Hi Clive - right behind you on what you say there! I find it very difficult to be too angry with the likes of Alberto, he did my training on the device and is very passionate about the unit and was even involved with its design. Unfortunately Cisco is having a major wobble at the moment which for me started around the time they axed the Flip camera division. The people we deal with in these forums from Cisco are on the whole on our side, unfortunately it's the top of the tree where the problem is. I think that's why Alberto is pleased for the feedback (without putting too many words in his mouth!). I feel sorry for them that they have to tow the party line, so to speak.
I can't begin to tell you how extremely thankful I was to Cisco's SMB division a few years ago too - they helped me build a business and asked for nothing in return. They sent out people to help us, we were given access to their offices and demonstration suites and it wasn't until 18 months later we started paying them back in results. I'd never seen this type of support from a vendor, we therefore put up with some of the 'undocumented features' of tools such as CCA. We and I am a very loyal Cisco fan because of what they did - they have built up such a high level of goodwill with me, that it seems a shame that it's been slowly eroded over the past year and a half.
The recession caught up with Cisco, they had a massive panic and therefore ran back to their core business, which is the big switching and routing. The SMB divisions were going great during the recession and we were starting to see the R&D pay off. Products such as the UC320 and BE3000 landed, but they were unfinished and needed more focus, the job cuts and constant message changes from the top at Cisco have adversely affected the sales of these units for the reasons we've both said.
The SMB division which used to have the UC boxes, the BE and all the associated routing and switching was merged back in with what we used to call 'big Cisco' and whilst this used to cause us problems with different SKU's we could order on for our customers, the end result at the moment is much worse. Unfortunately the SMB products now have lost their focus and support due to them now being in a big pond competing against the enterprise products for resource and attention. They will always play second fiddle unless they are given higher weighting.
You've done an excellent sumamry of the promises there - we actually were presented official slides as partners, with the roadmap, there's also a few really nice products and enhancements that were supposed to appear that haven't.
The UC320 is an excellent product, even if maybe it requires a bit more processing beef. I think it is really unique and I believe the features that we want are already running under the hood, Cisco just haven't had time to test them and assess their impact on their support load (which I would say is largely the issue).
There could be another option of turning the UC320 over to the community to begin developing and supporting the features that it lacks.
My biggest upset is that I have on the back of what Clive has very nicely pointed out - I have sold on the message I was getting and now my customers think I'm a liar or worse! I therefore think very much the same of Cisco!
Chris
