Cisco Pricing Undercut By $100M In Big Cal State University Network Project

alphadogg writes "The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network revealed earlier this week was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations. CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project. 'Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet,' said CSU's director of cyberinfrastructure. 'Alcatel-Lucent won the project with a bid of $22 million. Cisco was the high bidder with a cost just under $123 million. Not only was Cisco's bid more than five-and-a-half times that of Alcatel-Lucent's, it was three times that of the next highest bidder: HP, at $41 million.'"

Comments

Re:I knew cisco was expensive

[b4dc0d3r]

You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?

Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open source.

I had to quote the whole idiocy. Yes, we are comparing Corporate SQL, the kinds people buy. With the license charges, I don't think groups like Google nor Facebook could afford per-core or per-CPU licenses to do what they do.

This branch of the thread is about how Cisco stays in business when bidding 5x the lowest competitor. Not how they stay in business when an open-source router company gives away hardware for free. How does open source have anything to do with the previous argument?

You could argue the same for why buy Unix and Oracle when there's Microsoft Server and SQL. The answer is because the expensive one actually has some features.

Oracle is expensive, and it is great at what it does. It doesn't have a fancy GUI (SQL developer doesn't come close to what you can do with SSMS), but there are several you can buy, which also suck compared to SSMS. At the same time, Microsoft keeps making things difficult. Look at threads where people can't find Activity Monitor in Sql 2008 R2. They like SSMS as a GUI tool, but the new interface is pretty much shat upon.

This is why people go with expensive. There is a feature they want or need, and one provider either doesn't provide it (a decent management interface like SSMS) or keeps butchering it into useless eye candy (like SSMS). If Cisco has the one thing you really depend on, you will pay them.

The route to success starts with a great idea that nobody thought of and executing it well, and at the right time. How you implement it can be on open or closed platforms. There is another route to success, where you throw out ridiculous quotes just to see if someone will bite. Or like Microsoft, offer to sell an OS you don't even have. Or like Apple, pay attention to the things dumb users care about so they develop a fanatical, thoughtless appreciation. There are many routes to success, as it turns out.