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Partner Furious about ISA550 / ISA570 / UC500 End of Life

jeliasoncisco
Level 5
Level 5

Dear Cisco,

 

As a loyal and dedicated Cisco Select Partner I am writing to say how shocked and utterly appalled I am regarding your recent complete disregard for your Partners / Dealers who have invested much in your success. Recently, you have been discontinuing key products which are critical components to the success of your Small Business Dealers. Small Business (1-30 employees) accounts for a huge amount of market in Rural Canada and USA. There is strong competition from Cisco's competitors in this market with products built and priced for Small Business. Cisco's complete disregard for it's partners by discontinuing key part numbers will ultimately distroy your Dealer presence in Small Business. My company for one is at a loss of how I can possibly compete.

 

My company had established a successful position in the market selling the UC500 against NEC, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Shoretel. These competitors often had some or more features and lower cost. Now I am forced to sell BE6k which has a starting price which eliminates 85% of my customer market. Don't tell me it is affordable because I have priced it out and compared it. It is does eliminate a significant amount of my market. If you want to simplify your offering, position a "regular" ISR G2 with CME and CUCME, including Phone User Licenses at a small business bundle price available only to a certain Cisco Partner Categories with the training. This will at least make it affordable and easy to sell, as well as be easy to upgrade a customer to BE6K in the future.

 

Yesterday I received news that the ISA550 and ISA570 will be end of sale coming up and support will end within 1-year. This product is only 8-months old. I have had great success with it competing against Sonicwall, Fortigate, and Checkpoint. The key here is the features combined with the affordable IPS, Web Reputation, and Deep Content/ Application Filtering. Frankly, the ASA5505 is a great solid box, but there is no content filtering or application filtering except for $1000's of dollars. Also the Cisco Scan Safe does not work on the ASA5505.

 

Cisco, you are pushing us dealers to sell your Meraki product line. I tell you now, that this is not a replacement for any product in small business. Most every small business I have approached is not ready for Infrastructure as a Service. Immediately my clients have gone away from the sheer fact that the device will shut down if they don't buy a license. Small Business's want to "own" their hardware and have the choice to buy updates or service contracts. Meraki is only a supplementary product in Small Business, not a replacement for the standard hardware offerings.

 

To make matters even worse for me as a Cisco Select Partner, I have found that being in Canada and buying from Canadian Distribution I am paying around 20% more on Cisco Hardware and SmartNET than equivalent dealers in the USA. This Canadian price list is not in line with the exchange rate. 20% is ludacrous. It makes your position in the market that much more expensive and difficult for us to sell against the competition who does not have this price difference. In addition, what do I do when competing against company's selling grey market product they sources out of the USA. Their sell price is often below my cost!

 

Cisco, Please take a moment to collaborate with your USA and Canadian Small Business Partners, we have been loyal and know what sells and what our customers want. The cloud is not everything, especially with still poor broadband in many areas. We need to be able to know you will not pull out the carpet from underneath us. It is your recent actions that make me embaressed to be a Cisco Dealer, especially when we hear in the news you are laying of 5% of workforce due to low sales forecast. You might have better sales if you stop discontinuing key products and listen to what we need, the price point we need, and the margin we need.

 

I encourage anyone to comment on this.

 

Shocked and utterly appalled at Cisco's Disregard for Cisco Partners,

 

 

Jordan E.
Canada

2 Replies 2

Net_Connect473
Level 1
Level 1

Amen!!

Our market is rural and small towns and cities.  85% to 95% of our customers can't afford either Cisco Enterprise or Meraki products.  The ones that can afford Meraki are not interested in the least in handing over their infrastructure to a product that stops working or is not configurable if they stop paying for service or if their Internet connection goes offline for an extended period.  Meraki is more of a product to supplement a traditional network architecture --- not replace it.

I am frustrated and furious that Cisco seems to be dumping its small business partners on an island and sailing off into the distance,  It seems like Cisco is abandoning the large amount of development and investment spent over the past few years cultivating and creating small business products and partners.  As newer Cisco Small Business partners, we have re-tooled a lot of our practices to conform to the Cisco Small Business paradigm.  With all of the recent instability in Cisco's Small Business product line and the abandonment of several of its keystone offerings (OnPlus, ISA500, UC320, UC500, etc.), however, we are starting to re-think our move.

Quoting Jordan here because he nailed it:


" The key here is the features combined with the affordable IPS, Web Reputation, and Deep Content/ Application Filtering. Frankly, the ASA5505 is a great solid box, but there is no content filtering or application filtering except for $1000's of dollars. Also the Cisco Scan Safe does not work on the ASA5505."

I have been an industry professional for 20 years mostly working in the enterprise space.  Over the last year have built my own consulting practice.  The ISA series has been a great edge for us competing against SonicWall and Fortinet int he SMB space.  This is extremely disappointing and seems to confirm what I feared moving into the SMB space with Cisco:  Cisco is not serious about this.  They do not take into account professionals like Jordan and I when making decisions like this.  None of the re-sellers I have seen offering the ISA series provide any type of warning that the product has been cut and is now end of life.  I have many customers that were glad to switch away from SonicWall and Fortinet licensing models and move into an ISA 550 or 570.  The devices are working great and now I have to find an alternate solution to replace the next four I had scheduled for deployment.  Did Cisco simply not understand what they had here?  I was very clear when I spoke to the marketing personnel Cisco had call me on this product and flat out told her I expected to replace most if not all of the SonicWall's I support with ISA series devices. 

At this point I am beginnign to evaluate what I can use as a replacement for this line.  Any suggestions from guys that have been in the SMB market place would be most appreciated.  At this point I am not sure sticking with Cisco at this level is wise.  We are going to have a lot of egg on face here when we go back to our customers and explain the devices they bought that are no more than a year old are now end of life. 

Thanks for reading the rant...

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