CA: S.J. to save millions with Nortel contract (Cisco out, Nortel in at new Civic Center)

Mercury News ^ | 2/10/05 | Aaron C. Davis

[NormsRevenge]

San Jose will save millions of dollars, getting a substantially more robust computer network at a lower cost after city leaders were forced to fairly bid a contract that had improperly favored Cisco Systems in the new City Hall.

The city council in August was forced to rip up and start over with the $8 million contract after a Mercury News investigation exposed apparent favoritism toward the company and a subsequent city audit revealed San Jose had gone so far as to let the company write the list of 18,000 Cisco parts the city would buy.

The new low bidder, Nortel Networks, also promises to install its $5.6 million system in time for the new City Hall to open as scheduled in June.

The announcement Friday concretes earlier investigation findings that suggested behind-the-scenes communications between city technology officials and Cisco came at a financial cost to taxpayers.

[NormsRevenge]

Gee, I wonder if Ron 'The Ethical One' Gonzales will have to give back his donations from Cisco, too?

[RonF]

... a subsequent city audit revealed San Jose had gone so far as to let the company write the list of 18,000 Cisco parts the city would buy.

I should think that any RFP would require the bidders to provide a complete listing of everything covered by the bid. I see nothing wrong with this.

[NormsRevenge]

True, but they basically wrote the RFP too. Normal business dealings?

[linear]

Agreed - this thing was totally crooked. Typical of Cisco, IMHO.

[Nonesuch]

True, but they basically wrote the RFP too. Normal business dealings?

Normal for Cisco, yes.

You provide them with some simple requirements, and they provide the complete parts list to build what you ask for. If you don't know better than to ask for "redundant everything", then they'll sell you twice the gear you actually need.

I actually saw a deployment designed by Cisco and KPMG which had a redundant pair of switches connected to two fail-over pairs of PIX firewalls -- four firewalls in parallel, only one of which would actually be active at any moment in time.

OTOH, Cisco gear "just works" 94% of the time, while with Nortel it's more like 78%, depending on the phase of the moon. Last week I had a failing Nortel device, so requested an advance replacement, which arrived two days later, and failed two hours after we swapped it into production (Yes, we ran it in a test lab for a day before putting it into production).