There is an old adage around the telephony world that no one gets fired for buying Cisco or IBM. So it’s no surprise that the two companies which have written the book on how to sell, um, strongarm may be a better term, in new products and services that effect telecommunications have seem to have struck an unholy alliance around Dow Chemical. Checkout the eWeek article by Ellen Muraskin.
While this likely effects only the creme de la creme of companies and organizations, it does reflect how mighty Cisco is and how foolish some CTO’s can be. Scalability is one of the holy words of IT. If a service can’t scale then it won’t work. What I fail to understand is why companies pay to be beta testers. A deployment of the size of Dow Chemical will require a network architecture that basically becomes a phone company of its own, and old school thinking has to go out the window.
This is clearly where new thinking is needed.