Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?

Mon Jan 10 15:38:38 UTC 2011

On Jan 10, 2011, at 10:31 AM, Brandon Kim wrote:

> 
> Hello gents:
> 
> I wanted to put this out there for all of you. Our network consists of a mixture of Cisco and Extreme equipment.
> 
> Would you say that it's fair to say that if you are serious at all about being a service provider that your core equipment is Cisco based?
> 
> Am I limiting myself by thinking that Cisco is the "de facto" vendor of choice? I'm not looking for so much "fanboy" responses, but more of a real world
> experience of what you guys use that actually work and does the job.....

I think a lot of this depends on the market.

If you're into FTTH/FTTP then Cisco is not the way to go.  They have no serious offerings in this space IMHO. (that are cost competitive).

Each vendor has various things they do well.  Cisco surely is well capitalized with a broad portfolio of offerings in the DWDM to IP space.

I do believe they are the "IBM" of the industry, ie: "Nobody ever was fired for buying IBM(sic)".

This does not mean they (nor anyone else) delivers a perfect solution.  This is a challenge that I frequently remind the vendors of, as apparently many customers actually do *yell* at them when there are bugs, vs offering constructive partnerships to resolve the issues.

I think that Juniper, Foundry(Brocade) and some other vendors offer compelling products in the core space as well.  It's well worth its while to build a relationship with your vendors so you can have that constructive partnership IMHO.  Then when you hit a serious problem, you can take constructive actions vs just screaming loudly and hoping they jump.

- Jared