3 March 2008
by Alex Scroxton
Cisco has reacted to channel criticisms of its SMARTnet quote system that were highlighted in MicroScope and moved to fix problems that have been the bugbear of resellers.
As revealed last month (MicroScope, 18 February) the problems stemmed from an overly complex quotation system that misplaced and duplicated contracts.
Gloucestershire-based Recurve Technologies told MicroScope it lost £6,000 on SMARTnet, and other resellers have experienced similar issues.
John Donovan, managing director of UK and Ireland channels and SMB at Cisco, admitted that last year’s SMARTnet refresh had not gone smoothly.
"We moved to a new system a few months ago and it wasn’t 100 per cent optimised for the European market. In the area of quotations for new service contracts it has been a challenge for system partners. There will be a fix in the next couple of weeks and they will see a difference."
While they welcomed the news that Cisco was working on the problem, partners have given a guarded reaction to Donovan’s promise, with many voicing concerns that the vendor took so long to react given the levels of criticism levelled at it.
"It’s great that Cisco has accepted there was a problem, but it should have got on it earlier," said Colin Symington, director at Recurve. "Anything it can do at this point has to be an improvement."
The delays in dealing with the problem may still cause trouble for Cisco, with some partners giving serious thought to canning their SMARTnet options or, in some cases, taking Cisco support in-house.
"It’s created a load of headaches for me and it’s made me much less enthusiastic about selling SMARTnet," said one dealer.
Brighter Connections managing director Darren Stringer said he still had one question for Cisco: "Why did you change it in the first place? It didn’t need fixing before because from my point of view it was never broken."
One silver Cisco partner said the vendor was trying to help partners by simplifying its processes ahead of the April deadline to comply with its Shared Support programme.
"There does seem to be some real intent within Cisco to support people who genuinely want to work with it," he said.
