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."
whaddayamean, wasted? (Score:1, Insightful)
I bet those millions stimulated the creation of a nice boat or a mansion somewhere.
Worth more than any car? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:the right thing (Score:5, Insightful)
. 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.
Re:Worth more than any car? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cisco claims they were instructed to provide a quote for routing devices with features like, "redundant power supplies", and just provided a list of the devices that qualified. The state denies these requirments.
Put simply, they put together a sheet with 1,164 of the same exact device. One for every location, and wrote off the gross oversizing to future-proofing. That meant a big municipal facility would get one of these $20k machines, which was probably unnecessary, but the one room shack they call a "library" in rural virginia also got one... in case they ever did a high speed haul out there .
It's absoutely nuts. And the worst part is that someone signed off on this, even after Cisco had the balls to propose it.
Re:Worth more than any car? (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at Cisco from a hardware perspective, yes they are overvalued and there are less expensive, comparable options out there.
However, I will say a few things in Cisco's defense - I've worked with Cisco, Dell PowerConnect, ProCurve, Avaya and Nortel -- hands down, when I do run into problems, Cisco is the easiest to troubleshoot for. Mainly finding documentation/community help is much easier. Finding technicians that actually know what they are doing is easier.
The other thing I would like to say is that Cisco is not always as expensive as people want to portray them. A lot of time, things like West Virginia happen - the options aren't investigated properly, and you end up with a 20K router... A great example is before I got to my job, they were buying all 3550 switches for the wiring closets.. We didn't need a layer 3 switch in a closet, so we started ordering 2560 (the next gen model in that series) and significantly cut costs.
Another example of ours, we had implemented Cisco Wireless in one of our locations, but for another location were sold an Avaya on the promise that it performed just as well and would be cheaper. The later proved true - but by a small margin. Performance and support has been an issue since day 1. Trying to find engineers inside Avaya that know their own devices like a comparable Cisco engineer is few and far between.
The last thing people don't realize - you don't always need a smartnet.. We don't order them for all our wiring closet switches anymore - we just keep our latest round of switches on SmartNet. Cisco Catalyst does have a LIFETIME warranty on the hardware... The same thing that HP Procurve tries to sell customers hard... Core switches, we absolutely keep on 24/7 4 hour Smartnet ... Wiring closets, and branch routers... nah... we can just keep a spare or two, they are cheap enough. Replace when needed, send back for lifetime warranty...
With this said, I'm not always rosy on Cisco. We did a VoIP project about 3 years ago, and going with another vendor (Mitel in our case) gave us significant savings. I'm just saying that they get the overvalued label a lot, and yes, if you are just looking from a hardware perspective yes. If you are looking at the whole training, support, community and logistics angle - Cisco definitely has the leg up on any other networking company.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:0, Insightful)
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?
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Should Virginia settle with a "take back" offer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.