Vendors competing with Cisco. Certs + interesting facts

pizzafart

Out of curiosity, I decided to do a little research on competing technologies.

According to Yahoo Finance: Nortel Networks, Avaya, and Juniper are direct market competitors with Cisco. Below is a rough comparison of the companies. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=CSCO

Cisco Juniper Nortel Avaya
Market capital 122bil 9bil 9bil 5bil (respectively)

Then, I checked out certification programs for each.

Avaya's website was a bit hard to navigate; it seems that they have one certificatioin track that goes from beginner, intermediate, to expert. There are no other options. It looks that Avaya does primarily IP telephony. Though, this is by no means official reporting because I didn't spend that much time on the site.

Nortel Networks has a variety of certifications that mostly go from a beginner to professional level. There's an "expert" certification in the works.

Juniper certification process is very similar to Cisco. The "expert" cert includes an 8 hour hands-on lab test just like Cisco's does. There don't seem to be any different varieties of the expert level though.


Diagnosis? I dunno, but, I can say with some confidence that there don't seem to be many training sites that even acknowledge certs from these other vendors.

Does anyone have any input?

pizzafart

OK then there's 3com and Hewlett Packard, 1.7bil and 85bil market share respectively.


3com has a handful of what seem to be written only certs.
HP has a lot of different certs. Note: HP sometimes goes into the software and server realm, so, some of these certs aren't comparible.

Again, I don't hear a lot about these certs. Every now and then I see a Monster post looking for someone with HP Openview certs (network monitoring suite of apps).

EdTheLad

In my opinion Juniper would be the only cert to be comparable to Cisco.I dont know about the other certs and thats probably because their worthless.
I worked for Alcatel and they also have a cert program, its a joke, they give a training course that takes about 2 days, includes everything from bgp to mpls, you take an exam at the end unsupervised and when you pass your a certified expert... great, so when theres a problem who gets called? the so called experts! If you dont pass big questions are asked, so its basically a way for the managers to cover themselves.
This is where the cert philosopy goes screwy, to many managers want people with certs so they can pass the buck regardless whether the people have the knowledge that goes with the cert.This is my experience from one particular country i dont wanna say , im not sure if anyone else has experienced the same behaviour but it really pissed me off.