any of you ever get frowned upon for

I have not, but then again, I don't always get to recommend products. I have to implement them. However, price will always be a huge factor in deciding what products to buy. What kind of devices are you looking for. Perhaps the community could offer you some alternatives that may be better.

Some people love Cisco, some hate 'em. Either way, there are plenty of other products out there that probably do a better job.
 
Nah, don't really recommend them anymore. Not that I did a lot years ago either, mostly just small PIX 501s.

For the same amount of money..actually, for less money, IMO there are other products out there of equal performance and reliability, greater ease of use, and less cost...for the SMB market I'm in.
 
They have reliable uptime which is cost effective if you work in environments like my work involving banking services and email. Beyond that they charge for updates so factor that in. You could look into adtran. They don't give as good of uptimes but updates for the devices are free for life and they have tech support that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg and they tend to work with you a little more trouble shooting problems that are not caused by their hardware.
 
I never have, but many companies have declined the recommendation due to cost. I've got second string choices as well which they sometimes go with, but all things considered I'd rather work with Cisco equipment.
 
piako said:
recommending cisco products? b/c price
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I get frowned upon for recommending other-than-cisco products because of ciscos prices.

There are a lot of products out there that IMO does the same job or better for a much much much more reasonable price.

However, sometimes you have to recommend cisco depending on the clients needs (legacy, existing infrastructure, or simply compatibility).
 
HP Procurve and Dell switches are pretty good for the money but I don't think they are in the same bracket as Cisco. Cisco is the only way to go for huge networks just becuase of product support and how well Cisco Scales.

I have never seen a national / multinational network use anything other than Cisco.
 
Jay_oasis said:
HP Procurve and Dell switches are pretty good for the money but I don't think they are in the same bracket as Cisco. Cisco is the only way to go for huge networks just becuase of product support and how well Cisco Scales.

I have never seen a national / multinational network use anything other than Cisco.
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Most companies will not use one vendor exclusivley if they are such a large network.

Also, I would not discount that, while you may see a lot of cisco hardware on a multi-million dollar network, you will still see some HP, Force10, Juniper, Foundry, or 3Com hardware. And as everything on a network, each part is just as critical as the other.

I am not a super big fan of Dell networking hardware, but a lot of Dell networking hardware has a lot of cisco design, some of it such as the M1000e blade center network blades are directly cisco branded.
 
I've never been frowned upon, but smaller clients definitely don't like the prices for most of Cisco's equipment. I prefer Cisco over other equipment so I recommend it as much as possible.
 
Jay_oasis said:
HP Procurve and Dell switches are pretty good for the money but I don't think they are in the same bracket as Cisco. Cisco is the only way to go for huge networks just becuase of product support and how well Cisco Scales.

I have never seen a national / multinational network use anything other than Cisco.
Click to expand...

A lot of our international infrastructure is Cisco, but certainly not all of it. We're constantly evaluating alternatives to Cisco and many do get implemented for reasons other than cost. Cisco is a great company, but their products are not as perfect as people think they are. Sometimes, there's a much better solution from a different company.

They've got some serious competition including all of the companies Ockie mentioned as well as Arista for 10gig stuff (they're a relatively new company).
 
The company I work for uses primarily Cisco gear, and we get 33% discounts and it's still expensive, but not as expensive as all of the service contracts...

So higher priced Cisco stuff is the norm around here...
 
For switches and such... Alternatives (like HP) are great.

Nothing beats Cisco in the router arena though IMO.
 
TechieSooner said:
Nothing beats Cisco in the router arena though IMO.
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Some would disagree with you about Cisco being the best for routers, at least at the core layer. Almost every single service provider uses Juniper there. IOS is very feature-rich (dare I say bloated?) For normal features, JunOS has an edge.. but I'm impressed with the new modular versions from Cisco: IOS-XR, IOS-XE and NX-OS.

I doubt any small to medium businesses would benefit much from Juniper over Cisco, though. And for these situations I wouldn't use anything but a Cisco router.
 
Not these days. Most small to mid size can't afford it. There are many cheap alternatives out there. In today's market people want Converse Chuck instead of Nike. Constantly, look around tradezines for new products, make some notes, google for prices, and post randomly on the net for the reviews. Make sure you do it with a different screen names, so sales guys wouldn't follow you around with different ids.
 
TechieSooner said:
Nothing beats Cisco in the router arena though IMO.
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I would disagree with this. With Junipers JUNOS, it's incredibly powerful and it's becoming a much more popular pick in data centers for edge/service routing.
 
Cisco is kind of like Microsoft. You will not get blamed later for purchasing Cisco, but it isn't the best for every situations. The price tag definitely says loud and clear.
 
Cisco will be around for a while, can't say that about all these other companies talked about here... that's probably most important to me. Also the amount of support documentation and resources in the world regarding Cisco is so much more widely available than others.

As far as price, you need to go to www.cisco.com and locate a partner that is willing to give you a pretty heavy discount. The "list" price Cisco uses is really nothing more than just a benchmark. id be surprised if anyone bought at that price.
 
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