Cisco add-on disappoints government agency

Jeff Duke, a senior network engineer for the state of Indiana says he was and is a satisfied Cisco customer, but one purchase in particular fell short of promise.

"We use CiscoWorks for everything in our network, and I bought into using Cisco's VPN/Security Management Solution as well a few years back," Duke says. "Now it's major shelfware. No one on my team ever used it."

For one, Duke says he didn't get past the basic installation process of this particular Cisco security product. The user interface "wasn't very intuitive" and the product became too "complicated and difficult to learn," he says. Considering it was a one-off purchase, Duke cut his losses, stopped investing his time in trying to configure it and no longer pays maintenance on the product. He admits he could have asked Cisco to help but never did. "I am sure they'd be willing to sell me new software if I had asked," he says.

Instead, Duke adapted his use of CiscoWorks to also include managing the VPN concentrators, VPN routers and firewalls the other product promised to address. He doesn’t entirely regret the purchase because it taught him a few things.

"I learned that not everything a company sells has the same value," he says. "CiscoWorks the suite is awesome, and we could not get by without it. But now I know not all of Cisco's add-ons are necessarily must-haves for our IT shop."

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