You're confused. We're not talking about preference but rather business survival in a hostile environment. As a former Cisco customer, we came to realize that Cisco equipment was architected with the mindset of the early 1990's when the network was based on trust and that this legacy mindset and architecture are inadequate for today's network with existing and future threats. We had to learn the hard way when our company's internet presence was impacted due to Cisco equipment's vulnerability and sensitivity to certain traffic that causes loss of in-band and out-of-band management access, pegged CPU utilization and routing protocol failure affecting packet forwarding and connectivity. After understanding the traffic, the equipment architectural issues and not finding anything capable in Cisco's arsenal up to the 6500/7600 we set out to look at other vendors. Our research discovered a company we've heard of, Juniper, but didn't know too much about prior and that their boxes when subjected to the same traffic are not only immune out of the box but also capable of filtering the traffic to protect downstream Cisco devices that Cisco can't touch. Apparently, our service provider's NOC engineers recommend the same vendor but had to do it off the record since they resale both vendor's equipment. In summary, what we discovered is that Cisco's equipment is inadequate, their specs are dishonest and misleading, their sales folks side step the issues and spread FUD. Juniper, on the other hand, really nailed it with their architecture. They are professional to deal with, probably because they know they have superior equipment, and their specs are honest showing performance for worst case small packets and also mix traffic and is inline with our testing. Those are the qualities that make a successful company and not just a name.