Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.