[c-nsp] Maintenace management

[Justin Shore]

I've spent the last 6 months working on getting our contracts 
straightened out and ready for renewal.  I've run into a number of major 
problems.  First was the sheer number of contracts that we'd accumulated 
over time.  We bought some things through our sister company, a partner. 
  Some of the contracts were in their name.  We bought all of our new 
items direct from Cisco but they managed to be on about a dozen 
different contracts even though they were all bought on the same damn 
PO.  As items were shipped Cisco, in its infinite wisdom, created a new 
contract and put the items that just shipped on that contract instead of 
putting everything on one big contract.  We had numerous internal items 
that were on assorted contracts and some that weren't covered at all. 
Still more internal items were mixed up with the sister company and we 
discovered that we'd been paying for the coverage on some of their 
items.  Even worse was that somehow some of the sister company's 
customer SmartNets had somehow gotten associated with us.  We also had 
numerous ISP contracts.  Some of the items had been bought 3rd-party or 
off of eBay.  2 of them still had active contracts being paid by the 
previous owner (thank you Wal-Mart!).  We also had contracts on leased 
CPE equipment that I didn't know about (I'm still hearing new items 
fitting in this category every couple of months).  To say that our 
current arrangement was a "cluster" would be putting it lightly.

I spent the last 6 months trying to sort things out.  First I had to 
have an accurate list of what we had including model #s, serial #s, 
device locations, device names, etc.  Every detail that I'd need to 
track that device effectively.  Unfortunately this required a lot of 
driving time to manually read serial #s off of chassis since you can't 
pull the SN out of many Cisco devices.  Who ever got the brilliant idea 
to put the SN sticker for the PIX 515Es on the *side* of the chassis 
where it's covered by the 2-post rack should be taken out and flogged 
with 1700 series power cords with the power bricks attached.  I worked 
with a Cisco rep to create contracts for each of the device categories 
we have (internal, ISP, CPE) and for each service level we wanted 
(24x7x4 and 8x5xNBD).  This is when we discovered that you can't have a 
Sup's service level differ from the other linecars in a chassis (see 
C-NSP archives).  In the end the price was so high that we decided to 
look at return-to-factory options (RTF).  So we reworked the quotes 
again with RTF prices and included lab hardware.  I built spreadsheets 
with both options to tally things up so I could present it to 
management.  Unfortunately my numbers aren't accurate because Cisco 
insists on pre-dating some of our hardware back to the day that our 
contracts expired (they expired far sooner than the year that we paid 
for because of a problematic sales process.  We didn't get the major 
pieces until January but the 1yr contracts expired in November for 
everything we bought last year.  Nice).

So here we are 6 months later with a ton of hardware that isn't covered 
and me trying to work the wrinkles out of the prices so I can present it 
to management.  In short, how do we manage our contracts?  With blood, 
sweat and tears; and brute force.

I blame a lot of the hassle on Cisco's SmartNet process.  Apparently 
there isn't a way to have a single general account that you can then 
associate *items* with (according to what Cisco folks are telling me). 
Instead items are associated with service contracts that can not be 
modified after the purchase has been placed.  So in the end, instead of 
having a single account and a bunch of devices associated with it and 
one bill at the end of the year, you end up with an insane amount of 
contracts and no way to organize them until the next year when you get 
to redo everything and create new contracts again.  And yes, the SCC is 
a joke.  The amount of money we've lost this year to the work required 
to get our contracts straightened out is immense.  The system needs an 
overhaul and organization.

Justin



Phil Mayers wrote:
> All,
> 
> We seem to have an incredibly hard time managing our maintenance contracts.
> 
> Quite aside from the vagaries of CCO ("Sorry sir, your contracts have 
> disappared from your profile, no TAC access for *you*") we are unable to 
> gather all our maintenance into one (or a small number of) contract(s) 
> and what contracts we have are very difficult to inventory.
> 
> It goes without saying that SCC is a bad joke.
> 
> Do any of you manage to do it better? How?