Cisco Pricing Undercut By $100M In Big Cal State University Network Project 220
alphadogg writes "The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network revealed earlier this week was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations. CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project. 'Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet,' said CSU's director of cyberinfrastructure. 'Alcatel-Lucent won the project with a bid of $22 million. Cisco was the high bidder with a cost just under $123 million. Not only was Cisco's bid more than five-and-a-half times that of Alcatel-Lucent's, it was three times that of the next highest bidder: HP, at $41 million.'"
Re:I knew cisco was expensive (Score:5, Informative)
People who don't get competitive quotes but always buy Cisco because that's what they know.
Re:Maybe raising taxes isn't the only solution. (Score:5, Informative)
America spends more per capita on its schools than any other nation in the world.
Actually, we rank fourth [nationmaster.com]
And on a percentage of GDP basis>/a> The US ranks 37th, tied with Estonia. [nationmaster.com]
Re:I knew cisco was expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure that was a real quote from Cisco. It looks to me like they simply didn't want the business.
Not really, looking at the spreadsheets, it's typical pricing for Cisco. Especially once they started quoting Nexus-backed infrastructure with OTV to stretch layer-2. You'd be surprised at how many people have been biting off on massive OTV and Nexus costs with no competitive analysis. Looks like Cal State just did an objective analysis without marketing hype, and kudos to them.
Re:I knew cisco was expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I have to completely agree with this. I've been involved with several large-scale RFPs, and this is exactly how it goes. The only thing I'd add is that like clockwork, any party that doesn't win threatens to sue someone. It happens every time. They must be teaching this in business school or something. I've never seen a more childish group of people.
Re:I knew cisco was expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Just look at West Virginia's last big IT project [wvgazette.com] and you'll see how Cisco stays in business.
Re:I knew cisco was expensive (Score:4, Informative)
Because of idiots with a massive budget to spend or get cut. The contract was with Verizon, providing Cisco hardware. Someone wanted top-of-the-line, whether it was appropriate or not.
Re:Cisco what? (Score:2, Informative)
Do you have any evidence to back up the "100mb in the datacenter" statement?
(not all statements are directed at revotron; some are just directed at weird comments elsewhere)
1) they make (some) of their own network gear, and have since at least 2007 [1]
2) when they buy name-brand, they appear to use force10 [2]
3) IOS isn't used in any "modern" cisco gear. They use nx-os, which is derived from their SAN gear and really not much like IOS. [3]
4) let's suppose that google doesn't use 10gb in their DC -- why on earth would they use 100MB? There is zero cost advantage to using it vs 1gb. Here's a link to a very old goog server that for some reason is sold on ebay surplus [4]
[1] http://hitechstartups.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/google%E2%80%99s-secret-10gbe-switch-a-game-changing-strategy/
[2] http://oi49.tinypic.com/xpow81.jpg
[3] http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Cisco_NX-OS/IOS_Interface_Comparison
[4] http://www.ebay.com/itm/110585626008
Likely a Real Quote (Score:0, Informative)
I have seen similar quotes. Cisco tends to be 3X as expensive. With that said, you get what you pay for.
We have always run Cisco routers, so I can't speak to that other than to warn against bad configurations. However, we saved 2/3rds at our school when we switched to VOIP from POTS, purchasing Avaya phones, HP phone servers, 3Com switches, access points, and more. In the end it was all junk. There were way too many problems to enumerate in this post. The support staff from these vendors were worthless, and we ended up having to rip out the entire system two years in.
We replaced the access points and switches with Cisco, went with an Asterisk phone server, and have not had any significant problems since. In the end we spent 4/3rds Cisco's original quote, and wasted two years and many resources. We have learned our lesson. Hopefully, you can learn from our mistake.