Cisco delays test channel patience

Nursten: [The delays] make me wonder whether we should have all our eggs in one basket

Cisco’s continuing lead time woes have begun to test the loyalty of some its most committed resellers.

Lead times on a wide range of the networking giant’s products commonly remain at three to four months, according to partners.

Crawley-based s2s has been a Cisco partner for 10 years, but managing director Scott Nursten admitted that he is losing patience with the vendor after it missed “numerous” delivery dates in the past month.

“This is affecting my business severely,” he said. “It has been getting worse since the end of [Cisco's fiscal] year.

“We are predominantly a Cisco house, but if all our projects are put back because Cisco cannot deliver on time, it makes me wonder if we should have all our eggs in one basket.”

Nursten singled out ASA firewalls and the Media Conver­gence Server UC platform as particular black spots.

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of WatchGuard distributor Wick Hill, said he had seen an increase in Cisco resellers ‘cross-shopping’ for competitive firewall products.

“The feedback we are getting is that Cisco lead times appear to be going out, and in terms of firewall implementations lead times are now longer than the sales cycles,” he said. “We are expecting to see significant growth because of this.”

However, Rob Morgan, managing director of Cisco Gold partner Cisilion, said: “It was a challenge pre-Christmas but post-Christ­mas we are working more closely with Cisco around forecasting, and that seems to be paying dividends.”

In a statement to CRN, Cisco repeated its previous explanation that the lead time extensions are due to “supplier constraints”. However, Nursten claimed that Cisco had given him “no clarity” on exactly what is causing the delays.