Our pal Timothy Prickett Morgan (TPM) wrote a good story in The Register about how Rackable and Verari have recently added equipment leasing programs. I’m more than a little surprised that it has taken them this long to take this step; it’s not like these companies are still start-ups. If I’m running a company that sells big-ticket IT products, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy my products – cash sales, leases, trade-in deals, barter (including crops, farm animals, furs, etc.) While it doesn’t look like they are opting to add the rather wide range of buying options that I would provide, they do have more than the plain vanilla deals, including mid-lease upgrades and lessors that take an equity stake in the deal. It’ll be interesting to see how well these companies fare over the long term, what with the economic crisis and ever-increasing competition from much larger vendors. It’s much easier to make waves and money when you’re a plucky pioneer who is blazing trails and proving the value of a new product (like blades).

 The hard truth is that just when you’ve built up a decent-sized market, you have also inevitably attracted the attention of the ‘big guys’. They generally stumble around at first, maybe not getting the market or the value proposition, or bringing out inferior products. But they eventually get it right on the product side, and then they start grinding away –  using their immense marketing and sales resources to blanket the market and get into every deal. As a small company, the only alternatives are to get purchased or to out-innovate. For Rackable and Verari, being bought by a major vendor is not all that likely. IBM and HP figure they’re pretty set as far as blades go. Sun needs to fix their business before making yet another big purchase. This leaves Dell, which is kind of an intriguing possibility. They have the heft to swing a deal financially, and it would give them a compelling product set to pitch against IBM/HP. I haven’t heard anything along these lines, not even the odd rumor, but it does make a certain amount of sense…