Internetwork Engineering Blog

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found working with Cisco licensing to be challenging. If you raised your hand, you’re not alone! The complicated Cisco licensing process has been time consuming and created opportunities for errors. Who out there remembers the infamous product activation key (PAK)? For those of you who aren’t familiar, the fun started by tracking down who within your company received the emailed PAK, sending the PAK back to Cisco along with information on which device it will be installed on, and then finally receiving back a license file that you could apply. Well, I’m here to offer you some great news! Cisco has made great strides to improve how they deal with licensing and has proudly introduced a new solution, Cisco Smart Licensing. 

Part Five Of a Five-Part Series

Part Four Of a Five-Part Series

We’ve been talking about the benefits of working with a partner versus a vendor for the past few months. Since then, we’ve discussed how a partner aligns their goals to your business’s needs, understands your industry, and invests time and trust in a way only a partner can. Here’s one other way a partner relationship beats working with a vendor, they’ll make sure you’re making the right investment. For instance, a few years ago I was working with a customer who wanted to add next-generation firewall services to their network. After investing months in the project, developing the design, documentation, and negotiating the best price from the manufacturer, the order was placed and engineers were due onsite within days. Everyone was excited; it was going to be a major improvement to their network. At the last-minute, word came down from the manufacturer, unofficially thru back-channels, that the product we had ordered was going to be discontinued in the next six months. What were we to do? What would a regular ole’ vendor do? I can tell you what a partner would do. They would put their customer’s needs first. So that’s what we did. We notified our customer, canceled the order, had our engineers stand down, and began to find the right solution once again. The replacement product had already been released, so once we verified it was stable, we redesigned the project from scratch, rewrote the documentation, and renegotiated with the manufacturer. Within a few weeks engineers were onsite and it went off without a hitch. From that experience, several benefits came to light.

Digitization. It’s a great buzzword. Over the past year it’s reached an all-time high in usage. Every hardware and software manufacturer has written article upon article about it. Many have dedicated entire marketing programs to it. Whoever coined the term should be given a marketing award because it’s a shiny new skin on something that has been around for a very long time. Something I even encountered seventeen years ago.

Part Three Of a Five-Part Series

“Invest” is an interesting word. It implies you’re putting something of value to wo

rk and you expect a return, in addition to the initial value. This perfectly describes a client-partner relationship that is a two-way street. A customer expects that their investment will return a stable and dependable IT environment that isn’t a burden to manage and works to achieve the business’s goals. A partner expects that their investment will return the opportunity to sell, install, and service technology that achieves your business’s goals. When both parties invest fully 

it becomes the ultimate win/win with the principal investments from both parties being time and trust. In this post, I’ll explore two ways to know if you're investing in the right partnership. First, they’ll invest their time to achieve the desired returns for their customers and themselves, and second, they’ll be dedicated to building trust.