Hmm, is that from Cisco to the people that pay for licensing or the customers to Cisco for the license prices, or both, lol.
It's from Cisco to their customers. Things like I work for a certain Governmental entity where we have paid no less than $400,000 in the past year on Cisco equipment AND SmartNET support, yet they like to claim we don't have support on every damned thing we have called in, and they put their foot down as if we somehow stole it. The only theft we did was spend tax dollars, which are all Government extortion.
At any rate each and every time we have to get our Cisco SE team involved, have to escalate it to some high-level manager etc. They seem hell bent on NOT providing support until it get to such a level I have to do posturing through or own internal Legal Counsel threatening to send back a quarter million dollars worth of equipment.
Suddenly, they fix stuff and we get support. All the while this usually takes two to three days even though we have an contract with guaranteed SLA of 2 hours.
If something fails, they want tons of documentation. They don't read their own notes. They demand logs, ask about network changes, etc. Yes, they DO eventually end up RMAing the equipment, but they ship it with some old IOS or Nexus OS. I go to download what we need and install it, and everything is fine until I check it and find it does NOT have the licensing for OSPF and BGP etc, which is exactly what we need.
They say, "don't worry you can use those features 30 days without a licence." I say, "Then what? My whole damned network goes down? I cannot deploy a ticking timebomb!." I demand the licensing. They insist it is a separate support issue requiring a separate ticket! I insist we paid maybe $20,000 for SmartNET on said device don't make me jump through bs hoops - this should already be done before I even get it!
At any rate, Cisco demands proof like a purchase order, but getting that is tough because I am in IT and generally don't deal with the money side any more than getting quotes and saying what to buy. I refer them to the show tech log, which indicatest he licence level of the previous device... It's not enough. We dig up what we need and send it...
Bottom line is Cisco's Customer Support sucks!
