They depended on vendors like you for the hands on.
My vendor was IFFY. On the other hand, run through the typical vendors. Highend enough to play with the BLEEDING edge, inexepensive enough to want to buy the non-Compaq system-pro alternatives. This would be an aspiring vendor, someone who is willing to take a risk on Tier-2, unable (or unwilling) to qualify for Tier-1.
The vendor in my area was about an hour away. They were N Jersey, I was S Jersey. There were no others that I was allowed to talk to, since I foolishly called them 1st. I would have preferred a PA/Philly area based vendor.
At that point, a service call would cost serious money if I was paying for travel time. I wasn't. This was all included in the quite reasonable (as compared to CPQ) price. Which meant for every blip on this brand-new system (ALR in this case, but same vendor for the cube) would then trigger at least a day effort on the vendor tech's part. They must have lost serious money when trying to install it over 3 months.
Did they call upon you to perform service calls on systems installed by some other vendor?