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Larry Chaffin

Staying a Cisco Channel Partner is a tough choice.

If Cisco is losing market share and has constant turn over, it makes me wonder

By Larry Chaffin on Sun, 01/10/10 - 11:41am.

Over the last six months I have been wondering what I should do as a company with our Cisco partnership. To be honest, Cisco is not the easiest company to work with as a partner and that bothers me. I have sent a few emails to people at Cisco and two executives with no reply back other than an SMB Account Manager.

If I was running Cisco and a partner sent me an email saying he was thinking of leaving due to certain reasons, I would be sure to follow up and see if it could be fixed. It could be that you have many other partners who are having the same issue and it really needs to be fixed. In my opinion, as a common courtesy you should return the email even if you pass it on to someone else.

I have not seen any real movement as a company to fix the partner program compared to other vendors. It seems to be that Cisco is a commodity when it comes to networking gear and is no longer a solution. When you have so many (and from my point of view, really too many partners), it will always be like that. This is what I am hearing from customers as they purchase appliances from large Cisco Gold Partners but call us to architect the network, do the installs and troubleshoot as necessary down the road. So I've been thinking -- this has been working well for my company and I do not have to be a Cisco Partner to do this.

I went back and read this article by Brad Reese again, Why HP ProCurve is dismantling Cisco's market share on a deal-by-deal basis and this made me think once again -- why be a partner? I would like Cisco to tell me why I should continue to stay a partner, and to return my emails. With no word back, I'm left to wonder if the partner program is in worse shape than I first thought. 

About Putting Realism Into Your Network

Larry Chaffin Ph.D is the Chief Executive Officer/Chairman and founder of Pluto Networks, a Consulting and VAR partner specializing in WAN acceleration, VoIP, WLAN, telepresence and security.

Pluto Networks is a Riverbed reseller. Pluto was previously a Cisco reseller but in June, 2010, ended its reseller relationship with the company and is no longer a Cisco channel partner.

Pluto Networks specializes in the needs of small, large and enterprise companies by always giving them a great ROI on the products they sell. Pluto Networks has a presence in 23 countries around the world enabling all of its consultants to be virtual. Larry was a Judge at Interop for the Best of Interop Awards for 2009.

Larry has also co-authored all of the books listed below:

Managing Cisco Secure Networks, Skype Me, Practical VOIP Security, Configuring Check Point NGX VPN-1/Firewall-1,Configuring Juniper Networks NetScreen & SSG Firewalls,Essential Computer Security: Everyone's Guide to Email, Internet, and Wireless Security, How to Cheat at Microsoft Vista Administration, Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals, Asterisk Hacking, 2008 VoIP and Video Conferencing, Infosecurity 2008 Threat Analysis and author of Building a VOIP Network with Nortel's MS5100, along with co-authoring/ghost writing eleven other technology books for VIOP, WLAN, security and optical technologies. Larry is currently working on a follow up to Building a VoIP network with Nortel's MCS 5100 Book as well as new books on Cisco Telepresence Networks, Practical VoIP case studies and WAN Acceleration with Riverbed.

Larry also has more than 29 vendor certifications and has been working on many others. Larry has been a principal architect around the world in 22 countries for many Fortune 100 companies designing VoIP, security, wireless and optical networks. He has expanded over time also to include application acceleration. Larry is working with worldwide company now out of Asia as a Special Assistant to the CEO and CIO as they go through organizational and network changes, helping them with strategic advice from his years of experience.

Pluto Networks is a channel partner of, LifeSize, Riverbed, Call Copy, Fastsoft and Symantec.

 

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