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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.
. To really make things right, they'd also offer to find the state suitable routers, at cost, and set'em up as well.
Cisco's not a charity -- the management who approved the mistaken design, and the firm that designed and selected inappropriate router choices, should have to deal with this.
It's not Cisco's job to stop you from buying equipment that can do more than what you need it to do right now.
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 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.
You apparently have never dealt with government RFP's, you have to meet the specs and have no input on them or visibility as to what they are for. They specked a single device that could run voip with PSTN fallback, wan acceleration (WAAS is cisco's version of that same), and an embedded managed switch with POE. The device they came back with is the only one that fits all those requirements. The issue squarely lies with the people that wrote the RFP.
No sir I dont like it.
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.