SMARTnet delivery question

[Dieselboy]

One of my distributors keeps sending me smartnets with a start date of weeks in the past. If you pay 1200 bucks for 1 year smartnet, and lose 2 weeks this works out to almost $50 company loss per item. If you order tens of items this can mount up! I don't need to show the math to put across that losing $$$$ is easy. And if you have a failure in the 2 weeks you're without the smartnet because of that then you're not covered either.

Does anyone else have this with their smartnets? IE is this normal or is my distributor being slack?

I've requested they correct the start date to the same date they've provided me with the smartnets / electronic delivery email. I've done this before, they moan but they do it eventually.

[icecream-guy]

For us renewal starts at the beginning of the fiscal year, and we start the procurement process like 6 months ahead of the expiration. we've also consolidated a large number of contacts into like 5, this took some doing, and some accountant to figure out all the partial years stuff but well worth it.

you ought to find a new re-seller, cause what they doing ain't right.

[Otanx]

Never had a problem with ours. Our renewals always have a start date of the end of the previous years contract. Like ristau we consolidate our contracts, and each year we roll in any new purchases into the new contract. This means that we are paying pro-rated dates for those items as their original end dates coincide with when they were purchased during the year.  We just reach out to our Cisco rep with what we want on the new contract. They figure out the start date, and the pro-rated dates for everything. Also they will identify anything that has a published EOL. It usually takes two or three passes to get everything right, and then we take the final document, and send it to purchasing to get quotes and buy it. We did have an issue one year, and the actual purchase did not happen till after the old contract expired so we did end up with a start date in the past, but our rep knew we were working on it, and took care of us during that time.

-Otanx

[icecream-guy]

And if you have a failure in the 2 weeks you're without the smartnet because of that then you're not covered either.

like Otanx says, as long as it's in the works, you shouldn't lapse any coverage

now it you just bought an ASR 1000-HX and the SmartNet contract comes back with a date before you took possession. that'd be questionable,  usually a new Cisco comes with like 90 days support so one has time to roll the SmartNet in.

[deanwebb]

We never renew ours. We've been getting free support for the last 8 years, with Cisco having the eternal hope that we'll eventually renew.



Of course you all know that I'm kidding...

[Dieselboy]

This was the first year of my life that I ordered smartnets. The previous support contracts were all bought prior to me joining the company. I will definitely do as you guys have done and look to consolidating them and bringing them to start at the beginning of the financial year. This time the smartnets did take me a few months to sort out. I ended up doing a spreadsheet and marking each device with a priority from 1 to 3. 1 being critical (so 24x7) and 2 being the standby unit or not important for business ops (so 8x5xNBD). Example, primary ASA is 24x7 and secondary ASA is 8x5 - previously all smartnets were 24x7 which is unnecessary.

The distributor who's giving me start dates of weeks in the past are a HUGE well-known distributor. We used them in London and you probably have relationships with them in the US as well. I do need to use another distributor as there is 50% chance they will fail to deliver digital delivery items, because sometimes they're incompetent.

[icecream-guy]

We got 8x5xNBD for all our gear, and if something critical happens we raise it up through Advanced Services and get an entitlement..



Of course you all know that I'm kidding too...

[Otanx]

As part of the consolidation we got rid of all the 24x7 contracts, and now all of our stuff is 8x5xNBD. Automatic fail over redundant systems for critical stuff. Warm spares for stuff like access switches. The first year you consolidate contracts will be a pain, but it is worth it. Now instead of every month getting a renewal and having to run down if we need support on a specific serial number I deal with it once a year.

-Otanx

[Dieselboy]

I'm lucky as most of my stuff ends at the same time. It's just the bits n pieces that have been purchased in between. I didn't know until recently that you can buy "half" a smartnet to cover you until the all the contracts end at the same time.

[deanwebb]

We called up Cisco and asked for Smartnet support for some new devices we bought. We read them the serial numbers and they were like, "Uh, those aren't Cisco serial numbers" and we were like "Yeah, stupid, those are JUNIPER numbers!" and then we hung up on them. We totally punk'd Cisco.



The kidding level in this thread is off the charts...

[Dieselboy]

Dean, if you think so then wait until you hear the response from the distributor when I queried those smartnet start dates!

Initially I thought may be they have started cover from the date the previous cover ended, but then I noticed the brand new never previously covered devices also had start dates of 2 weeks previous (it was about 10 or 11 days I think).

So the distributor came back to me and said:

Hello Tony,

Contract Dates were based on the quotes provided with our Sales Team and Quotation Team.
...

Hmmm. So my response was something like:

I'm not sure why [company] would back date start dates of new contracts, to the date at which the quote was provided. This is wrong, unless [company] are honouring 24x7x4 hour response Cisco support from the date of the quote?

There might be some other logical reason but I can't see it at the moment.

[icecream-guy]

should at least be delivery date,  how is one expected to get support for something in procurement, that hasn't even been delivered yet?
might wat to take that up directly with Cisco. (if there are any employees left in that department, )