smart-net vrs 3rd part support?

DevilWAH

At the moment I have support from a CISCO partner who's in house engineers deliver 1st, 2nd 3rd line support and then back of the rest to CISCO as needed. I get partnership access to Cisco.com and I have 3 CISCO certified engineers assigned to us who have knowledge of the company network.

But people keep trying to sell me "smartnet" support through them and telling me it will be better and its a great value add. One person told me "its better because we don't try to fix things in house you can go direct to cisco your self". So what he wants me to pay them but when I need help I have to phone CISCO directly, where I will get an engineer who knows nothing about my network who I will have to explain every thing to.

Maybe I have it wrong but it seems to be either, personal service from CCIE engineer with working knowledge of my network vs an automated service where I have no idea who I might be talking to, and who will have no clue about my network.

Maybe the guy just was not very good at explaining things, but can any one tell me what advantages smart-net has? All I see it as is a way for a support company to sell me a service and then wipe there hands of it.

networker050184

It depends on your level of support with Cisco. Larger companies are going to have dedicated engineers from Cisco working on their account that know their network. This is cost prohibitive to smaller companies though. I know a lot of times the partners do exactly what you would do, they just call Cisco TAC for your support cases unless it's something simple which you could probably figure out yourself anyway with a solid skill set. The real value from TAC is the in house tools and databases that aren't shared with the public. A lot of it is searching their internal ticketing system to find similar cases!