Total bid costs were the sum of Layer 2 hardware (and software), Layer 3 hardware (and software), Layer 2 maintenance, Layer 3 maintenance, training, and taxes and shipping. Cisco’s cost in each respective category was $51 million; $18.7 million; $34.3 million; $10.6 million; $1 million; and $7 million.
Alcatel-Lucent’s was $14.5 million; $2.5 million; $1.8 million; $798,000; $777,000; and $1.7 million.
via Cisco network really was $100 million more.
The comments in response to this article are superb and well worth the read. If you don’t drill down far enough this comment stood out for me (highlights mine).
it comes down to a architected solution vs best of breed. If you just want routing and switching (speeds and feeds) – -take it to bid and bid on the lowest vendor. Although there are still some advantages inherent within each product – you’re going to get what you get. But you can’t get business value out of switching and routing – its the applications! In SJSUs case – I laud the concept that you buy an architecture. If you need to deliver business applications like conferencing, video, call processing, presence/IM service, and contact center… as it appears sjsu was looking to do … why not buy the architecture that has been integrated and purpose built for the applicaitons. That is why SJSU is saying Cisco was the only vendor that had a solution. ALU doesn’t, brocade doesnt, HP doesnt…. the alternative is you could go to bid for each of these, take over a year to do it, once purchased, hire an IBM, Accenture, or build your own team to integrated them all, and then what do you have… a HUGE expense and stovepiped systems that don’t truly deliver the needs of the business today or tomorrow
Any college with a reputable Computer Science program should have many decent graduate students able to solve integrating applications from various vendors reducing the problem set to just speeds and feeds. It’s also not a good idea to buy into an architecture that ties one to a single vendor for applications.