Software Center Changes

[stephen.stack]

Hi All,

Merry Christmas to everyone

Have a look over the email below. Is there any truth or validity in it (i ask beacuse i did not recieve this)?
I'm interested to know peoples opinions on it.

Regards

Stephen

From: Cisco Services Update [mailto:ciscoservices@cisco.com]

Subject: Important Update: Get ready and take action for Software Download

Enhancements on the Cisco Website

Software Download Enhancements

Get Ready for Software Download Enhancements on the Cisco Website

Dear Valued Partner, To improve your experience with Cisco and protect your investment in  Cisco Products, we’re pleased to announce the improvement of Software  download entitlement controls effective 10th January, 2011.

In preparation for this change, we ask you to complete the following  actions before 10th January, 2011: •   Verify all applicable Cisco Products are covered under Cisco Service  contracts, and that you have a valid license for Cisco Software. •   Verify your Services contracts are accurate and make necessary  corrections- serial numbers, part ID’s and locations must be accurate on  each Services contract. •   Associate all Services contracts to applicable Cisco.com user ID’s •   Verify all Cisco.com user IDs for your company are valid and  properly assigned to individuals in your company.  Starting 10th January, 2011, software downloads on Cisco.com will be  verified against Products registered on your Services contract. Attempts  to download Software for Products not registered on your Services  contract will not be permitted.

In an effort to minimise entitlement issues, we encourage you to  directly manage Services contract associations to Cisco.com user ID’s  via the Service Access Management Tool (SAMT). This tool enables  administrators to manage which individuals are allowed to request  Service from Cisco (e.g. technical support/ TAC, hardware replacement/  RMA).

Cisco.com users can use the Cisco.com Profile Manager to view which Services contracts are associated to their profiles.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Kind regards, Cisco Services

[burleyman]

Stuart I 100% agree, if you buy a software product you should get free fixes for a long as that software is supported....nothing extra needed.

[Matthew Hall]

Jeremy, your reasoning sounds sane, but as I've spent 6 hours on the phone with licensing before...while two Cisco AMs and SEs pull their hair out trying to argue with their own company to get the proper licensing cut for a purchase, I know that anytime I have to pick up the phone to call cisco just to get a piece of software downloaded...or god forbid try and track down a contract number and get associated it takes alot of time.  Time is MONEY...real MONEY, to my customers, to me, to everyone but Cisco in this case.

If Cisco made it easer for my customers to instantly associate me with their contracts, this wouldn't be a problem.  The issue is that SAMT is horrible.  As a high end, specialized integrator, I often go in to fix problems with solutions that other partners have blown up, or were completely unequipped to deploy in the first place.  Let's take a reasonable CCIE with 10 to 15 years experience, say he only sees 20 clients a year...heck 15.  ALL of them will have equipment that was not purchased from him as an integrator, sometimes they won't purchase ANY of their equipment from their professional services providers, they buy it all from big box pushers with zero professional services presence.  In this case I have no access to the customer contract numbers via SAMT.  I can't even see them, only the original VAR can.  MANY customers...even large named accounts don't know their contract numbers, so I'm stuck calling about every piece of gear that they have and trying to track down the contract number for something they bought on CDW 3 years ago.  Costing everyone involved (accept Cisco) money in the process.  They are supposed to be attaching all new gear to the same contract, but we all know that different divisions purchase at different times, from different VARs under different names...it gets to be a mess. The process to be attached has gotten squirlier over the years as well...now I have to hope that the same guy in the fortune 500 organization that was the contact for that service contract 3 years ago, is still at the company....or is the same guy listed as a contact for this router they just bought in a separate division with separate fund sources.  I have to get emails verifying all of this to be attached.....some times at 3 AM when we find a single device with a bug and hopefully the customer contacts aren't on vacation, or asleep, or maybe not even with the company anymore.

If Cisco would make it easier for consultants to gather all the contract IDs for a customer themselves (the customers loath having to do it and always ask us as the consultants to do so) and subsequently attach in 5 minutes to all of them with the proper customer authorization, then I wouldn't see this as much of a problem.  It seems you are trying to get everyone to do the right thing, while simultaneously encouraging bad behavior by making it as difficult as possible to do things the right way.  In the interim I can only forsee partners simply attaching to a few customer contracts for download purposes, because unless you have to open a TAC case, it is a long and arduous process to connect to all of the contracts for every new client I will see in a given year, especially quick turn around jobs.

Clients get visibly furious with Cisco when they are trying to get me associated at times, it's simply way more complex than it needs to be.  I know this won't necessarily turn them away from Cisco, but even if we are talking a 2 to 5 percent drop in purchases...it's going to start costing Cisco REAL money.  Cisco already associates CCO accounts with organizations, why not the service contracts as well?  Heck Cisco could even make it easy for CCO users in an org to quickly associate equipment purchased from various divisions into CCO themselves, to get all the straggler equipment pulled under their control.  You could just have a button under an organization's manager CCO account where they could enter a list of serial numbers to have their contracts sucked over into the org (with a few checks...email address domain name and such).  Then it would be as simple as having a customer log into their CCO account, ask for your CCO account name and associate you to their contracts in one click.  No Cisco or origional VAR intervention needed.  Plus they can then just as easily remove you when the project is done.....why such a huge ordeal that we as VARs have to go through?  Cisco HAS to be making this difficult on purpose...I just can't see any other reason for this considering the work Cisco puts into things like QUAD.  Shouldn't collaboration with our customers and Cisco be easier...not harder?

[jeredavi]

Hi all,

Thanks for the responses.  I enjoy the discourse and the recognition that sometimes I have sane reasoning! 

I absolutely understand that time is money.  It is for Cisco too.  And you correctly point out that there are areas of our business where we need to improve in terms of the ease of doing business with Cisco.  I know our senior leadership has always been committed to this and that actually right now, it is called out with laser focus that we will address some of these most critical pain points.

Will we always get it right?  Nope.  Will we always address them as quickly as we and our customers & partners would like?  Nope.  But I can say that my role and others in similar roles are your advocates.  Your feedback matters, and where possible, we will aggregate it and address it.  I know that sounds “jargony” but I believe in it.

To some of your specific points:

Licensing

6 hours on the phone related to licensing issues isn’t acceptable.  I trust that this is more an exception than the rule, and I know that licensing as a whole is always looking for continuous improvement opportunities.

Contract Associations

I agree this model can be improved, but I don’t think the challenge or cause of the pain is SAMT.  SAMT is a tool for partners and customers to use in order to manage associations on their own.  At the end of the day, the work that SAMT does is the same as if Cisco had made the contract association.  It just enables the partner or customer to do it themselves.  This was born by partners asking specifically for this capability.  I think the issue is more about the model of how we entitle people with their contracts based on these individual associations.  I know that some very bright people are looking at this through the lens of contracts belonging to companies and companies have individuals with Cisco.com profile.  This approach could help and will be analyzed.  But, there is always going to be some form of associating an individual Cisco.com profile with something…a contract or a company.  We can’t entitle you to services unless we know who you are.  So we’ll continue refining the tools to help make that association happen whatever that looks like.

3rd Party Consultants

We understand the issues here and that many of your businesses are about servicing customers who didn’t purchase their Cisco service coverage from you.  But think of it this way…Your customer buys equipment and service from one company, and that establishes a services relationship between them and the company they bought from.  Or in the case of SMARTnet (most common in the scenario you gave), establishes a direct services relationship between them and Cisco.  The customer now calls your company and you come in to support them.  How would Cisco know that you have permission to obtain service on behalf of that customer?  We aren’t aware of any affiliation/relationship your companies have unless we are told.  Enter contract associations.  And again, SAMT is one way that a customer can “tell” Cisco who has permission to access their contracts as they can manage that themselves.  There are other ways to let Cisco know of the association with your customer but also recognize that comes with the due diligence on Cisco's part to protect the customer as well.  We can’t blindly allow just anyone access to services that the customer has via their service contract.

Huge Numbers of Contracts

This can certainly be a challenge having to manage contracts one-by-one on an individual basis.  One bit of good news is that partners can utilize their Bill-To IDs as the mechanism to pull all of those contracts together.  This is yet another benefit of SAMT.  Partners can use it to manage Bill-To ID associations.  SAMT Admin Matthew Hall can say, “Give Jeremy Davis access to service all of our customers against the contracts they bought from us” simply by associating your Bill-To ID(s) with my Cisco.com profile and flipping the switch to tell Cisco that I can obtain support against every contract underneath those Bill-To IDs.  Powerful.  Does that help in the 3rd party consultant case?  No.  And it only works for the party that has a Bill-To ID with Cisco, so it isn’t often directly helpful for the end-customers themselves.  But it sure can be for the partner.

I can assure you, we absolutely, positively do not make it tough to do business with us intentionally.  As I mentioned, we are all focused on easing how our customers and partners do business with us, and continuous improvement does happen.  Keep the feedback coming because there is no better way for Cisco to qualify and quantify those pain points without hearing them from you.

Thanks again for the input!

Jeremy Davis

Entitlement Theater Lead, the Americas

Cisco Services Entitlement Field Operations

[Matthew Hall]

"How would Cisco know that you have permission to obtain service on behalf of that customer?  We aren’t aware of any affiliation/relationship your companies have unless we are told.  Enter contract associations.  And again, SAMT is one way that a customer can “tell” Cisco who has permission to access their contracts as they can manage that themselves."

Understood, I'm not asking for an auto associate.  SAMT works as designed.  The idea that customers establish a relationship with one company and keep it are idealistic.  I've worked for some large publicly traded Teir 1 VARs and we had the same problems there as I do now as a smaller specialized company.  Idealy companies would buy everything from one vendor, but that rarely happens.

I mean SAMT is a huge improvement, but it only works if customers have been trained to use it by their VARs at the time of sale, which apparently isn't happening.  Perhaps I need to just start training customers to use SAMT when I first arrive on site.  But there are still two large problems.

Problem one, as a 3rd party VAR, cannot lookup the devices of my customers. If a customer asks me to look up X devices I am working on and get them contract info or see when smartnet is up, I can't see it in CSCC or otherwise.  Even if I can't associate to the contracts, I should at least be able to see the devices and help the customer get those contracts associated with them in SAMT without calling Cisco.  That way the customer can get me access without having to go through phone calls and hoops.  I should be able to lookup the devices and see if they are under smartnet/esw/etc and the contract number (even if there is no company info..just the contract number itself).  This shouldn't require me to call every time and have Cisco look it up for me if the customer can't remember who or where they bought it.  This wouldn't leak private company info to me, all I see is if it's covered and the contract associated to it.  It also obviously wouldn't give me the ability to have access to the contract without customer permission.

Problem two, SAMT is BID associated only when it comes to VARs.  When a customer fires a VAR and hires another that means all of their old equipment is on an island, at a minimum until the smartnet is all up and I can sell them a refresh.  This is also a problem if they just hire a second VAR on to say..only due all of their Unified Collaboration work.  The only fix is that I see if they can make me a SAMT admin for their organization in the mean time, which is a bit drastic.  Otherwise I can't manage engineers coming in to do work for them without them having to do it.  I understand Cisco protecting the customer, but there should be a way to give another VAR full access management to ALL of your contracts if you like.  Once the customer clicks me in to those contracts via contract ID on my CCO account I should be able to manage them in the same manner as the original BID VAR.  This should only require a new "VAR" level access right.  As a Cisco partner we already have everyone attached to our organization.  They could add us and then as a manager of my org I could use PSS to add and remove CCO associations and I could subsequently use SAMT to add and remove those guys from customer contracts, just as though I had BID level access (I guess instead of BID it would use a customer organization ID).

I think I can agree with you, that the one change to give the customer ORG level and a new VAR permission level would fix much of the process.  Then I can just train the customer to use SAMT, have them add any missing contract IDs and give my ORG VAR level permissions to them.  But problem one still requires a call to Cisco and me to hand them serial numbers one by one, going through is it covered, how was it originally ordered, when does the coverage end, what is the contract id.....Unless there is a tool that I don't know about.

These problems have always existed, the recent entitlement changes to the software downloads just brought them to a head, and although a lot of people are just complaining about not getting things for free, many of the smaller VARs I know are complaining and feeling serious pains from the above issues.  To be frank, larger VARs won't care...they are just going to have enough previous associations in the bank that the software entitlement isn't an issue and they probably rarely if ever add new customer BID associations to their own engineers via SAMT.  In my own personal experience I only had to request an association when I had to open a TAC case...which to be honest is a lot more rare than an IOS download.

Thanks

[Matthew Hall]

3 years later and SAMT is a bit of a failure for me, it's buggy.  It doesn't seem to display contracts or users properly. New deals we sell aren't automatically added to the tool, even though I BID is associated.  It was a good idea...just seems to lack proper follow through.

[kyle woodhouse]

I also agree with Stuart and others that software updates for the  life of the product and featureset you purchased should be free.  Great  point that Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, Linux and others already do this. 

A piece of networking equipment isn’t really much different from a  computer.  A router or switch is just a specialized computer designed  to run at layer 3 or 2.  You pay for the license to windows 7 when you  buy your computer and you get software updates for the life of that  machine.  Why not make any piece of networking equipment the same?  I  don’t mean upgrades (ipbase to ipservices).  I mean if i buy a CISCO3925  router with IPBASE why should i not have access to updates to that  feature set for the life of the router?

Luckily this still seems to be the current policy for almost all  of their small 1RU switches.  Hopefully Cisco reevaluates their policies  makes Routers/ASA's and others the same instead of taking away that  level of access as well. 

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps10745/product_bulletin_c25-607000_ps6406_Products_Bulletin.html

Q. Where do I access the updates?

A. Customers who purchased a LAN Base or IP Base software license for the    Cisco Catalyst 3750-X or Catalyst 3560-X, or a LAN Lite or LAN Base    software license for the Cisco Catalyst 2960-S Series Switches   described  in this notice will be provided with updates as long as the   original  end user continues to own or use the product or up to 1 year   from the  end-of-sale date for this product, whichever occurs earlier.   Updates are  available at the Cisco website at http://www.cisco.com/public/sw-center/index.shtml by clicking "Downloads" and selecting "Switch Software". To download    software, you will be required to log in using your Cisco.com username    and password. If you do not have a Cisco.com username, you can obtain    one by clicking "Register" at the top of any page on Cisco.com.

I guess I just disagree with the way they are requiring SmartNet  on some products and not others.  There has to be a better, simpler and  less confusing way.  Why make different policies for different product  lines?  Is it really that hard to make a policy for ALL Cisco products  to get free updates for the life of the product including advanced  feature sets when they have been paid for and be done with it?

[jharris2006]

Also agree with Stuart and others.

A software update should be free, If the software it shipped with was free of defects then no updates would be needed.

Auto manufactures fix their defects for free (recalls) and they're alot more labor intensive and costly than a digital download.

[dzvconsulting]

What a effing joke.  I just bought an brand new factory sealed ASA5505 from a reputable Cisco dealer.  When I start the configuration, I discover that it is ASA version 8.2(5) - this is over two years old.  I went back to the dealer and they were just as surprised as I was.  And, big, bad, we have you over a effing barrel so what are you going to do Cisco says sorry, you should have know.  WELL GUESS WHAT.  I DON"T WORK FOR CISCO AND THEREFORE I DIDN'T!!!!!  So... I will bend over and let them F**K me out of a few more dollars just to get MY BRAND NEW PIECE OF EQUIPMENT setup, but this will be the last time I ever recommend or purchase Cisco.  EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CISCO CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[danielcomcom]

I really can feel where you are coming from... I've been trying for months to simply download an update for something the product said it should do. First I'm told I can't get a contract because I bought it off of ebay not from a cisco what ever. Then later I'm told I can't get it because it's too close to end of life... That's after probably 6 Hours on the phone getting bounced around... for crying out loud just let me download the file. If I ***HAVE*** to pay more money than at least let me do it instead of just telling me ***NO*** I can say one thing for sure I am NEVER going to recommend Cisco to ANY of my clients EVER!   Tears for my great ebay deal on a D9476 Modulator... On the brighter side I'm going to be supporting some small upstart company instead of one with it's head in the sand.  Hello Cisco? do you enjoy the sound of customers leaving?!?!