Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 15:46:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
On Tue, 27 May 2008, goemon@anime.net wrote:
Are you buying directly from cisco or from resellers? If you are getting counterfeit hardware directly from cisco then I guess we have real problems.
According to the FBI presentation, which may not be a reliable source for this topic, Cisco has very few "direct" customers.
Even if you think you are ordering "direct" from Cisco, e.g. www.cisco.com, the order seems to get forwarded to several primary Cisco resellers and the hardware shipped via a reseller. Even most resellers buy their Cisco products from a primary reseller or a secondary reseller, not direct from Cisco.
The FBI presentation did note that a few US Cisco customers, such as some unnamed large US telcos and unnamed intelligence agencies, do order and ship directly from Cisco.
A lot of folks order from a reseller and Cisco ships directly. This is true for many section 8a resellers when selling to organizations under those purchasing mandates...anyone spending federal $$$. I suspect some states have similar requirements. (Section 8a gives preference to small, minority owned, and disadvantaged businesses.) In any case, the reseller never sees this equipment. I am unclear on how common this is in the non-8a part of the world, but I suspect a lot of folks get their stuff direct from Cisco (or Juniper, for that matter), even though they buy from a reseller, if they are buying bigger boxes that small resellers are unlikely to stock. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751