Chink in the armor?

Throughout The Gripe Line's 10-year history, one company that has been conspicuously absent in readers' complaints is Cisco. So I was surprised recently when, within a few days of each other, two readers raised unrelated but interesting issues regarding the router giant’s policies.

Reader A reported that his company wanted to renew the support contract on a Cisco 7206 router, so it sent a check for about $5,000 to the authorized Cisco reseller that had originally sold the company the router. “The reseller cashed the check on Jan. 14 and then went out of business on Jan. 15 without ever buying the service contract from Cisco,” lamented Reader A. “Now Cisco is telling us that we are up the creek without a paddle, and they will not honor the service contract purchased through [its] reseller.”

Although it’s possible Cisco is not legally obligated to provide the service contract in such circumstances, the reader felt there were many reasons why the company should. “As you may know, Cisco does not sell service contracts for such high-end hardware directly, but only through resellers,” he pointed out. The defunct reseller had actually been one of a select group qualified to handle that product line. And because the transaction was a renewal of an existing contract, wasn’t the reseller essentially acting as Cisco’s agent? “This is really disappointing because, in the years we have had the Cisco 7206 in mission-critical operation, we have never actually called for service even once,” he continued. “Cisco's offer at this point is to put us in touch with another reseller and let us pay another $5,000 to get coverage, which is not exactly what we regard as fair.”

At Reader A’s request, I asked Cisco to look into his case to make sure it really did reflect the company’s policy. While company spokespeople were initially optimistic that something could be done for him, the final response was much the same as Reader A had been told. “In cases like this, unless Cisco has accepted the order from the reseller, or a separate agreement has been reached between the customer and Cisco, Cisco cannot take responsibility for the reseller's failure to perform,” a Cisco spokesperson said. “These occurrences are rare, due to Cisco's rigorous standards around its reseller authorization process. But whenever Cisco does discover reseller inequities, we will take steps to improve the quality and consistency of the Cisco reseller community.”

Reader B was showing his Cisco rep around his facility one day and just happened to point out a Cisco router he had purchased on eBay for a great price. Far from congratulating the reader on the great deal, the rep indicated Cisco might have problem with that. “Although he was polite, he indicated that ‘Cisco hates eBay,’ " Reader B said. “Apparently, when one buys Cisco products, he is not authorized to resell the OS for the apparatus, though he can do whatever he likes with the hardware on which it runs! So technically, even though I bought an unopened router from a defunct dot-com, I am in violation of [Cisco's] licensing agreement.”

Although the rep assured him he was not at risk of legal action from Cisco, Reader B decided he’d better cut a deal to make the router legitimate in Cisco’s eyes.