I've worked a little with Foundry. It's a good solid switch, and it programs up with 99% Cisco syntax.
To be honest about it, Cisco rarely wins any kind of "bake-off" when it comes to performance, and in some cases, features. Trying to sell against some of Cisco's competitors purely on performance or features will fail more often than not.
Cisco is a good solid product, performance is excellent, and the feature set is well beyond sufficient ("feature rich" if you'll pardon the marketing). What sets Cisco aside from most of their competitors is that it is an "old" company, it has a huge support organization (which is usually technically superior), it has an excellent track record for staying with a customer-in-crisis and (at the very least), "holding their hand" and with an occasional exception, quickly resolving the issue.
They are (for most organizations) a "one-stop shopping" supplier. Their product suite is the broadest in the buisness.
There are many reasons why Cisco is a good choice, performance is a ways down the list, especially for a business. The performance is very good, but "The Company," "The Support," and 'The Solution Base" are generally more important than raw numbers.
Foundry is also an excellent company, the product is excellent, I like 'em (I can say the same for Extreme and some other similar organizations).
I worked in an Interoperability Lab for years, we frequently did performance testing of one vendor vs another.
In short: there's more to a product than price and raw numbers, using only those parameters, Cisco would lose most of the time.
Perhaps other posters will have a different perspective, all of the above represents my personal experience and viewpoint (of ~20 years in the PC/Networking business).
Scott
