As a hack I enjoy a good spat between vendors and the debate between Internetwork Expert and IPexpert makes for some interesting reading this Halloween. But what message does it send to the industry? By Cisco’s calculations, there are currently 1 million skilled workers in the world today, but we need 3 million by 2012. So it sounds like we should be putting all our energies into encouraging newbies to train in IT and to develop the next generation of network professionals, no? Also, how does this debate help secure the future market for independents?
My Q&A with Cushing Anderson, IDC program vice president of Project Based Services – Consulting, SI, HR and Learning, may give some independent players and customers some food for thought:
Do you believe that the introduction of Cisco 360, which divides the market for CCIE learning into training companies that are authorized by Cisco and those that aren’t, is good or bad for customers?
I think competition is good for customers. The extent to which Cisco provides its partners with access to high quality, usable information for partners to leverage into high quality training, that will help increase the quality of training provided by authorized and force non-authorized training providers to increase their training offering, too. As Internetwork Expert did, the non-authorized providers will react and change their products and offerings to increase its relevance to customers.
The biggest concern is the availability of information to non-authorized providers. If Cisco restricts the information available to those providers there will be a challenging disadvantage to the non-authorized
As Cisco pushes marketing dollars into the 360 program what will happen to the independents? Should customers of these independents be worried about their learning suppliers’ future?
It should become more difficult for independents to gain mindshare for training. Most independent training vendors are smaller – so their ability to get market attention is limited. The extent to which Cisco gains mindshare of enterprises vs independents will hurt independents. It may push the marginal providers out, but I don’t think it will cause the high quality independents to go out of business. I also think any contraction in the number of suppliers will be fairly gradual. (I don’t think anyone will get scared out of the business in the short term.)
Why do you think Cisco established the 360 program?
I think there were two reasons – They felt they needed to insert an element of consistency into partner training. Additionally, I think they wanted to improve the blend of the CCIE training to include a greater variety of training modalities to ensure the best experience for candidates.
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