[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Phil Mayers]

On 23/01/2017 17:16, Rick Martin wrote:
>
> I am under pressure to consider third party maintenance providers for
> our significant Cisco inventory, and I am quite leery of such an
> arrangement.  I suppose third party maintenance may be OK for

Ask yourself a couple of things:

  1. Do you make use of the additional value of vendor maintenance over 
3rd party to a level that justifies the price difference?

  2. Have you correctly costed in the intangibles involved in accessing 
that additional value?

For hardware on common parts I would say there is likely to be no 
additional value. Sparing cat3/4/6k or n9k/UCS hardware is easy.

For rarer hardware you would want good guarantees that they are actually 
warehousing spares. I have seen more than one occurence of that not 
happening and biting people.

On Cisco RMAs - I have noticed a distinct trend in Cisco over the last 
few years to fail to deliver on NBD RMA. They seem to often breach the 
15:00 deadline to declare it an RMA, in most case as a result of their 
actions. One assumes this isn't deliberate, but it is very annoying.

However, software is the real issue. As I'm sure you're aware, opening a 
software bug TAC case and driving it to completion can consume tens, 
sometimes hundreds of hours of your time. Ask yourself how often, given 
the size of your custom to Cisco, those fixes are going to be made in a 
time that is worth paying for, and how often your reporting it was the 
deciding factor.

I have historically been a proponent of vendor maintenance for software 
bugs, but we've used 3rd party maintenance - usually backed by the 
vendor at 3/4th tier - without problem on other platforms. They have 
found and fixed bugs at least as well as Cisco have. I would imagine a 
Cisco gold partner would be able to feed bugs into TAC just as well as 
you would directly.

Obviously you need software *upgrade* rights, always and every time on 
every platform I would argue.

In short - is the hassle & benefit of TAC access really worth it based 
on your previous experience? If so, go Cisco.

Cheers,
Phil