Cisco has been moving to a SaaS model since 2015. It added former Adobe CFO, Mark Garrett in 2018, has made Strategic SaaS acquisitions and with IOS 16.9, made it more difficult to use pre-owned hardware.
Some have suggested that such licensing regimes are similar to illegal “tying” arrangements under antitrust law – where you are forced to buy a good you don’t want in order to get the good that you do want. The EU has already rejected such licensing regimes, and Cisco made an exception for hardware transferred within the EU. In November 2019, we launched a white paper to help our audiences better understand how their Cisco support agreements and hardware ownership transformed over time: Where Have Cisco Pricing, Policies & SMARTnet Support Failed its Customers?, for which you can request/download by Clicking Here. Many of our readers were aware of small shifts made by Cisco, but were surprised by the implications to their hardware ownership and any flexibility they would have to achieve any tangible budget containment. Grant Patten did a great job writing this white paper!
XSi has been working for the last four years to help organizations evolve their IT Maintenance, Lifecycle Management and Entitlements to stay in compliance with Cisco’s new rules. Entitlements are now a REAL risk and asset management has a new layer of complexity. So, XSi is now providing a hybrid model to help them save substantially on their annual IT maintenance expense with Cisco – all while staying fully compliant with Cisco and by opting into a more agile, proactive IT Asset Management system.
I can say with absolute certainty that XSi is the only company, at the moment, with a solution to save money on Cisco’s Smart Licensed hardware. We call it our Cisco Lifecycle & Asset Assurance Program.
And our solution does not stop with hardware running IOS 16.9. The truth is, lots of Cisco hardware does not run IOS – Firewalls, IOS-XE, NX-OS. Those each have versions that require the entitled owner to go with Smart Licensing.
So the bottom line is, many Third Party Maintenance Companies can maintain End-of-Life or End-of-Service Cisco hardware. Still, there is only ONE independent provider that can maintain that equipment as well as maintain a large portion of Cisco’s Smart Licensed hardware.
For one major client, we are now maintaining two-thirds of their over 30,000 Cisco assets, and Cisco supports one-third. Their annual savings is over $2 Million per year. Click Here if you’d like to auto-download a PDF brochure for this service.
We would love to divulge exactly HOW we’re able to accomplish this, but only do so under NDA. Please contact our Commercial or Federal Sales Teams today and schedule an appointment. Click Here to request an intro discussion.
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