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Cisco Looking To Make Things Right With West Virginia
alphadogg writes "Cisco has offered to 'take back' routers it sold to West Virginia if the state finds they are inappropriate for its needs, according to a post on wvgazette.com. The offer is in response to a state auditor's finding (PDF) that West Virginia wasted $8 million — and perhaps as much as $15 million — in acquiring 1,164 ISR model 3945 branch routers from Cisco in 2010 for $24 million in federal stimulus funds, or over $20,000 per router. The auditor found that hundreds of sites around the state — libraries, schools and State Police facilities — could have been just as suitably served with lower-end, less expensive routers."
I bet those millions stimulated the creation of a nice boat or a mansion somewhere.
Methinks Virginia should sue Cisco for FRAUD
$20,000 a router for library?
What is Cisco taking the citizens of Virginia for? Suckers??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...shouldn't be taking advantage of people who don't know any better. A salesmen tells them they need a thousand dollar router for their business even though a hundred dollar one would do the job just fine. It is in the best interest of the company to sell more zeros worth of product. But at the expense of taxpayer dollars? I draw a line.
A router?! A computer that is dedicated to the purpose of moving data along a network path and/or deciding which network paths based on some rules and protocols.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me one of the industry's biggest shams is the gross overvaluation of Cisco networking. Is it really so much better than all the others or are they cloaked in so much brand naming and the hallowed process by which people become "certified" that people forget what the actual purpose of Cisco's stuff is?
Methinks Virginia should sue Cisco for FRAUD
$20,000 a router for library?
What is Cisco taking the citizens of Virginia for? Suckers??
You realize Verizon actually sold the routers to WV, right? Of course not, why would anyone read about an issue before they comment.
They bought massively overspecced routers. And this is Cisco's fault... how?
Cisco is only offering to take them back because the cost of taking them back and reselling them is way less than the cost of the bad publicity of a government agency whining that they spent way too much on a big-iron router for a library with two computers...
For whatever the reasons Cisco makes this offer, it's the right thing to do. Just as sucking the Federal teat (hey, it's just bidness, everybody does it) was the wrong thing to do. To really make things right, they'd also offer to find the state suitable routers, at cost, and set'em up as well.
If I was the state, I'd be taking a close look at conscientious civil servant who approved the original deal. "Misappropriation of public monies" has a nice ring to it on a résumé.
They bought massively overspecced routers. And this is Cisco's fault... how?
It's not the fault of cisco. It's the fault of the cisco salesman/consultant who's job depends on telling the treasurer of the library that an expensive router will make kids learn better and faster and grow up to be sweet little angels and not serial killers.
Exactly, they're concerned about reputation.
They ought to be concerned about being lined up against a wall and shot in the head for being criminal scum.
What, you're going to be upset about corporate executives who cause grossly more harm than the average criminal on death row being mistreated?
Fuck you.
Reminds me of when I was trying to find 10GbE switches for a small SAN I wanted to design.... but, those are the prices. People complain less when you overbuild compared to when you underbuild, that's what drives this.
WV and Virginia are two completely separate states, have been for over 150 years... I think someone needs a map
It seems not very many people remember it was Verizon that sold WV the routers, not Cisco. Either way though, this really falls on the shoulders of the idiot who repurposed the broadband expansion funds for buying large quantities of overpowered routers because ridiculously unnecessary mandates. Frankly, I'm surprised Cisco is doing this, but it's good to see at least in one instance corporate greed didn't triumph over common sense (Verizon notwithstanding).
Or that unified platforms across 1000+ sites makes for cheaper support costs when the configs and hardware is identical. Though, given how it went down, they likely paid for Smartnet and Verizon gold-plated latinum level support contracts.
Learn to love Alaska
A good salesman will get all the tech people convinced that they need his cool stuff that will work well for a good price. A great salesman goes right to the top and convinces the top(non technical) people (with white papers like this week's pole) A truly great salesman will even eliminate the tech people and replace them with his own so that the new tech people will not only support every suggestion but will become a sales force in their own right.
I am willing to bet that no serious tech person had anything to do with this and if they did that they are Cisco certified up the ying yang. Just a guess but that the decision to purchase these came from very near the very top and the person was totally chuffed to be running a multi-million dollar project and was convinced that their tech wienies would be way out of their "depth" on this one.
Assuming some tech guy did protest they were probably told that their suggested routers were mere toys and that to play with the big boys that you needed serious hardware.
One of the greatly overlooked solutions is that your networking demands are so small that quite old solutions can be very effective. As long as the system can be remotely administrated you would be hard pressed to buy old hardware that didn't meet the rest of the system's requirements. 100,000 users you need the big guns. 100 users you probably need one step up from a home router.
Read again, Cisco sold them and it is Cisco offering to take them back. You did read that right?
Of course not, why would anyone read about an issue before they comment.
Is it always the fault of the business partner? If only there was a recent precedent which shows that Cisco not only charges a premium, but an absurd premium, which can be on the back of the American tax payer. Of course there is such evidence. Fortunately the CSU system did their homework and saved $100 million and didn't get Ciscoed. (Apart from San Jose State, which clearly isn't known for its business school.)
Ahem, from the article:
" State auditors concluded that Cisco's sales staff showed "wanton indifference to the interest of the public." "
Seems pretty clear to me.
Cisco, and others, were specifically looking for government pork: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/40380
Cisco is looking for about $1 billion in federal bailout money, according to a report in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer. The company expects the U.S. government to fork over $47 billion to high-tech.
Bruce Klein, a Cisco senior vice president, is charged with making sure Cisco gets that share of the money. Cisco can't receive it directly, but only through projects tied to local and state governments that are financed by the stimulus funds, the N&O reports.
So Klein put together teams across Cisco to identify business opportunities with local and state government agencies and other public sector organizations.
Cisco is not alone in looking to capitalize on the influx federal stimulus funds. General Electric and IBM are also lining up stimulus-backed government contracts, the N&O reports.
But should companies shipping jobs to offshore facilities and contractors be eligible to bid on contracts financed by federal stimulus funds?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I agree... Maybe someone should look at WV's IT Networking staff. What a waste of stimulus money.
Cisco was caught red handed !
Before the auditor report came out, did Cisco volunteer to do whatever it wants to do now?
If Cisco did, I'll applaud Cisco for doing the right thing
If Cisco didn't do nothing, and pretended that nothing wrong had ever been done in this $20K per router for library deal, before the auditor report became public, hey, Cisco wasn't such a nice guy afterall !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The requirements were that the sites had legacy T1's and similar and were being upgraded to fiber. Therefore the router had to have both legacy interfaces and high performance. That combination is awfully expensive and the 3945 is not an unreasonable choice.
It would have been much cheaper If the requirements had allowed for temporarily having two routers on the sites until the legacy T1's were taken down or alternatively allowed for an extra visit to the site to replace the router.
Trying to avoid an extra trip to each site is not stupid. Requiring both legacy and high speed interfaces is not stupid. Going for a unified platform is not stupid. However, a joint meeting with the pre-qualified bidders would likely have revealed the potential cost savings of making a compromise on the requirements. Alternatively, an independent consultant with just a little experience in the area should have spotted it.
The same thing happens in many of bids, not just in the IT sector. Seemingly reasonable requirements together mean that only very few vendors can bid and that they need their most expensive solutions to handle it.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
"Hey guys, I'm really sorry I got caught beating my wife"
I needed to connect some PCs to network hardware, but it was not possible to just lay the cables because there was an emergency exit and passage. Cables were not an option.
So all I wanted was to use the available wall ports.
Cisco came up with a 3500EUR solution. For that there was no budget, so the hardware was standing there idle.
I just bought two hubs for the price of less then 100EUR. Hardware to hub on both sides, Hub to wallport on both sides. Patching by our IT guys (which took about 5 minutes, including the coffee break) so wallport 1 connects to wallport 2 directly as if it was a cable going from one side of the hallway to the other and we were done.
If Cisco would have offered a much cheaper solution for say 400EUR, I am sure the company would have bought it.
Seems a bit of 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.'
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I completely agree.
What happened to the WV's bid process? I work for the Government, anything of this size would require a RFP and a selection committee. It is solely on WV's shoulders to select a competitive bid on infrastructure projects like this one. I hope the same group of people don't run their Road Commission or Real Estate contracts. What a sham...
...moving very slowly and winning footraces with smug satisfaction.
You know, if you are buying something and have no clue what you need then this is what happens. They should take a long hard look at whoever decided to buy these things as they are the ones responsible for wasting taxpayers' money. Cisco is on the hot seat right now but if you went through what states buy line by line I'd be willing to bet big money that you'd find a lot more stuff like this. When people spend other peoples' money there sometimes is a tendency not to worry about it.
They send you a summons to come to court and if you don't show up THEN they come with the guns.
I can't comment at all on WV, but my experience is that most IT staff, incl. specialized or "specialized" IT staff, don't have much influence over such things.
A general trend in the industry is to de-prioritize internal expertise, esp. more specialized expertise, and to depend on outside support, esp. as it becomes more specialized. Where there is still expertise within internal IT staff, their concerns are easily ignored.
In some organizations, the people who make the final decision often have no technical background, or a limited background, or a "worked in IT 10 years ago" background, or a "specilized in IT management" background... or whatever... They are often people who do something because "this is how things are done in business". Even if such decisions are ostensibly made by competent people with a technical background, they may have been told how to make the decision by somebody else.
As said, I don't know about the VW situation but it wouldn't surprise me if a number of VW's IT networking staff saw the waste of money and disagreed with it.
That's exactly why they're trying to "make it right". This isn't generosity so much as damage control and a desperate attempt at "please don't sue us!". I'm sure if they hadn't been caught they would have been perfectly happy with the sales they made.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
hmmm, a 2901 ...will process 3+ Gb with 1500 byte packets. and it costs 15% ... .... boss had "big dreams" , shame he did not read the tech docs.
My company did the same wrong thing for a Internet edge router - we bought a 3900 when out Internet link was 150Mb)
I know I'm probably gonna get modded down for this, but what the heck....
Since when is it the responsibility of a company to tell customers what exactly they need? To use the famous Slashdot car analogy, if I am in a Lexus showroom and I am buying a car just for the sake of doing my usual daily stuff. I'm not a CEO or a VP trying to impress my company employees, I'm not a Hollywood star trying to do the same, I'm just someone from the street who's totally clueless on cars, and while I could just as easily have walked into a standard Toyota showroom, I happened to walk into one that sold Lexus.
Now, is it the moral duty of the sales guy there to tell me that I have no business buying a Lexus, and should instead look at a Camry? The parents suggestion seems reasonable, except that we're now expecting salespeople to sell people what they need, rather than what they want. Since when is it the role of salespeople to spoonfeed customers? What next - someone in Safeways who's checking out a coke being told that it's bad for him by the checkout clerk? Or being told not to buy gourmet bread from the store's bakery since that's more than what he needs, and instead being told to make do w/ standard items in the breads section.
In the above case, I understand that people shopping for the government of WV didn't have a clue. But that's where they could have used consultants to advise them on what to shop for. As it is, various governments make use of IT outsourcing services from various companies, and can easily ask them to (for a fee) advise them on the most appropriate equipment to buy, and from whom: WV could have done likewise. People look at middlemen as a scourge, but sometimes, when the stakes are high, it makes sense to use them to determine how to extract value for money. Like normally, I wouldn't bother asking someone how to shop for a computer or even a car. But if I were shopping for something I was unfamiliar w/, I'd either do the research myself, or if I was still not confident, I'd ask people I consider better than me at it how to go about it. Seems like this is something obvious that the WV government should have done.
Anyway, since Cisco has decided to do damage control in the PR perceptions, they might as well offer alternative replacements, as opposed to just cash, for overpriced equipment.
It's "IN the hot seat", not "ON the hot seat".
What is it with you Americans and pronouns? As, that, than, then, you don't seem to understand what simple words like that mean.
'Sense' instead of 'since'.
'Rediculous'
'Moran'
What the hell happened to your education system?
Installation and labor?
Did that not get built in to the bid?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Methinks Virginia has no reason to sue Cisco, as it was a slave state and WEST Virginia was not.
Government contracts don't work like that, You bid to meet the requirements, if you can not tick off every box as requested it is good by!
If you handed in a contract and it said "we can do as you requested and it will cost $15m, but if you do this it will only cost $2m" your submission may be thrown out, as its not your job to tell the government what to do. Government contracts are made to sound fair, but in reality it usually means the little guys got 0% and the big guys going to *have* to mark up to cover what the government thinks they need.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Methinks Virginia should sue Cisco for FRAUD
$20,000 a router for library?
What is Cisco taking the citizens of Virginia for? Suckers??
First off, Cisco was not the retailer. They were purchased through a reseller, Verizon in this case.
Second, it is not Cisco's responsibility to ensure that the router is the right fit for the application. That is like me suing Best Buy for selling me a 70" 3D LED TV, when a 46" would have worked just as well- and calling it fraud.
I work in government too and more specifically in WV in the office where this occurred. I'll tell you what happened to the bid process. The incompetence of the state purchasing division is what happened. Their process is so painful and long that state agencies do everything they can to avoid using them. Even the former governor Joe Manchin got caught stringing contracts to avoid them when he was in office. I've had contracts languish over there for over a year.
In this case, an existing contract the state has to purchase minor items with Cisco was used for these big ticket items. So technically it was bid out. It just wasn't bid out for these routers. The agency got dinged for this misuse of the system and the spirit of the law.
Having said that, the whole process here in WV needs to be overhauled. It is too complex and way too lengthy to be useful especially when the funding is on a tight timeline like the stimulus funding was. That complexity and duration is what makes purchasing something to be avoided. It is only human nature to try to avoid the pain. I don't have a choice but to use them and dread it every time I do.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Geez. You no, for all intensive proposes, your just picking on are grammer. If you has a problems with are education system just right a letter. You'd feel better than.
Government contracts don't work like that, You bid to meet the requirements, if you can not tick off every box as requested it is good by!
If you handed in a contract and it said "we can do as you requested and it will cost $15m, but if you do this it will only cost $2m" your submission may be thrown out, as its not your job to tell the government what to do. Government contracts are made to sound fair, but in reality it usually means the little guys got 0% and the big guys going to *have* to mark up to cover what the government thinks they need.
THIS. I spent many years bidding equipment into the Education marketplace, and many, many, MANY times I had to meet bid specs that made no technical or financial expense. The mechanism for asking to have the spec revised is nonexistent or dangerous (as in, your company is dropped from consideration for trying to tamper with the bidding process). All through coverage of this story, I've never seen enough of the actually bidding process to make a determination - I've have to read the paperwork. But I strongly suspect Cisco did absolutely nothing wrong. They simply made the decision to make money for the company (however much), rather than making nothing.
It was taken over by rediculous morans with no since.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
If only there were things in gov't budgets we could cut besides parks, police, air traffic controllers and food inspectors.
P.s., I hate children.
Take back at full price? or a low used price that you can get more for them on e-bay.
They don't speak English anymore.
Otherwise they wouldn't use quite so many Zs
Since it's on topic, it's pronounced ZED not ZEE. As far as I can see it's only pronounced ZEE because of the nursery rhyme they teach 'kindergarten' pupils.
Or they could just have waited until the day of the upgrade to fibre to install the new router?
I suspect it's more about the negative publicity than "Please don't sue us". Cisco has incredibly deep pockets (mostly cost they sell $20k routers to 2 person part time libraries), and could tie anything like that up on court till the cows come home.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm glad to have learned something that helps me to understand stuff I don't know about.
Wish I had mod points. You hit the nail right on the head.
I thout that Virginia collectively hated being called a "state" and refers to itself as a "commonwealth"?
Methinks Virginia should sue Cisco for FRAUD
$20,000 a router for library?
What is Cisco taking the citizens of Virginia for? Suckers??
If they sold them to VIRGINIA using money from WEST VIRGINIA... Yes, they need sued for fraud.
West Virginia has been its own state since 1863, thanks.
yeah well i don't like being called fat, but that's the truth, they can deal with being called a state since that's what they are
With all due respect, what does Virginia have to do with it? You do of course realize that WEST Virginia is a different state than Virginia? FYI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia We even have our own congressmen, senators, and a governor, believe it or not!
We need to eliminate monopolistic, nany-state actors, like the "State Auditor" - who's sole purpose is meddlesome interference and disruption of a free-market system.
This case is a great example, illustrating that the enlightened self-interest of all parties will ensure a fair market of desired outcome, if we remove the coercive influence of Government.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I agree, I think its pretty good of Cisco to offer this, especially since it does appear as if they did nothing wrong.
Its kinda like saying you won an ebay auction and later realized you paid 2x more then you could have bought it new, or more to this case, realized after winning the auction that you bought the top of the line model and could have been ok buying the economy model. Not the sellers fault here, its the buyers.
Ive worked under contract for the Canadian gov and its the same way, they send you a list of work to be done and you bid on it the entire project as is or not at all. You cant submit a bid that has changes to the project. Sometimes the specifications of the job are done in house or sometimes they are contracted out. But once the specifications are written and sent to tender, they cant be changed. especially by the bidder.
So basically this isnt a failure at Cisco, this is either a failure of the gov doing their own in house assessment of their needs, or if it was farmed out, then that company failed the gov when writing the specifications of the project.
In my experience the most f*cked up projects seem to come about then the project specifications requirements gathering is farmed out. Man I did some weird projects that took a massive amount of time just todo the simplest task.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"in" and "on" are prepositions, idiot, not pronouns.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's "IN the hot seat", not "ON the hot seat".
What is it with you Americans and pronouns? As, that, than, then, you don't seem to understand what simple words like that mean.
'Sense' instead of 'since'.
'Rediculous'
'Moran'
What the hell happened to your education system?
I sit on chairs, not in chairs. fucking wanker foreigners that sit on cushions and shit...
Well, over here, in America, they have chairs we sit ON during class. Guess it must be harder to pay attention then sitting in a chair. Question, is the chair upside down when you sit in it? I mean, how do you get in a chair? In between the legs?
Be seeing you...
How exactly does a router cost $20k? Granted this was in 2010, but how exactly is it that expensive? Special government price? How much would it cost someone else to buy that router?
And honestly, it's time to check all the books of all the states and start punishing the people who overpriced and sold stuff to the government, and also punish the idiots who accepted those prices and purchases. Corporations needs to be put in check.
Be seeing you...
When it's cheaper to put in three devices, a T1 router (long live the old non-isr 1900 with AUI and fixed serial ports) and a fibre router, and a switch/router to run them both for the transition, put in all three, and take out none, no site visits, then there's a problem. A single device should be cheapest. And the ASR I mentioned does both and is cheaper, so I can't help but guess that there were some extra hidden features, like Scansafe, that I didn't read about for this so far. But then, so many times, the money is earmarked for a specific thing that the RFP is essentially for the cheapest 3945, not an RFP for the cheapest solution.
Learn to love Alaska
It's not Cisco's fault... That West Virginia IT didn't know how to do their jobs! Somebody in the state installed that and signed the Purchase Order.
I work in IT and even 75% of IT people don't pay attention to what they NEED when they sign these big orders. My boss has "forgot" to transfer product licenses we own to new systems he last three upgrades. And that's FREE stuff we keep missing... And the vendor routinely is in such a hurry they pass it right along... Again, free upgrade money for them when that product needed a minor processor size bump.
I can't imagine the level of idiocy at a State level.
I guess we have to give the money back now, and pretend our hand ended up in your pocket by accident. You believe us, right?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Remember Business School and MBA is not the same as Project Management.
The WTF question of the day is WHY??
Have you tried to do ANYTHING at a remote site based on waiting for the PHONE company???
When you have to sit at the Capital and pick a box that will work for every one-room library 100 miles away with many different installed networks.. And it all has to be drop shipped, configured and ready to install. Mistakes like over-spec are easy.
In a deal this size there's absolutely no way Cisco's team went through each location to size the routers. At some point you expect the customer to have a clue. Government institutions pretty much universally put out an RFP in this type of situation giving specs of the hardware they need, then ask vendors to build a quote around it.
We need to fix that. It's obviously too confusing to Americans to have two "Virginia's" on a map. We need an extra star for Puerto Rico that wants to be a state... That will save millions buying new flags.
My guess is that they were integrating all the old lines into one network along with the new ones, so someone would have had to go to each site to make that happen anyway -- and installing a new router could easily be required for that. But yes, perhaps those sites could have waited a bit longer before joining the new shiny future. Maybe the contract with the old provider had ended or something silly like that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Really? You sit in a seat? How do you do that? I've always sat on top of them never inside them. Silly me I didn't even know it was possible.
I truly had no idea they had electricity in West Virginia.
Bucket seats.
A single device should be cheapest.
Why? T1 routers these days are legacy devices with very few units sold. Of the few units shipped, most are likely low-performance devices like the 1900. If you buy something non-mainstream, it is usually more expensive than a mass-market item.
You are completely right about the ASR 901 though. It would have been a much better choice than the ISR 3945. However, the routers were purchased in 2010 and it seems the ASR 901 was not announced until 2011.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It depends on whether the cisco salesman was being just a vendor (in which case, its the fault of the idiot buying from him) or was offering a 'free consult to your router needs' in which case, he's theoretically obliged to be honest...
I don't know what they think about the people of Virginia, but they seem to think that about the people of West Virginia, a state since 1863.
No, it's because we like the sound of our consonants spoken to be close to the sounds they produce. Otherwise we'd say "ay bed sed ded..." instead of "ay bee see dee...".
Better headline, right lede.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No, it's because we couldn't get Virginia to go along with calling itself East Virginia when we split from them. The Carolinas and Dakotas don't seem to confuse anyone.
Part of the capital was a grant. Government is generally use-it or lose-it so I strongly doubt they had the option of waiting.
Here in WV we're thinking these chairs might be nice for the library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_and_Elaine_Brown
They show up with guns. This incident was a prolonged siege that took place in NH. They're not poster children, especially if you heard their interviews on local radio, but none the less, it proves the point.
Read again, Cisco sold them and it is Cisco offering to take them back. You did read that right?
Yep, even though apparently you can't. From the original story:
"Five days later, state officials signed the $24 million contract with Verizon Network Integration to buy the Cisco routers."
http://wvgazette.com/News/201205050057
You all realise that T1/E1 cards for ISR G2 routers are cheap and simple? I have a legacy E1 in a 2911 that also handles many modern forma of connectivity. Hell, a 1921 ISR G2 would do the trick for most of these branches.
That's not what the legislative audit found. They found the following:
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Well considering this was one of the recommendations from the auditor's report:
I would say they are trying to keep their current contract with the state. It is about trying to bail out of this remedy.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
While govts at any level tend to think first with their wallet and then their minds when dealing with purchases, Cisco sales people should have acted above board on this. By that I mean, THEY, not the customer, are the experts or should have access to the experts and must help guide customers to some degree. It's NOT only about making a sale but keeping customers. How stupid is that? Cisco has excellent products--true--but they are NOT the only game in town anymore so they better watch out. Just look at EMC...people love their products and they are rock solid but support costs and all this ancillary crap is WAYYYYYYY overpriced. Anyone who is a true engineer and has managed such equipment knows exactly what I am talking about....same can be said for vendors like F5, NETAPP, and so one...the equipment is easy to spec out...it's this other "support" bulls**T I can't stand. And often you have no choice but to purchase it. When vendors require the support costs as part of the entire package then they have a duty to act reasonably and help the customer--not screw them over. The obvious outcome for this sales person was to sell as much sh*t to a govt as it could...period. What else is the explanation?
It's not an uncommon arrangement. Cisco sold the routers to WV but the transaction went through a sales channel (in this case Verizon) to complete the deal. It was Cisco sales engineers that speced it out, drew up all of the particulars (model numbers, etc) and handed the deal off.
It's West BY GOD Virginia. We fought a war over that and won!
3945 is a little overkill but it sounds like the RFP was poorly speced based on a terrible design. Also keep in mind Cisco, despite what they may think, is not a SMB centric vendor but an enterprise solutions provider; nothing is cheap. To Cisco a branch office is a Nike office with ~200 users. Just because you can put all those features into a 4-5U rackbox does not always mean its a good idea. Dual redundant power supplies do nothing for you if the backplane for all those expansion cards or the motherboard dies. Then your entire network is down and you cant even call IT because the same dead router also runs your voip phones. You can still right-size your gear and leave some room to grow. I dont know if Cisco was to blame, there are very few one-box solutions that have those amounts of options. None of them are cheap. This thing was not just a IP router, it looks like it also had extensive telephony and security add-ons which are typically spendy for the hardware then a per user software licence fee. Don't forget about the service contracts per unit that goes into the cost. It sounds like a poor design combined with fail-tastic breuaucracy. Having Verizon as the middle-man knowing the Feds are writing the check is asking to get ripped off. Dont be pissed at Freightliner because some fool bought a fleet of dumptrucks to do pizza delivery.