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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."
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.
In a sense, they're the networking industry's redmond. If you're not getting 40% off from list you're not doing very well. And, of course, they sell industry certification that does much what redmond's certification does: Generate an army of vendor lovers that have been taught the answers that generate them the most money are the right ones.
The difference is that the "Cisco"CNA/CCDA/CCNP/CCDP/CCSP/CCIE certifications aren't "cisco" only. I'm a BCNE. The Brocade test could be passed by anyone who could score a 90%+ on CCNA. There was a "Cisco to Brocade" test I took. There wasn't a single question on the test that was Brocade specific. Cisco pushes EIGRP every chance. Brocade has FSPF for an STP replacement/enhancement, but I didn't have a single question on it. The command line is identical, aside from some things you can pick up from contextual help.
The result is that a Cisco certified something can run a Juniper, Brocade, Alcatel, Huawei, etc. A Microsoft Certified anything can't do much on Windows, let alone anything else.
Sure, it's easier when you've spend years messing with Cisco's proprietary WRED and EIGRP, and maybe still consider ISL as a trunk type, even though even Cisco has officially depreciated it, to just select Cisco so you don't have to mess with anything new.
Learn to love Alaska
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.