Anyone got any budget left?

The end of the financial year must be nigh -- vendors are rolling out their last minute specials to try and get everyone to spend their last shreds of budget before June 30 rolls around.

Naturally, trying to get IT managers to spend their final crumbs of financing before the year rolls over assumes that there's actually any budget left over, and that it wasn't all consumed as soon as it was assigned, and before the unpleasant requests for compliance systems began.

But IT vendors have to make that assumption to avoid going completely insane as they contemplate their own scary targets.

Citrix, for one, is running a discount on its Presentation Server and Access Suite products, slicing 10 percent off the licensing fees for purchases of between 25 and 100 seats.

Local director of channel sales Phil Dean-Jones happily admits that the main incentive for the deal is to catch some year-end dollars, but also notes that it represents the main chance for smaller installations to catch a break on software pricing.

In other words, if you need more than 100 seats, you can probably cut some sort of deal no matter what the time of year.

Apart from potentially empty customer coffers, the biggest risk of this kind of strategy is that it builds an expectation that there'll be a discount fest every June, flattening sales in July and August.

Citrix ran a similar 'buy five, get one free' promotion last year, but Dean-Jones says that this year's has gone better -- perhaps because the maths on calculating a 10 percent discount seem more instantly appealing, even though the end price per seat was more or less identical in both cases.