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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 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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Installation and labor might be covered in the monthly recurring cost of connectivity that Verizon is supplying.
Pull my finger for my public key.
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.
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..."
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...
Have you tried to do ANYTHING at a remote site based on waiting for the PHONE company???
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'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.