Gimme a price!

Principle 1:
A vendor works with several cutomers
A customer works with several vendors

Principle2:
A customer has access to (valuable) information, a vendor would like to have: competitive information
A vendor has information a customer would love to have (expertise)

Example:
A vendor such as Sun/IBM... spend a load of money to get competitive price info. Here's what happened to me:my boss gives me a budget of USD250K to find an SRM product. Well, I have the budget, I know what product I want; off course, the budget is not to be given easily, I must first compare prices among potential vendor. I'm lucky, the product that fits my needs (AppIQ) is available from HDS, HP and Sun, I just need to ask a quote, for the same configuration:
- HP gives me USD350K
- Sun gives me USD1M (yes..that's not a typo)
-HDS, well they are not keen on giving me a price, coz the product is "too complex", I should try to get something else, made by HDS...a crap USP centric soft basically.

Problem description:
How to explain the price difference between HP and SUN? I gave same info to both (1000 FC ports, 500 servers dual attached)...I havent got a clue, but someone knows something I don't..

Conclusion:
so basically, a customer has info (and money) vendors would love to get....but vendors have info, a customer would love to get also. If the interface vendor-customer is not right (trusted advisor) then we get these kind of excess

that's all folks