Cisco Smart Licensing - We hate our customers and we want them to know

[AbraCadavra44]

I just came here to say that your confusing, ridiculous maze of licensing hoops that you have built into these products just make me want to give up. What the hell is wrong with your product teams? You think I want to read 4000 words of text to try to figure out how to license my switch? Not to mention it seems that the process for all this is constantly changing between firmware upgrades, so you are probably reading instructions that don't even work anymore if you have recently upgraded your firmware.

Everyone involved in this mess should be fired and you should just start over. It's unbelievable. You are all going to destroy the company. It's clear the thought process here is to move to a "perpetual" revenue model, but it can't be at the expense and usability of your products. Didn't anyone stop about 3000 words and 14 flow charts into this whole "smart licensing" mess and say to themselves....maybe we are doing something that is going to make our customers hate us?

[tminchev]

I agree 100%,.   Cisco,  you need to fix this, no one can afford a full time resource to manage your license mess/

[ripcisco]

I've been selling, installing and supporting cisco for over 20 years. It is now apparent they treat their customers and partners with such disdain that I actively encourage my customer base to use *anything but cisco*. Really - they were a good company once but now irrelevant in most of their product lines. I'm of an age I can do something more interesting instead but for any IT pro's with a career ahead, please for the sake of your sanity deploy something else. Not even the distribution network have a good word to say about dealing with Cisco these days either, so that's distributors, partners and customers who you've isolated. Cisco - good riddance.

[support]

once i get past my current problem, i am going to move my clients to fortinet products. I buy new smartnet (we should call them stupidnet) licenses and boom, i cant register anything to get support. I buy Fortinet and my licenses are done, setup is a breeze and their support team will do it for me if i am confused. For 3 years now the assistant director for a major city of chicago group and myself have been trying to get THEIR contracts disassociated with my account, nope. i can see all of their contracts and renewal costs anytime i want to. I am done after this renewal. And you cant even resell their garbage when you want to leave them, so they are landfill waste.