I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. We were doing similar work for private school at the same time, and the process for the public and private school could not be more differen…
In my experience, the govt. schools themselves have extremely limited IT admin resources available to them to help with this sort of thing. A senior high school I know a little about only has one person doing IT admin, over 1500 students, each with their own email and network login, and is running a combination of Macs and PCs/Windows.
a company like cisco or microsoft trying to rip off state/local governments? color me not shocked.
What does Microsoft have to do with this?
Because Microsoft is just as happy to sell overpriced packages of unnecessary functionality to clueless or corrupt government employees as Cisco is, and they have the extra property of arguing fervently against the use of free/open source software that competes against their offerings and would save even more.
It seems absurd but I'm going to have to side with the state/library on this one. It can literally cost more to make a choice to use the cheaper unit than to just buy the big one. "Some libraries need smaller routers. Ok. Which ones?" could easily run in the millions before any routers were purchased. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of government purchasing.
This is bullshit. They could have put the network engineer from the Department (the guy who confirmed he had not requested dual power supplies) on this for a week, and he would have had a solid estimate for far less. Put him on it a month and he could have had an itemized order with the exact models to order from Cisco or from any of its competitors. If he were busy with other duties, any other network engineer in th…
Agreed - it sounded like the Cisco guy just spec'd up the absolute maximum needed for one or two locations, then just decided to roll out the same spec across all 1000+ locations, obviously trying to maximise sales. Cisco was probably shocked when the government approved it all.
It seems absurd but I'm going to have to side with the state/library on this one. It can literally cost more to make a choice to use the cheaper unit than to just buy the big one. "Some libraries need smaller routers. Ok. Which ones?" could easily run in the millions before any routers were purchased. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of government purchasing.
This is bullshit. They could have put the network engineer from the Department (the guy who confirmed he had not requested dual power supplies) on this for a week, and he would have had a solid estimate for far less. Put him on it a month and he could have had an itemized order with the exact models to order from Cisco or from any of its competitors. If he were busy with other duties, any other network engineer in th…
Oh how I wish it worked like that. And who knows, perhaps out in WV it can. But I was once an appointed advisor (one of three) to a committee that was in charge of reviewing the qualifications of a similar outside consultant and making a short term contract recommendation to the department that would approve the hiring. I'm here to tell you...
I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. We were doing similar work for private school at the same time, and the process for the public and private school could not be more differen…
You get similar stuff at private companies too, though few private companies are large enough for corruption like that to be able to reach the same scale without getting too big to go unnoticed by auditors for long enough. The number of times I've had potential supplier hint at extra perks or "return favours" is fairly high, and I've not even been in positions of very substantial purchasing power. It's often not even…
This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds of negotiations was fascinating. As far as I could tell, many things sort of worked, when they did, because engineers had a cultural desire to "get it right", mostly for their own satisfaction. But the company itself didn't seem to either have an effective way of policing it, or maybe even really an interest. Somewhat as in government, low- and mid-level contracting didn't excite anyone in management, who were focused on issues that really "moved the needle", like securing and overseeing new exploration deals, not how much someone spent on a piece of equipment that wasn't even in the 6-figure range anyway.
Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What i…
There's a point in standardizing, but they probably should have standardized on 2-3 different branch router products, vs. one.
Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What i…
Decent point.
If you have 5 office buildings with 50-500-500-500-2000 people in them (respectively), then standardising is probably a good idea since now you can use the same company to fix problems in all the builds and not have to take special care with the small building.
However. If you have 30 builds with 5 people in each. Sending a new, preconfigure, router by fedex is so much cheaper.
That is how my phone company treats me. If my home router dies, or has an odd problem that they can't figure. They just send me a new router by mail and I switch it out with the old one and send that one back.
"The auditor began digging, speaking to many people in West Virginia state government who had been involved with the project. The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use…
It would kinda be like buying a really expensive 24 port router and then just using 2 ports.....oh wait....that's what they did already.
Dual power supplies is a bit overkill. Although I remember my high school admin got a central router with dual power supply, but when you plugged both in at once (from the same source) they drew too much power on a reboot and flipped the fuse after every blackout.