Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco. Really???

There's an old belief that you can't go wrong by selecting a technology supplier that is the large incumbent. The "safe bet" if you are willing to pay some hefty premium in IT services is IBM. In VoIP connectivity, this would be Cisco.

But the decision is not quite that easy, especially these days. While it's true that one has to choose a vendor that has solid financials and will be around for the next little while, businesses today need to spend their money wisely and select vendors that will stay flexible and keep up with rapidly changing conditions. What good is it to pay twice the price of other solutions for the "safe bet", when you won't be able to get personalized service and will not be able to get the attention you need when your plans change (and they will!).

I remember one of our early customers. A company that hosted CRM applications and needed VoIP gateways. The particular business unit we were working with selected our company originally because of our domain expertise and the belief they could get much better service and more cost effective solutions than the "safe bets" out there. And they did! They had very successful deployments and grew their hosted infrastructure quite a bit. In fact, they were victims of their own success. One day, I received a call from my contact in their business unit telling me they were transitioning all their hosted infrastructure to "corporate IT". Oh boy. These guys only knew Cisco and wouldn't bother with a "small supplier" like us. Well, one guy made the decision to buy all new Cisco gear, and move all the hosted infrastructure on Cisco. It took them 4 motnhs to "reprogram" all the routing logic using Cisco. Because Cisco does not have a product that is as flexible as ours, it added quite a bit of management complexity, making the architecture difficult to maintain. But hey...who were we to argue...

A few months later I met my contact at a conference. Because of all the extra complexity introduced, their infrastructure had sufffered major quality problems that affected the end users. And guess what, the guys who was responsible for displacing our product for Cisco got fired because of that!!!

Especially these days, when money is really tight and the need for flexibility is higher than ever, the "safe bet" is no longer the "no brainer" choice it was before. Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco??? I think not...