Unfortunately some of  the vendors don't use the same tier structuring that
HP uses.
They seem to be using an older structure. I dislike tier pricing and I don't
agree
with it. The vendors are not suppling you with any added features or
Improvements.
If they want to charge more for their product then I believe they should do
it up
front when you buy the product. Sorry, if that makes the product unavailable
for
smaller shops than so be it. In life not everyone can afford to drive a
mercedes!
Tier pricing has torpedoed some of our planned enhancements right out of the
water.
That's the end of my ranting!!

Karl Hancock wrote in message ...
>Just a rant to make myself feel better today.
>
>Vendors offering tier based pricing irritate me.  The specific vendors will
>remain unnamed, for now.
>
>We are adding a processor to our 995/200 that would make it a 995/300.
When
>I spoke to HP Support about this, they indicated that there would be a
>charge for hardware maintenance, understandably, but that a 995/200 was
>already in the highest tier so adding a processor or two would not increase
>software support costs.  ( need to reverify that I understood this
>correctly, in light of what other vendors want).
>
>Now some of our third party software vendors want to charge more for the
use
>of their software on an additional processor.  What is irritating about
this
>is that we will not get any benefit from running these packages on a faster
>machine.  Job scheduling, network printing, etc. run just fine on our
>present 2 processor system.  We are adding a processor to improve the
>performance of an online transaction processing package and batch jobs.
But
>these other vendors want additional payments without offering me any
>additional benefits.
>
>End of rant.
>