One of the reasons that cisco has earned its place as Number One is that, to my knowledge, cisco has never terminally screwed a client. No other contender can make that claim with me. I've been screwed by all of them, except cisco. They don't always give me what I want when I want it, but they don't do fundamentally bad things like walking away from the ISP market as Proteon did or wiping out their upper management team as Wellfleet did from time to time.
--Kent
I've had my problems with Cisco, and there have been many, however, I must say that when you poke them in the eye and say, "uhm, I've got a problem that needs fixing now!", the engineers pop out of the walls like that green thing in Ghostbusters. They slime things all up, and quickly pull a working solution out of the muck. In fact, I found myself at O'Hare Airport in Chicago early Sunday morning picking up two routers and a bunch of interface cards. Cisco had been working on an unidentifiable prblem, and decided that we may need to unload a couple of our routers so they zipped out a couple of extra routers to us, along with an engineer. Anyway, I know that I can count on their customer support organization to immediately respond to my needs. The ONLY other company I ever worked with that offered (and met) this level of support was HP. Chris