I want to talk about a topic that comes up continuously with many of the organizations I work with. Regularly, either the technical decision maker or the person who ultimately signs the check will see two proposals in front of them. One is for a Cisco-based solution and one is for a solution based on one or more other vendors such as HP Procurve, Riverbed, SonicWall, Nortel, Juniper etc. In many cases the price tag associated with the Cisco-based solution both is higher than the offering from other vendors, yet still Cisco holds a majority market share in many of the areas that it competes in.
I can confirm this position when I see the majority of my customers choosing quite often to purchase Cisco products over their cheaper competitors. For all those IT decision makers and CIOs tasked with bridging the gap between the technologists and the business, I want to ask the question, “What is Cisco’s value proposition and is it worth it?”
The Competition
First of all, let’s look at what the competition offers. There are many different vendors that compete with Cisco. Some are specialists that operate in a specific area such as security (ISS, Mirage Networks), switching (HP Procurve), WAN acceleration (Riverbed) or content delivery (F5). Many of the ‘specialist’ competitors are recognized by independent research organizations such as Gartner and indeed by technical professionals themselves to have the best product to do the job that they are doing. In areas outside of routing and switching, there are few places where Cisco can unquestionably claim to have the best products when looking at that single solution area.
Others competitors such as Nortel and Juniper play in many more areas and offer products across routing and switching, security, voice etc. These have better offerings in the area of integration (described below) but often lack severely in the specialist areas the other type of competitor excels in.
Innovation
Now, let’s look at what Cisco does that’s different from the competition, starting with innovation. Innovating is something most technology companies claim to do and some do indeed deliver on that claim and provide tangible business value from that innovation. Others duplicate the efforts of others and compete on price, driving down the prices of new technologies and bringing them to the masses – a perfectly acceptable business model.
One statement that does hold true is that Cisco is one of the few companies that does innovate and provide tangible business value for the customers that take advantage of the resulting technologies and services.
To give a few brief examples, Cisco has many proprietary networking protocols and technologies that it developed in house. Some such as EIGRP (to be discussed below) have remained and will remain proprietary. Others such as FCoE (also discussed below) have been driven to become open standards and can now be adopted by other vendors.
Let’s take the EIGRP routing protocol as our first example seeing as it is at the heart of what Cisco claims to be best at: routing. Way back when, Cisco saw a problem. There were two widely accepted routing protocols based on open standards: RIP (and RIPv2) and OSPF. RIP was to its credit, a very simple protocol to configure and administer but it had major problems when it came to scalability and its ability to manage traffic when it come to multiple paths. OSPF on the other hand was a highly scalable model but was (and still is) extremely complex to configure.
Cisco developed the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGRP) and later Enhanced IGRP (EIGRP), which was not only very simple to configure for small and medium sized environments like RIP, but it scaled extremely well and went further to provide better traffic management features and faster convergence than OSPF. Some network engineers will tell you that this one protocol in itself is enough to justify buying Cisco routers and switches because of the time it saves you on design, documentation, ongoing maintenance of that documentation and the ease with which changes can be made to that design.
Another example of Cisco’s innovation in this area is with Hot Swap Router Protocol (HSRP). They saw a need for their customers to have redundancy in the components that joined their networks together – the routers. They developed and published this protocol in 1998. Customers saw it in products and could take advantage of this extra layer of availability (which is now considered essential in any enterprise) soon after.
By comparison, the equivalent open standard, Virtual Redundant Router Protocol, was not completed until 2004 – six years later. It’s clear that this provided significant business value and piece of mind to Cisco customers for a long period of time before the market caught up.
I want to discuss one final example. Cisco can be accused of being acquirers rather than innovators. Indeed, they are acquirers and have brought many products to market based on acquisitions, but I’m a strong believer that they are still innovation focused.
We can see this with their latest innovations in the datacenter with the Unified Compute System, Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Unified Fabric. The majority of the datacenter professionals you talk to regard their advances in this area as visionary. I won’t go into all the details here as it’s outside the scope of this discussion.
I wanted to bring up the datacenter example because Cisco did this one a little differently. They actually spun off a new company called Nuova Systems to find ways of simplifying the datacenter without having their efforts influenced by Cisco’s other product lines. Cisco then reacquired this company when the necessary breakthroughs had been made and they now have very solid products coming to market.
So, you might ask, “Why should I care about innovation? The others do the basics that I need at a lower price point.” We’ll examine that question later in more detail.
Integration
Integration is the next natural step in the evolution of any Information Technology system after performing and automating individual tasks. I’d like to refer to an old book written by Bill Gates back in the 1990s called ‘Business at the Speed of Thought’. Some of the ideas are a little dated now and perhaps they were not all his, but the underlying principle that he grasped is still not understood by many CIOs today.
The idea is this: when a piece of information enters the organization, it should be digitized and made available to every part of the organization that can improve its efficiency or productivity from that information and it should be presented such a way that it is useful to those parts of the organization. From this concept comes the idea of business intelligence, data mining other similar activities. In his book, Gates gives examples of how sales data was collected and analyzed to improve performance going forwards as well as how he felt so strongly about this principle that he actually banned paper forms at Microsoft so that all information was in this digital format. I strongly advise anyone in a CIO type of role to give it a read.
Anyway, integrating systems and sharing information leads to more intelligent decisions, better automation and more computers doing work that people do not have to. Cisco is integrating its product lines with each other.
This can be seen in several areas but some are key. Unified Communications in which phones share information with switches and endpoints (PCs) in order to enable telephony information to be integrated with applications. For example, I have seen applications that allow lawyers to automatically record conversations with clients and send them a copy of the recording along with the automated invoice for their time.
Cisco also has a big marketing term, ‘The Self Defending Network’. Some might see it as just that but it is actually a phenomenal and valuable piece of engineering. In summary, all the relevant Cisco products collaborate to defend the network. Routers, switches, firewalls and even agents on PCs all communicate security events to a central threat management system to get a better handle on when an attack is underway and to co-ordinate an automatic response. The network really does defend itself.
These are just some of the things integration holds for the future of networking but Cisco is leading the way here and their customers who recognize the value in integrations like these and choose to invest will reap the benefits with cost savings, better security and competitive advantage.
Skills and Training
Cisco’s certification programs are viewed by many as the best in the industry. They are also the only certification programs created by a commercial technology company that I am aware of that are adopted by universities and colleges as part of their standard curriculums.
The reason this is so is because Cisco training teaches people skills primarily and product knowledge second. The skills such as subnetting and basic routing taught in their baseline CCNA certification are transferrable to other vendors’ products and also survive. Other vendors’ training can be heavily product focused from the word ‘Go’ and therefore the skills their graduates have become outdated as products are refreshed. This is why universities and colleges are apprehensive about adopting them.
As a result of the wide adoption and acceptance of their training and certifications, Cisco certified professionals are relatively easy to find. Granted, top-level CCIEs are still in short supply, but trying to find someone with the same level of experience on products from other vendors can be extremely difficult. The Cisco partner community is also filled with variation, choice and good competition that keeps driving the value on offer higher.
Management
The final area I’d like to examine is management. Some of these points hold true for a single vendor strategy whether it be Cisco, Microsoft, HP etc. But, once you realize the business value offered as described above, it is easy to understand why people choose Cisco over others as their primary, preferred vendor.
Whenever there is a requirement to have skills in multiple vendors’ products, there is always a challenge in finding those people and especially the right people that have the right mix of product knowledge that matches your environment. When you have a firewall from vendor X, a switch from vendor Y and a router from vendor Z, finding the right person who has experience with making them all work together can sometimes be impossible. You are often working to put together a multi-vendor solution with many different moving parts that is probably not entirely documented and tested where the single vendor solution would be.
Furthermore, if you were to run into a problem with your mixed environment and you need to call your three vendors for assistance, it is commonplace for much finger-pointing to take place. Vendor X blames vendor Y, vendor Y blames vendor Z and vendor Z blames the other two. I cannot emphasize enough the impact of this point.
Support tickets are solved so much more quickly when they are quickly elevated to the higher levels by the single vendor because they realize that it must be one of their products that is at fault. This can translate into days of troubleshooting time either by your own staff or expensive consultants who charge by the hour. I have in fact just finished on a project where we lost four days out of ten on an implementation in a foreign country. The result was that the project was pushed back by weeks due to the subsequent scheduling problems it created.
Working with multiple vendors also means managing support and maintenance contracts with multiple vendors. This is at the very least an administrative overhead, but if they operate on different dates and/or models then they end up making budget planning more complex than it needs to be.
One final point on the subject of management… There is no open standard for systems management. Many vendors have their own products: HP has OpenView, IBM has Tivoli, Cisco has CiscoWorks, Microsoft has System Center etc. The net result of this is that yes, they can all monitor any class of device be it owned by that vendor or not, but they all excel at managing their own devices. Other devices are ‘supported’ either through open standards or through third party management packs but never give quite the same great experience as you would get from that vendor’s own management products.
Summary
Cisco products are quite often not considered to be the best of breed in areas outside of their core routing and switching, but they do at least have formidable products in every area they are competing in. They have a strong history of innovating and providing tangible business value through their home-grown products and their acquisitions. This value when viewed with a strategic eye that recognizes long term and soft costs associated with other vendors’ solutions, often delivers lower overall cost and additional useful functionality beyond that of the competitors.
Obviously it is not always the case that Cisco will innovate first, but by adopting a single vendor strategy with Cisco, you can be sure of great, reliable support when you have problems; tested and documented solutions that you can repeat in your organization with confidence; and a management platform that gives deep insight and granular control over the entire breadth of your network. You may not have best of breed or the most money in your pocket immediately after the initial investment, but you can sleep sound knowing that your business assets are secure, available and that you have made a decision that is solid, understandable and difficult for others to criticize.
DISCLAIMER:
The opinions expressed in this article are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the opinions of my employer, Vicom Computer Services, its affiliates, subsidiaries or any of its partners.
