smart-net vrs 3rd part support?
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.
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.
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Comments
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networker050184
Mod Posts: 11,962 Mod
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!An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made. -
santaowns
Member Posts: 366
We actually have smartnet for our core devices, the rest are covered through a company named Insight. When something breaks we ask for an exception to get it added back to smartnet so that the device cost is covered. Not sure how big your company is but we are extremely big and it wasn't cost effective to have the smarnet coverage on all of our devices. Smartnet will cover end of life devices for us the majority of the time. -
it_consultant
Member Posts: 1,903
My personal experience with SMARTNET has been very positive. I will never run a Cisco based network (esp if you have a call center) without an up to date SMARTNET contract. I have run into too many CCIEs and CCNPs who didn't know their head from their you know what.
