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West Virgnia Auditor Finds Cisco Router Purchase Not Performed Legally
coondoggie writes "West Virginia wasted millions in federal grant money when it purchased 1,164 Cisco routers for $24 million in 2010, a state audit concluded. A report issued this month by the West Virginia Legislative Auditor found the state used a 'legally unauthorized purchasing process' when awarding the router contract, paid for with federal stimulus funds, to Cisco. The auditor also found Cisco 'showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public' in recommending the investment in its model 3945 branch routers, the majority of which were 'oversized' for the requirements of the state agencies using them, the report (PDF) stated."
And nothing happens !!
This library has a 3945.
Somebody at Cisco must have made quite a bonus...
And a customer that doesn't know what they're buying? Say it ain't so!
Caveat emptor - get smarter buyers.
So they got boondoggled. There's really nothing they can do. Someone is counting their ill-gotten gains at everyone else's expense, and that's business as usual for the world. That's always how it is, people unjustly enrich their pockets at everyone else's expense. It's not illegal to be an unethical crook.
"Not Performed Legally"?
"'legally unauthorized purchasing process"?
So, the opposite of legal... would be illegal.
Also: "Cisco showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public"
Really, a profit driven company tried to fleece the public? I'm shocked, shocked like a man making toast in the bath!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Spending someone else's money on something they can't afford themselves, and don't really need anyway, in the name of fixing the economy . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
we should make them a superhero class!
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
Spending someone else's money on something they can't afford themselves, and don't really need anyway, in the name of fixing the economy . . . ?
Only in part. It is also to repair, replace, and create new ifrastructure, thereby allowing businesses to do more. That 'more' dtill requires the businesses to spend on expansion that uses said infrastructure. Right now the only thing businesses spend on this government to buy laws.
Silence is a state of mime.
There's a whole lot of room to go down in specs before you could even consider talking about "insifficiently specced gear".
It's kind of like using that argument when someone needed a shovel and got sold a truck with a plough.
The people who bought these should be punished. Publicly. Then they should be barred for life from public service.
Then the people who hired these fools should be punished. Publicly. And barred for life from public service.
Come on people. Firing is easy. It is hiring that is hard.
Looking at the regular wholesale price in Germany (which is most likely higher than in the US), a price of $20k per piece would require e.g. a voice bundle. Plus, with a purchase of that many devices, Cisco would allow for a project price that would save at least another 20-30% on the purchase ... ... 29xx series will in most cases handle any "regular" speed used in WAN environments, even with partial 1G speeds ...
As for the oversized, unless they were setting up every site with full 1G or more, they are oversized by at least one or two models
Apparently you are totally unaware of the state of bridges in this country if you think our infrastructure is fine.
We've got lots of infrastructure that is falling apart. West Virginia just happens to have IT clueless folks running the place spending money where they shouldn't, and the biggest networking IT specialist around recommended something insane.
I can attest that while Cisco makes great products their sales folks and technical sales consultants are very unscrupulous at times. At a company I was working for we were looking for competitive bidding on a new Wifi Infrastructure. We were currently using old Cisco equipment however management wanted to have an open process and do a competitive bid. The Cisco sales staff and their channel support did everything they could to undermine the competitors even though our bake off showed that in terms of some features, the competitors had better features and security. Ultimately when they sensed that they would lose, they used a product roadmap meeting with our CIO as an opportunity to throw my management and my entire team under the bus at our "flawed" thinking.
Hard sell techniques? Yes. Unprofessional? Definitely.
In this case, it sounds like the Cisco sales rep was looking at his bonus, which was probably very very lucrative considering the total sales contract price. Any Network Architect or Engineer worth his salt wouldn't have recommended this overblown hardware based on the requirements. Hopefully West Virginia will use this opportunity to fix the holes in their procurement process so this doesn't happen again because I don't see Cisco ever giving them a refund.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I'm not surprised, this is Cisco's M.O.
Every quote I've ever gotten from them has been massively inflated by speccing higher end equipment than is necessary. They always give the big pitch for the bigger product - usually to upper mgmt, whether it is overkill or not. Everyone wants to believe they are "the enterprise", so Cisco talks them into enterprise-grade equipment.
Not to say that the state employees shouldn't have questioned the quote. But odds are that the only technically knowledgable people involved were Cisco's people, and they are the pros at fleecing the sheep.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
"The Legislative Auditor believes that the Cisco sales representatives and engineers had a moral responsibility to propose a plan which reasonably complied with Cisco's own engineering standards,"
Maybe a moral responsibility, but certain not a legal one. They proposed a solution that'd perform the task required, the customer said "yes, we want that" and handed over the money. If they're not prepared to do due diligence, that's not Cisco's fault unless Cisco had been commissioned to make a report to evaluate exactly what was required to equip each site for the cheapest price possible. The article suggests that it was more like "we have x sites that need routers, some as big as y" and Cisco sold them x routers capable of doing y.
The way to win would have been to hire or use a CCDA or CCDP certified consultant. The design associate/professional track is for consulting on Cisco networking device options, feature sets and port density.
Unfortunately, most consultant firms hire with only CCNA certification which means you are knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.
Most equipment has a finite life. Yes we have all see that 15y/o Cisco box in the back room everyone is afraid that if the UPS allowed to power down the fans in the Cisco or its power-supplies would never spin back up. Mostly competent business or state agencies depreciate stuff faster than that and replace it.
You should be able to reasonably estimate the needs of a facility like a library 3-5 years out. Then you build yourself a little head room. Take your most critical estimated capacity requirement multiply by 1.4 and size accordingly. Even that can lead to some over kill; like putting a 2811 where an 1841 might do, but its usually enough prevent any nasty surprises that require replacing equipment before the end of its service life. On balance it works out okay cost wise and may leave you with some residual value in the equipment that you can then resell. No reasonable person would have faulted Cisco for doing what I just described but some of the reports on this clearly show them over specifying by 5 or 10 times and more.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
uh, mods, this isn't flamebait. It's a good point. The whole ARRA was to push "shovel ready" projects and stimulate the economy. In this case all it stimulated was Cisco's quarterly results.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
You should care about the state of infrastructure. If your bridge collapses, it will fall on your head!
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
It's not a rehash, it's an update. If you had bothered to read any of the links you would see that these are the state's official findings on the matter, and it puts Cisco in the position of potentially not being able to bid on state projects in the future.
Yep I am sure this created all kinds job hours over seas keeping the production line printing up router PCBs a little while longer. After being sold at Cisco's (I would guess based on price breaks I have seen them give VARs) 140% markup a whole lot of good US tax payer dollars help fill the deposit capital requirements of a European bank. After all we know Cisco never re-repatriates profits; okay maybe these particular dollars hit US entities and tax roles but they just offset other dollars that would have been brought back for payrolls, dividends, expense otherwise so its wash. Glad Obama is doing so much "investing" in winning our future.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Did I ever say the infrastructure is fine? NO
I said: Obama wanted "stimulus" to "rebuild infrastructure" He got it. Now all of the sudden it's like that stimulus never happened and he has amnesia about it. Could it be that it was completely wasted on things like.. overpriced routers... instead of being spent on the precious "infrastructure" like we were promised? Could it be that West Virginia's government didn't want to use all that taxpayer money it got for something useful? Could it be that handing gobs of cash to unaccountable politicians is just as bad an idea as giving liquor and card keys to teenagers?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
"Stimulus" and "infrastructure" don't tend to go together well, especially in the U.S., which has a fairly decentralized regulatory system requiring coordination between local, state, and federal agencies, multiple levels of agency review, and the opportunity for nearly anybody in the vicinity to sue over anything from environmental concerns to contracting concerns to NIMBY reasons. That all takes a long time, while the purpose of stimulus spending is to build stuff now. So the way that circle is squared is to put stimulus money towards so-called "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects, those which are already approved and ready to go. On occasion those are real infrastructure projects which just happened to, by stroke of luck, be ready right when the stimulus bill came down. But in a lot of cases they're more boring maintenance stuff rather than long-term infrastructure. In a lot of cities, for example, the majority of the money went to repaving roads.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Cisco 'showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public' "
On what planet does CISCO bear a responsibility to the 'interests of the public'?
Seriously?
CISCO's responsibility to its shareholders, pretty much* full stop.
*I'd argue it's in its longer-term self interest to pay attention to the interests of its employees, and probably its home-community. But to the 'public in general'? None whatsoever.
The responsibility lies entirely with the 'expert' or 'consultant' hired to run the project. And if that person was so stupid that they hired a vendor as a consultant (ie someone with a vested interest in the result), then perhaps *shock* someone might even get fired for incompetence?
-Styopa
The problem, as I see it, is not in the fact that they used Cisco but that it looks like it was a no-bid contract. There are other companies out there with routing equipment that compare favorably with Cisco products. I've found Cisco fanboism to be as annoying as Apple fanboism.
Not so certain. The auditor's opinion, and first recommendation from that section of the report:
That section states:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But the righties are always telling us about this making jobs. I thought giving all the money to the "job creators" is exactly what they wanted to do? Thus they will hire people, not because they have work for them but because they have too much money or something.
Most of the report focuses on dual power supplies. Are those really needed? Maybe. Probably not in most cases.
Dual power supplies perform a couple of useful functions. If a power source fails, the other power supply fed by the alternate source keeps the router running. This is good for critical operations, and in maybe a few circumstances like the state police, it might have been useful to them. The other function is to keep the router running if a power supply dies. I've found this to be rare, but not impossible, with Cisco equipment. Again, it depends on how critical things are. Students and teachers in a school might be quite upset, and some online education processes can be disrupted, but education can still go on with substituted lessons during the time it takes for a replacement to arrive.
As for capacity, the router should have been chosen to match the designated capacity level, which did vary widely. Then when any facility needed to be upgraded to a higher capacity level, the router would be swapped out to match. A hand-me-down approach could be used for another smaller facility to use the bumped out router for their capacity growth. A range of routers in a pool could make that work. OTOH, politicians might also cry foul if a few routers are sitting in storage to support hurried replacement and hand-me-down steps.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, the reason that the 3945s were recommended was because the state wanted routers with redundant power supplies, and the 3945 is the lowest model Cisco makes with redundant power...
This really doesn't surprise me. Having worked with a State government in the late 1990's I was in charge of a conversion from Token Ring to eithernet for a moderate sized network for an agency. Cisco seemed to assume that we were all dumb as dirt and insisted that no other brand of eithernet switches would work with their routers which we were already using and which we did want to stay with for the one router we needed.. A classic case of FUD. Fortunately, they were high bid on the overall project by a factor of over two! By using the vendor WE wanted (who also had the lowest total cost) for the switches, and keeping the Cisco router, the conversion went off ahead of schedule and way under budget and worked fine for as long as I was there. My experience taught me that they really didn't CARE what was best for the customer, they just wanted the sale.
performed their legal duty to maximize shareholder value
I'm getting tired of people translating this meme into reasons why a sales rep performed jackassery like the sale in question. Yes, the company owes its shareholders a true and ongoing effort to make their shares valuable. Part of that effort includes making the company valuable by maintaining its market-worthiness through the stewardship of its reputation with its customers. When a sales rep oversells like this, and it comes out in the press, it erodes the value of the company, and is counter to the make-shareholders-happy mandate.
The "corporate America is inherently bad because publicly traded companies must do wrong-headed things because they're required to" attack on businesses is just wrong. Thousands of businesses, every day, increase their near and long term value by being valuable to their customers. Nobody likes to talk about that in ranty internet forums because it takes all the fun out of shouting about The Man etc.
What Cisco did in this case was demonstrably not in the shareholders' interests.
I hate corporate America as much as the next guy
What you hate are the people and incidents that make you hate those people and incidents. In the meantime, millions of people at work in thousands of companies do sensible things every day, and have loyal customers as a result. But that never makes the news because it doesn't provide something to bitch about, and where would Slashdot be without that?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The way to win would have been to hire or use a CCDA or CCDP certified consultant. The design associate/professional track is for consulting on Cisco networking device options, feature sets and port density.
No, the way to win would have been to conduct a proper tender exercise. Write a specification, and hire an independent consultant to help review bids against it, if you aren't smart enough to do that in house.
Pardon my ignorance, as I'm not a network-admin type in the least, but would there be something wrong with using plain gigabit ethernet switches with an optical module (or something to the effect, not sure of the terminology). Is there any future use for the system that would be hindered by using plain switches instead?
And how is it that a consultant certified for one company can advise across the realm of many companies that should have been open to the bidding process?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use."
Quality network engineer you have there, Dept. of Education.
In all seriousness, this is not new. DHHR in WV just fired some folks because they went public with information about a contract that was awarded to a contractor under mysterious circumstances. As a West Virginian, the answer is plain. Look for the money, tickets, campaign contributions. This is nothing new for the state, unfortunately.
They who wanted dual power supplies? I can see maybe some being used in some places like the State Police. But for all the small schools, too?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
None of it is "wasted". Every dollar counts on the GDP side of the ledger and funnels to big business. Exactly as designed. Makes the numbers look better and sends money to those deserving people who funnel money into Washington lobbying.
And you can cross vendors off the list of vendors you will consider for future contracts for doing things which aren't illegal, so how does that make any difference?
What you hate are the people and incidents that make you hate those people and incidents. In the meantime, millions of people at work in thousands of companies do sensible things every day, and have loyal customers as a result. But that never makes the news because it doesn't provide something to bitch about, and where would Slashdot be without that?
... and the CEOs and other executives that allow and even encourage this kind of activity.
In a company the size of Cisco, such things might not even be seen by C-level executives. Being as this is a case in West Virginia, though, it is very likely being at least observed, if not now managed, by the CEO, since West Virginia where he grew up and first attended college, and got his law degree.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Apparently it was for hundreds of locations around the state ... large and small.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
" the state wanted routers with redundant power supplies"
Well, that's what Cisco claims, but they can't document it. The best they could do was show that redundant power was included in some spreadsheets which the state reviewed. People within the state deny making redundant power a requirement, although they did discuss it for "24/7/365 locations such as regional jails and DHHR state hospitals."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I get that you're being sarcastic, but the answer is no. Stimulus is effectively forcing us to borrow money to spend now in the name of fixing the economy and the spending is supposed to be on things of actual value. The classic example is if stimulus is simply about getting money into hands, just hire people to dig trenches with spoons. We don't need trenches and that's a stupid way to get them but it's "creating jobs".
What do you mean, leftist? It's the lefties, all the way down from the President, who are talking JOBS, JOBS JOBS! They're all talking about jobs-- it's just that the jobs are for their cronies and for government.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Now that they have announced which tiny little shanties have $20,000 routers sitting in them unguarded, I wonder who many will walk off... even if its just the employees after they learn how much its worth lol.
Ran into a problem at work. Management told me I could tear out the entire network and rebuild. This is exactly what I had wanted to do for years. Unfortunately I had to inform them the issue was a database issue not a network issue. A quick half hour of tuning fixed the issue just fine.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
1. The president is a center right politician, he is no leftist.
2. The job creators things was basically what Romney ran on. The same supply side argument they always make about jobs.
My experience is this:
1) High level person talks to middle IT (and usually incompetent IT manager) about a bunch of buzzwords they read in an in-flight magazine
2) IT middle manager doesn't bother to say (or know) that buzzword won't work or is inappropriate for location.
3) Peons who actually work on the stuff tell MM all the issues, and as he doesn't understand plows forward anyway.
4) Bid gets put out and approved because its buzzword capable, and its what was the requested specifications.
5) Thing of dubious value gets installed ( or not)
6*) [Bonus!] actual needs aren't met because there no money left becuase of shiny new toy that makes upper level ppl happy that they are "cloud enabled"
I'm from the UK.
Which is probably, why in part, I do have more socialist views than most Americans.
I've only ever been to America on holiday a few times.
You should see the things the DoD buys, often to never be used.
I work in sales for another company selling servers. It's all in the information in the RFP. Do you think the original requirements document sent out specified individually what each police station or library would require? Never. There's very few employees out there in public or private sector that would go down to that detail.
Oftentimes the purchaser sees the budget they have available to them and hears the age old mantra "use it or lose it." So they buy the biggest and baddest piece of IT gear they can.
The case that I see now is with servers. Let's say some enterprise is building out a new datacenter using vmware and they want to operationally standardize on a single model. A common practice. So they go out a buy a 1000 Dell/HP/IBM servers. They don't go out and buy 17 of model X, 25 of model Y, etc etc all with different memory/disk configurations depending on the specific workload that will be put on each individual server.
If the RFPs specified every single requirement for every single location all customers would get a more accurate proposal. However, they don't.
We're $20T or so behind on infrastructure spending, we basically stopped spending any significant percentage of GDP on maintenance and replacement about the time the interstate highway system was completed so we have nearly a half century of debt to pay down.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, a state probably can't do so, so long as you operate within the bounds of the law it's pretty hard to justify stopping someone from bidding on future RFP's or open bids.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The ultimate cash cow is the US government especially since they haven't passed a budget in what, 4 years now? They just keep writing checks that we'll all have to pay some day. The government does create jobs in terms of bureaucracy but that's funded out of net productivity from all the other folks paying into the system. I think of it as my out of work brother in law, moving in with his family. He's in my house, eating my lunch, watching my TV and using my razor blades but isn't contributing anything to the household. Yeah, he may serve a function as a watch dog when I'm not around but he's a net expense, a tax on my quality of living.
On the flipside you do have greedy companies and the disparities between how wealthy some of them are vs. the rest of us is discouraging. I'm not a socialist by any means but when you have Apple sitting on $187 Billion in cash, you have to wonder why the system is so skewed. The Tax code does need to be rewritten to encourage investment and growth in jobs for businesses, not some token welfare project and something not tuned to government or aerospace either.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Romney is also center right, just slightly right of the center right president.
I mentioned nothing about being conservative or not, but conservativeness does not traditionally rule out give-aways of tax dollars. Spending is not the primary difference between conservative and progressive beliefs. Nor do those map directly to right and left.
From the beginning Romney was a candidate that could not win. The republicans pretty much knew they had no real shot at it so they let the Mormon run. If they had selected a more right wing candidate their loss would have only been worse. In the same way that Palin basically cost McCain any shot at the election. Once you go that far right the candidate is considered a joke outside some very fringe groups and areas.
Few isn't bad as long as it's more than 1.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Belkin!
Good, they should check out Brocade(formerly known as foundry networks).
The applicable rules were already referenced in another branch, but it's quite possible they can (I haven't actually read the details).
The only reason to make your bidding process Cisco only is if you are using Cisco-specific features on your network (e.g. EIGRP, HSRP) and you are too lazy or stupid to change them to the industry standard (e.g. OSPF, VRRP). HP and Juniper make good network equipment too. Seriously.
Based on actual requirements, it seems like the alternatives are legion actually.
If things are different on the high end for equipment that WVA never needed, then that's something that the Feds need to address. It sounds like it's time to start enforcing the Sherman Act.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If the auditor's report shows that illegal activity took place in the awarding of the contract then the AG's office should charge somebody and fine Cisco. Otherwise, it sounds like the findings are more about political gain versus illegal activity.
So if the state succesfully convicts itself for breaking their own law, then.... Ah! *this* is why they have State Prisons!
I likewise call WV home and I've been in IT here for nearly two decades. I've worked directly with Mark Williamson, the Cisco engineer being scapegoated in this mess, many times over the years. I'll say going in that I know I may come off as a Cisco shill. You're welcome to review my post history to see otherwise. I have purchased, implemented, and managed their products at my jobs over the years and I'm fairly agnostic about brand at this point. However, a few things need to be said about this issue and how it is being presented.
This stimulus money was treated as a windfall by Jimmy Gianato and abused like every pork barrel project in WV has been for as long as anyone remembers. Allowing the State to pin the blame on one (genuinely nice) engineer at Cisco is only continuing the abuse of the system by those really guilty here.
No, the way to win would have been to conduct a proper tender exercise. Write a specification, and hire an independent consultant to help review bids against it, if you aren't smart enough to do that in house.
But you're missing the basic point - the State's goal was to spend a lot of federal grant money on technology related to homeland security. In keeping with the long-standing tradition, a huge sum of that money personally profited friends and family of those in charge. A formal specification, RFP, and review process would have opened the door to others who weren't supposed to get a piece of the pie, and risked shining light on the process. By doing it under the table with the State CTO's former employer, they were able to do what they wanted and apparently get away with it since the blame is being heaped on a Cisco engineer instead of the actual culprits.
This is West Virgina we're talking about here. For many, many decades, Senator Robert Byrd *covered* that state in wasteful pork barrel spending, all of it justified with BS about them being poor Appalachian folk (that made out like bandits from his largesse). Given this history, I'm suprpised anyone in W Va government even noticed, let alone complained.
Compared to Cisco, Brocade equipment is noticeably lower quality. I've run into two new brocade switches with bad ports on them as well as one linecard. Furthermore I found a software bug with a brocade chassis that could potentially cause it to become unusable with the only way of fixing being wiping the config. I've only seen one DoA Cisco switch.
Oh and Brocade documentation sucks (granted I haven't had to look too much at the Cisco documentation too often).
Fuck Beta
Cisco way or the highway?
There are plenty of alternatives.
Cheap storage VM.
I'm getting tired of people translating this meme into reasons why a sales rep performed jackassery like the sale in question. Yes, the company owes its shareholders a true and ongoing effort to make their shares valuable. Part of that effort includes making the company valuable by maintaining its market-worthiness through the stewardship of its reputation with its customers.
But when the customer comes to Cisco with a giant federal stimulus grant check and tells them they need to spend it all ASAP, is it really in their best interest to say "No, we won't take your money. Go give it to one of our competitors."? I don't disagree that this was a huge waste of money and corrupt from the core, but the corruption is on the part of the Homeland Security folks in state government.
the state wanted routers with redundant power supplies [...] for 24/7/365 locations such as regional jails and
DHHR state hospitals.
And even in that case they would have been better off with two cheaper routers and two data links in a redundant configuration! One of the standard packages for sale at $OLDWORK was/is "1 SDSL line, 1 ADSL line, two 1800-series (formerly 800-series) Cisco routers, with BGP and HSRP set up so that when both lines are up VoIP goes over the SDSL and non-VOIP goes over the ADSL, when one line goes down everything goes on the other automatically and our support is automatically notified". It cost a *LOT* less than USD 20000!
And that requirement was probably put in there so that the more expensive router would be the one chosen. Now maybe that requirement was floated originally by Cisco, maybe the procurement group thought it up themselves, but I doubt anyone really sat down and thought how vital that requirement really was and whether it should just be a "nice to have" checkbox.
The red tape was there to keep others from putting in bids. This is just deliberately corrupt, incompetent purchasing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
About 200,000 gallons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's being spent here. Federal stimulus spending has paid for no less than five brand new highway bridges within the past 3 years, less than 10 miles from my house. Maybe your state sucks, but mine did in fact have literally shovel-ready projects ready to go, got the money, and used it. I'm quite sure there were many more besides that. Those just come to mind because I can see them and drive on them.
The Feds should be suing West Virginia.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I would not judge the guy from Virginia who did the speck *before hearing his version*.
My employer often indirectly black-mouthed by media (including /.) for over-specking sins and it's hard to read totally unprofessional charges and keep silence.
I always over-speck our embedded gear RAM at least by 2.
If I know the HW spec is frozen forever and the SW one is not, I over-speck by x4 and sometimes even more.
Usually such HW freeze happens on gov orders.
I am ready to defend my approach before a Senate Committee.
for 1/8th of the cost, you can afford to keep extras on standby. I haven't had the same experience in terms of bad hardware. If you do your part and report those bugs, they tend to fix them and release new code. When we reported bugs with the ServerIron, they had new code for us to use within a few days. Yea, its a pain, but for a fully managed switch with 24G ports at $150, ill take it.
This points to a huge deficiency in government; no accountability. The sad thing is no matter how irate everyone here is, or how criminal the act. The people responsible- namely Jimmy Gianato- as Fund Manager - he will not even get a slap on the wrist. Until corrupt lifetime politicians go to jail for violating the law; this will keep happening. To much power and no consequences for their actions... I think I might want to change my carrier...... President Protous has a nice ring to it!.
The greatest crime that has ever been commited is the atrosities the goverments of this world commit against the people
I ran into the bug with the FastIron over 6 months ago. They only just fixed the bug and it took way too much effort on our part to even get them to acknowledge the bug.
Fuck Beta
That argument is pretty much the same as claiming an unlocked door makes theft the fault of the home-owner i.e. you're blaming the victim and absolving the perpetrator of any responsibility. If someone makes a poor decision, you still have to choose whether to take advantage of it or not.
That argument is pretty much the same as claiming an unlocked door makes theft the fault of the home-owner i.e. you're blaming the victim and absolving the perpetrator of any responsibility.
No, it is exactly nothing like that. The perpetrator was the State's group charged with spending the federal stimulus money, and Jimmy Gianato specifically. The victim is the US taxpayer who's money was given to politically-connected companies (the boondoggle is much bigger than this router purchase). The State employees charged with managing the grant did not do any needs assessments or verification that the equipment they were purchasing would be useful. They went to Cisco with a dollar amount that they needed to spend and a few ideas of what they might want. They got what they wanted - money disbursed, a bunch of it going to the state CTO's previous employeer (Verizon), and some toys for the state if they can figure out what to do with them.
So? Even assuming your theory of corruption on WV's side is correct, how does that absolve Cisco of any blame? Both giving and taking a bribe are wrong, as are selling and receiving stolen goods, and colluding on an inflated purchase still requires two people to collude. Unless you're claiming that every single person involved at Cisco was actually dumb enough to not realise how inflated their bid was... I mean, recommending a router that can handle 1000 VoIP connections (and not spotting that you've not included the actual VoIP modules required) for a branch library in a rural town with less than a dozen phones is just such an easy mistake to make!
OK. So I am normally the last person to defend big corporate, and the first to make excuses for government. However in this case I am inclined to say: WTF?
Since when is it a companies responsibility to have "public interest". There job is to make money. If they sold broken things, or misrepresented the things they sold, then it is on them and their reputation, which will hurt them later on.
Nobody held a gun to the head of government and said "You must buy this CISCO router!"
Did they not put out competitive bids? Did they not do their research? Do the procurement people not know what they are doing? Does the IT staff not know? Did none of the afore mention communicate with each other?
It does sould like Cisco seriously upsold government in this case, and that is sort of a real jerk thing to do, which if I were government again looking for routers or network whatever, and bids came in, I might make a arguement for not selecting Cisco based on previous work. However the blame does seem to fall on incompatance in this case in whoever was in charge of the tech procurement, either not understaning the job, the requirements, or perhaps something even illegal like a nice kick back from Cisco.
I'm not saying I support Cisco in this, but I can't say I blame them much.
How was their quote inflated? They didn't overcharge for the equipment provided and they provided the equipment the customer wanted.
I agree completely that the equipment is oversized and inappropriate. That the money could have been better spent on a mixture of bandwidth and lower-tier equipment. That the State and the US taxpayers got a raw deal on how the money was spent. However, it was the grant administrator in the state's Homeland Security department that decided to spent $X on Cisco equipment instead of bandwidth or other things. He decided that there was no need to consult those who would know the state's needs. He decided to use Cisco and Verizon rather than go through the legal purchasing process. He decided to just get the same oversized model for every single location.
I'd love to see Cisco help improve the situation by providing the appropriate equipment and taking the other stuff back for trade-in. But before anyone considers a punitive action against them, and particularly the engineer caught up in this mess, I expect to see terminations and prosecutions of the political appointees that caused it.
Oh it certainly looks very plausible that there was corruption somewhere in the State Office of Technology (not Homeland Security) - there was no tender, and they should never have accepted the bid - but the Cisco engineer in question can't produce any documentation that backs up his claims that he was just following the spec he'd been given by the state. Given this documentation would exonerate him, it seems telling that he can't provide it - specifications for a $24 million bid don't just go missing...
The second link in the article is much better than the first, there's plenty of irregularties all round, the report blames both sides of the deal for failings.
Oh it certainly looks very plausible that there was corruption somewhere in the State Office of Technology (not Homeland Security)
Then you should look closer. The head of Homeland Security, Jimmy Gianato, was the grant administrator and this is but one of several gross abuses of the federal money. OT didn't even know about the purchase until the last second. They initially resisted then the head of the department suddenly signed off on it despite objections from the staff, meaning political pressure was brought to bear.
the Cisco engineer in question can't produce any documentation that backs up his claims that he was just following the spec he'd been given by the state. Given this documentation would exonerate him, it seems telling that he can't provide it - specifications for a $24 million bid don't just go missing...
Read the auditor's report - they don't exist. Most of his work was based on two days of meetings. The spec was what he produced from those meetings and the state signed off on it. Why would you think it is his responsibility to maintain this, even if he had it?
If I meet with an architect, describe my dream home, then sign off on the blueprint he creates, would you later say he cheated me because he has no detailed documentation of my original request? I accepted the blueprint. I said it is what I asked him to do. I own it now.
You're not making a $24 million proposal either; the fact that no records exist of these meetings on either side and even more so the spec was hashed out in just two days with no consultation of the parties the proposal was for all scream collusion. Your analogy of the architect is close, but even then you'd still be foolish not to have any record of what you asked for in the first place (did you really just recite what you wanted from your head, having made no notes at all?), and in the WV situation it's confused by multiple people and bureaucracy being involved, with all the plausible deniability that entails.
Your analogy of the architect is close, but even then you'd still be foolish not to have any record of what you asked for in the first place (did you really just recite what you wanted from your head, having made no notes at all?)
Now you're starting to get it. You just agreed that the grant team for the State failed dramatically.
...in the WV situation it's confused by multiple people and bureaucracy being involved, with all the plausible deniability that entails.
There is zero plausible deniability for those truly at fault. Read the auditor's report. Politics kept the report from recommending any action against Jimmy and his group, but the report makes it clear who failed, how, and why.
I hadn't claimed in the first place that the fault with all Cisco's; my point was that there was blame to go round on both sides.