I have never seen a more convoluted mess as Cisco licensing. Is there a single customer that has a positive experience with Smart licensing delivery/use? It is so bad, it may be time to wipe a clean slate and start over. With Meraki folks taking over, they have to be thinking "how do we clean up this mess"
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I cringe every time I need to do Cisco licenses. In fact, I just log a licensing case and let Cisco guys take care of it. As a customer, I have too much on my plate to worry about a vendors licensing complexity after spending my money with them. I always make it their problem
Cisco should have CCIE Licensing and it would be the hardest one of all.
Does not help that the licensing cases are outsourced to IBM, every-time i see @ibm in the email i know the engineer will not be able to handle it if its not a simple case.
Who ever though that it was a good idea to bind hardware equipment licensing to the cloud not only should be fired but institutionalized for such a level of re--rdation.
Specially with all the negative partner and customer feedback regarding this before it went live.
It’s because nobody is ever hired into Cisco product groups if they have had an Operations role. Anybody who talks to operations people (my life long friend is in ops) in a customer and you’ll rapidly see what a hot mess it is. But our sales people don’t talk to them and our PMs never consider operational complexity with anything like the seriousness it deserves. Of course, if you talk to the procurement people and legal bureaucrats, they love the control.
@ymi - Cisco has been fixing licensing for 10 years. Right now it is at the lowest point ever in terms of complexity, confusion to buy, confusion to install, and customer dissatisfaction. I think 90%+ of people at Cisco don't even understand how it works.
The intent was admirable but the execution resembled a vacuum cleaner.
IWhen I talked to IT managers who switched from Cisco, some of them confessed that they did so because of Cisco licensing.
That was years and years ago. I always thought it would get better after the Meraki acquisition.
I guess we're still stuck there?
Was Cisco for a long time. First thing I did was deactivate Smart Licensing, across the board on our Enterprise, now on outside. Regretfully a complete decade-plus long waste of development money and time. Painful to implement, painful to manage. Wish there was a different story to tell. Can someone articulate how Smart Licensing actually makes things easier? From running a network perspective, it is, regretfully much more complicated administrately, especially when you do not have a resource to manage Cisco licensing.