I helped design a DC for a big data mining / science company and we got just under 20% off the higher margin packages. I felt very good about the number and Dell was great to work with on the purchase side.

Please stop and read this and show it to your boss.

If you are really getting 0% discount you need to private message me and send me $10k so I can tell you this one weird trick.

You simply ask for them.

Just do that. Everyone gets discounts.

Well, it depends on how much stuff you're buying and from whom. If you're buying $800 dollar workstations you won't get as many discounts as when you're buying 400+GB quad CPU 2U servers

Agreed. But even a single purchase is likely to be below list price.

the last time i was in a position that i oversaw hardware purchasing... you get better deals based on your overall spend. after we had spend 250k we got a new sales rep that had access to offer us lower pricing, same thing happened once we breached the $1m mark. new sales rep and pricing went lower. In fact, our first sales rep couldn't even make up a reasonable deal at $80k because he didn't have access to that level of discounting.

usually i always send everything back and tell them to do better.

my biggest gripe about dell pricing was no line items, just a bottomline price. so i couldnt tell which things i could save money on by sourcing them elsewhere(ie: larger drives, large amounts of memory)