From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Sun Jun 20 2004 - 19:50:45 GMT-3
At 6:09 PM -0400 6/20/04, John Underhill wrote:
>'The history of all hitherto existing society, is the history of class
>struggles'..
>(..anyone running carnivore?)
>
>Howard,
>I think loyalties within corporate partnerships are becoming more strained
>and less relevant with the growing tendancy towards outsourcing. The only
>people left in my company that are actually employees, are sales reps,
>secretaries, and of course, managers.. none of whom have the slightest
>interest in becoming a CCIE, and further, rely solely on the opinions of an
>outsourced IT staff as it regards purchasing decisions.
Your point may be quite valid toward enterprises, but not other Cisco
customers. Let me return to that after talking about some of the
places where certifications are, or are not, significant.
Question: is your company an end user, or a reseller? One of the
things that seems part of Cisco's strategy, but is not as obvious, is
there is relatively little incentive for Cisco to have
Cisco-certified people in end users. There is a value to having them
at resellers, because, in principle, that can offload some of Cisco's
cost of sales and support.
That enterprises have used certification to screen candidates may not
be of any particular value to Cisco. Now, the claim can be made that
having people certified in your (a vendor) products will tend to push
purchasing decisions your way, but with Cisco so dominant in the
enterprise market (for certain product lines), what is the incentive
to Cisco?
As a group, ISPs aren't particularly concerned with any
certifications. They don't use resellers, and the CCIE doesn't give
a level of Internet routing beyond the beginner level. Internet-scale
BGP routing is much more than configuration commands -- it requires
formal policy specification, knowledge of best current practices,
etc. For the large ISP router, Juniper is a significant competitor,
but, AFAIK, certification usually doesn't drive those produrement
decisions.
>Policies evolve to
>suit necessity, and given the 'Walmart' archetype being adopted as the
>current corporate model, I think it is going to become ever the more
>necessary to consider the individuals needs alongside their corporate
>partners, as fewer people fall under the umbrella of these corporate
>agreements, so collectively, the body of displaced engineers will
>increasingly represent the greater potential revenue.
For this to succeed, it would require Cisco buying into the idea that
a large pool of Cisco certified engineers will make a difference to
Cisco's sales. If that can be done, and Cisco sees it can be done in
a way that doesn't hurt its partner relations, then Cisco indeed
might be supportive.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Jul 03 2004 - 19:40:45 GMT-3