- Deloitte Consulting on behalf of Cisco Systems
Enterprises face increasingly complex choices in their network vendor strategies. IT leaders must introduce new technology for critical business functions, while managing IT costs and balancing operational risks.
This report summarizes the findings from a detailed customer survey conducted by Deloitte to examine the operational, financial, and risk factors associated with the use of single vendor and multivendor approaches in different types of enterprise networks. By providing a framework for understanding the overall value drivers associated with these networking strategies, this report is intended to help IT decision makers evaluate the potential impact of different approaches.
Through this survey, we examined how network vendor strategies align with important sources of business value, such as network performance and reliability, as well as operational functionality, maintainability, extensibility, security, interoperability, and risk. The survey results are based on a set of detailed interviews with customers currently using Cisco products along with other vendors' products in their networks.
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The fact that this was written by a third party (admittedly commissioned by Cisco) certainly adds validity to the not-very-surprising conclusion that single-vendor networks have numerous advantages. The vast majority here are qualitative, but nonetheless valid.
I would LOVE to see some discussion from our community about the extent to which you agree with this paper.
There are two major issues that I would particularly love to hear from you on.
1) Is the assumption that it is possible to acquire all needed network elements from a single vendor valid? To what extent (if any) do you have have to compromise on "best of breed" in order to have all components from a single vendor?
2) If you have a multivendor network, to what extent is that by choice? Sometimes multivendor networks are a fact of life as a result of mergers - or even independent decisions made within various business units of a large company.