In a healthy market, a buyer in need of a product can get quotes from multiple sellers and pick the best one. Real competition produces real pressure, and prices move toward the floor.
The tech supply chain does not work this way. For any given deal, it produces something closer to a monopoly, and the mechanism that produces the monopoly is deal registration.
Once a reseller has registered your deal with the provider, that reseller holds an additional protected margin on the specific opportunity. Other resellers can still approach you. They can still quote. But they cannot price against the registered reseller on anything close to equal terms. The provider has effectively picked a winner before you started shopping.
Some buyers try to get around this by inviting multiple resellers to compete. What they discover is that the second and third resellers cannot actually compete. Their quotes come back higher, or suspiciously similar, or carefully structured to avoid a price war. The losing resellers do not want to burn goodwill with the provider by undercutting a registered deal. The winning reseller does not have to sharpen their pencil because they know the others can’t match them anyway.
The illusion of competition remains intact. You still get multiple quotes. You still run your process. But the process is theater. The outcome was allocated the moment the first reseller registered the deal.
From the provider’s perspective, the system works. Resellers are incentivized to go find customers and generate demand, and protected margins reward them for that effort. The provider gets an army of salespeople without having to employ them. From the buyer’s perspective, the same system produces a market where real price discovery is structurally blocked. You cannot compete what cannot be compared, and you cannot compare what has been allocated in advance.
The conflict here is not that resellers compete for deals. The conflict is that you have been told there is a market, when in fact the market has already settled before your first conversation. You are running a procurement process inside a pre-decided outcome.