Wince! From Network World:
Cisco network really was $100 million moreCisco is sort of the Rolls-Royce of networking equipment -- bulletproof and priced accordingly. They are also very proactive when dealing with any issues on their hardware. That being said, I have worked with a bunch of Lucent (this was before they merged with Alcatel) equipment and they are also very very good -- no real discernible performance differences between them and Cisco and the lab I was working in was very focused on high-performance computing. For them to blow the bid by $100 Million Dollars (raising my little pinkie to the edge of my mouth) is nuts. Brocade came in for $2M higher -- I might have gone with them as they are truly the cutting edge.
It really was apples-to-apples.
The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network that we wrote about earlier this week was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations.
CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project.
The price discrepancy between Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent sparked a Add a comment on the Network World site that the bids did not represent a fair, apples-to-apples comparison. When asked if the number of network elements Cisco proposed drastically outnumbered those of the other bidders, Michel Davidoff, director of cyberinfrastructure at CSU, replied "Absolutely not."
"Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet," he said. "Every campus had two border routers, two cores, and two server farm switches. All the vendors had to propose exactly the same solution" based on the average number of servers deployed at each CSU campus. "All of this is based on exactly the same data to all of the vendors. It's exactly the same formula for all of the vendors."
