Cisco Looking To Make Things Right With West Virginia 182
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."
Re:Worth more than any car? (Score:4, Informative)
Both, depending largely on the particular devices in question. In recent years, general-purpose CPUs have gotten so fast and buses so efficient that a quad-core Xeon running a Linux-based routing system (such as Vyatta) can allegedly handle 10G line speed for a few ports, and PCI cards are widely available for DSx and other interfaces that used to require standalone routers. That said, you can't do line-speed 10G to 720 ports without serious custom hardware, and while Cisco's stuff is still overpriced for the capability compared to HP or Juniper, it's not the sort of outrageous ripoff that the ISR series is.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:4, Informative)
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 looking for federal stimulus money (Score:3, Informative)
Cisco, and others, were specifically looking for government pork: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/40380 [networkworld.com]
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?
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Salespeople as nannies (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Worth more than any car? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:4, Informative)
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.