Hacker News Reader

Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

Does Facebook have a fleet of 50,000 sales people going out and selling their data center software to companies? Has anyone considered the fact that there are probably a handful of companies that can staff huge, extremely skilled developers to implement what facebook put it into place? Even if you can download it and its free and open source, most companies want someone they can call when their IT software doesn't work. Cisco isn't just a technology company. They're a giant sales and services organization.

View on HN

> They're a giant sales and services organization

Case in point: SmartNET is tech support on steroids. It's truly unfathomable how knowledgeable the person on the other end of the line is; they've been thoroughly trained in 1 particular area of Cisco networking related to the class of device you own, and without fail have the solution to your problem.

Cisco is the only company I've encountered where the support contract is laughably worth the price.

Back in high school a bunch of us ran an ISP. One day it came to pass that our main Cisco router and the access switch which housed all the dial-up modems (made by a company called Shiva iirc) stopped playing nicely together, resulting in all of our dial-up users (i.e. almost every paying customer we had) not being able to log in. Needless to say, this was a problem. Fortunately for us our ISP was technically owned by the very large metropolitan school district of which we were a part, which allowed us to use their platinum-clad service contract with Cisco tech support in order to diagnose the problem. We got the Cisco guy and the Shiva guy on the phone all at once. To cut a long story short, a) the problem was with the Shiva box, b) the Cisco guy knew more about the inner workings of that box than did their (Shiva's) own tech support, and c) the Cisco guy fixed it over the phone in 5 minutes. As an impressionable 17-year old, this display of competence left quite an impression on me :)

It helps that they have an entire educational line of courses to build up the specific skills. I took the CCNA classes (and tutored for them at a local community college) in high school and while they do go over basic topics like 7 layer model, its highly Cisco hardware specific and it helps to have funnels like that into your support operations. It is similar to how Microsoft was (still is?) in the operating systems industry.

That's sad. I did my CCNA about a decade ago now, and it was top notch and although it covered Cisco gear, it was mostly about the underlying network concepts.

It still covers those topics, it just uses specific implementation examples to help you understand it. It is all still applicable to other hardware, but the entire field (that is in the scope of an entry level cert, at least) is pretty reliant on knowing the OS and scripting language of the hardware. I don't know how you could say it is mostly about underlying network concepts when over half the test is implementation specific Cisco questions. Maybe the changed it?

That was sort of my point.

Asking as someone with extensive familiarity with Cisco TAC, Advanced Services, et al... have you interacted with them lately? Anecdotally based on my interactions, the average knowledge level of any given set of 1st/2nd tier support engineers seems to have dropped precipitously in the past two years. Once you get to a platform-specific support group (say, the ACE group in Framingham, MA), the knowledge level is outstanding - but it also seems to have gotten much more difficult to escalate cases to that level without an extraordinary amount of effort on the part of customer engineers.

> Even if you can download it and its free and open source, most companies want someone they can call when their IT software doesn't work. Cisco isn't just a technology company. They're a giant sales and services organization.

This was also true of IBM back in the day, though.

That could be said of Microsoft in the server business as well, but Linux still managed to gain a big share. It's possible for a RedHat model to develop in networking - sell services and support, but not hardware. See Cumulus for example. (Disclaimer: I work for a Cisco competitor, but not Cumulus).

I had the fortune to speak directly with people who have been through the Cisco training program, and it is pretty rigorous. Pretty impressive how they can not just answer my question about the equipment, but put it in context with how networking "works" overall.

Regarding the Facebook move - I think it's funny how people are going to try and copy Facebook here. Facebook has a very unusual business problem they need to solve, and they are very creative and clever about solving it.

A lot of folks are going to look at Facebook from the outside, ignore the unique business problem they are solving, and say "we should insource all our network gear etc." Next thing you know they have a whole mess of new problems on their hands, support and staffing at the core. I saw this with an insourced VOIP phone system. Yes, it is cheaper but when it stops working you wind up paying for support, plus the features fall behind without care and feeding over time.

The downside for the companies that aren't Facebook (or Google, Amazon) is that you can miss out on a whole range of technology that will solve your problems just as easily, with support and the "ecosystem" to go along with it. If you don't have a unique problem (and this is part of the vanity in these decisions IMHO) then you are well served to leverage the options available.

> Cisco isn't just a technology company. They're a giant sales and services organization.

I recall hearing that about Sun, too. Now they're just a minor cog of a database maker.

Database maker, ha. Oracle is a much bigger sales and service organization that swallowed up Sun.

In my heart, Oracle will forever be a database company that was eaten alive by their sales and service organization.

You are missing the point. The idea is that, as Facebook's and Google's way of managing their large networks become more popular (due to it being more efficient and less expensive), eventually all companies will move towards it. This will negate the need for the expensive Juniper and Cisco switching/router gears which the companies relies on for their revenues.

A sales team is only as good as the product they sell. They can continue to sell a product which is not competitive but only for a while before the market catches up and pushes them down. The effect will not be short term but could be long term (assuming that what article is saying is true).

Cisco's future maybe bleak but not because we'll all move to Facebook's and Google's model. The systems they build are at massive scale, and heavily optimized to their workflow. Cisco equipment is in general designed to handle a heterogeneous workload, in a variety of deployment scenarios.

Scaling sales and service is one of the easier things to do. Groupon went from 10 to 10,000 employees in less than two years. About half of that sales, the other half technical

Reply on news.ycombinator.com