vendors. At any one given time I am evaluating a minimum of twenty different products. I allso re-evaluate vendors we rejected every 6 months to see if there have been sufficient improvements to reconsider them.

Good vendors will have reasonably open pricing, and will negotiate discounts on a per customer basis. Negotiations typically revolve around volume, probability of repeat business and beating competitors bidding on the same deal. The only vendors I have ever dealt with that do not have open pricing, are the ones with a questionable product offering. Meaning its either technologically inferior, not "fully functional" or is so over priced it negates the cost savings benefits of applying the technology.

rPath is not offering cutting edge networking hardware, its an open source platform. Open source platforms have open pricing - Red Hat, Novell, etc. In my opinion, from what I've seen of rPath's offering and the responses from representatives from their company, suggests rPath is tacking an Enterprise premium price on a Small Business product offering. I think my questions asking them to demonstrate the value justification are legitimate, would you not agree?

Marcus