As someone with both technical knowledge and purchasing power, I've run into this frustration as well.

It's always pretty easy though to say "we like your product, but we want more information as to integration possibilities. Can you put us in touch with someone on your technical staff so we can ask these questions?"

Everyone company I've run into will at least give you an email contact, and all of the smaller ones (less than 20 persons employed) will just transfer you to the tech department directly.

I've done this with everything from hardware purchases to $7000/per cpu database software.

As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.

I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.

Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.

I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.

I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.

I was tasked with finding a compute cluster for a small gov contractor research lab. I spoke with IBM, Sun, SGI, Dell you name it. None could inform me more than their brochures. Then I filled a form on LinuxHPC website. Quotes from smaller vendors started coming, most just VARs for the big boys. Except one shop in the midwest: those guys didn't waste any time, the entire team dialed us in and we could ask each specialist about the product. Even the cabinet maker dude who made the rugged, wheeled storage units for DoD; some other guy who could water-proof computers to stupid levels, etc.

Sigh, I'll miss the days when America made stuff :-|

This is why most companies need a 'talk to an engineer' instead of a sales person for those who want the details. From my understanding a few soft/hard tech companies do this with engineer rotations as you could learn a lot from talking to perspective customers (who knew!).