Buy Cisco to keep your job, or buy a lower-cost alternative to keep your job?

"No one ever got fired for buying Cisco. But everyone's been fired for blowing their budget." That's apparently is an anecdotal comment made by a CIO as he signed a purchase order for SonicWall security appliances (read Network World's test of SonicWall's all-in-one firewall), as reported by SonicWall President and CEO Matt Medeiros to ChannelWeb.com. In a Q&A with the channel site, Medeiros explains why he's seeing wins against Cisco, pointing to the higher cost of Cisco gear compared to SonicWall alternatives, and because of what he claims is the ease of use of SonicWall equipment compared to Cisco gear (compare unified threat managment products).

He cites a recent win away from Cisco at a "very large semiconductor company in North America," which signed off an order worth half-a-million bucks. He told ChannelWeb: "The reasons we won the award is not just the actual price difference. It was based on the three dynamics of economics: the purchase price was less expensive, the installation was going to be less and easier to do, and long-term management was going to be much easier. They have adopted our global management system. They truly looked at total cost of ownership and we won hands down."

He added: "The CIO said that 70 percent of his IT budget was now being deployed to just maintenance of his existing infrastructure. Think about that. He was saying that the 30 percent remaining had to be spent extremely wisely. Given the current economic trends in North America with budgets being tightened, the CIO felt that he absolutely had to consider an alternative and that is how we got brought to the party. It was an absolute Cisco environment."

As we head towards a recession (if you believe that to be the case) are we going to hear about more wins away from Cisco by lower-cost nice players such as SonicWall? Have you ever considered SonicWall's technologies in your product assessments? 

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