When I tried to engage a 'professional' to design a proper network for a customer of mine, the prices started in the stratosphere and quickly escalated to outer space to add the features required by my customer. Not to mention their per minute cost of configuring all of this esoteric stuff.
(Being the middleman in this situation, I want to get the lowest prices and the best matched products even more than my customers - it directly affects how much I'll make on the project and how much effort I'll need to put in the future to keep those customers happy).
This was in their office (the 'pro') and without them lifting a finger to research specific equipment, prices or offering any advice to better the proposed network or any possible issues that may have been obvious to the 'pro'.
I am not a consultant, but I deal with consultants like Billy Bob over at Local Computer Tech, LLC on a regular basis. More often than not, Billy Bob, he's pushing Cisco gear because Local Computer Tech, LLC is a Cisco shop. Or a Sonicwall shop. Or a Fortinet shop--you get the idea. It is very convenient for Billy Bob's customers to be cookie cutter installations; different gear = increased support burden = lower profitability. He's not going to mention alternatives if he can get away with it.
Sure; I understand that being the 'pro' they don't need to do the above with each new customer - they are thoroughly familiar with their own products and capabilities and have these answers at the tip of their tongues.
You'd think that because Billy Bob set up 30 Sonicwalls, that he's a Sonicwall guru. Nope. Billy Bob has set up 30 very basic installations, because customers that hire Billy Bob tend not to have complex IT requirements. Billy Bob has done a wonderful job of avoiding having to learn anything complex up to this point, and he likes it that way. Companies like Local Computer Tech, LLC tend to have a guru on call to do the heavy lifting, but he's probably not the one doing housecalls.
What did bother me though is the fact that while I don't doubt the reliability and stability of the products they offered, they charged enough for them that it didn't matter any more (an order of magnitude difference) vs. any consumer router I could provide, configure and support for my customer directly.
One of my customers has an IT firm that charges them $70/mo to manage their firewall. My company often does it for free because we insist on reliable hardware that Billy Bob doesn't know how to troubleshoot. There's the cost of the hardware, then there's the cost to keep Local Computer Tech, LLC in business. It's more a matter of business model than support burden. A hefty markup is not uncommon, and that's not limited to enterprise gear.
And while I said 'enterprise gear is '90's tech' - I mostly meant as a positive as to how stable it is. But that stability is not worth 10x the price and effectively per minute billing to setup, deploy and maintain (if needed) the proprietary products they are pushing.
My company recommends Cisco ASAs. They're stable, but the real reason we push them is that they actually do what we need them to. If you have basic requirements and don't mind rebooting your router once a month, go with whatever's on sale on Best Buy. Enterprise-grade would just be overkill. My customers' techs often try to set things up with their SOHO routers, and they just don't have the feature set. SOHO devices also lack basic diagnostic functionality, so I get to troubleshoot for them.
Once you get proficient with the ASA, management is nearly effortless. While a local tech is clicking on screens trying to set up port forwarding on a new Netgear router, I've generated a config via script and pasted it into the ASA's running config. GUI is often easier to manage if it's the first/only time you'll deal with a particular vendor, but CLI scales very well.
(In addition, of course, to their lack of features unless you pay through the nose for their latest products, if the features you need are even available for their products 'now').
A Cisco ASA purchased in 2006 will run the newest OS, but you'll need a RAM upgrade. When you buy Cisco, you're not buying a gadget, you're buying a platform. The price reflects this. Planned obsolescence is more of a consumer-grade problem.
In summary;
In 30 years or so, I hope the networking products from the previous 30+ years have matured and stabilized enough to warrant their almost automatic recommendation as a reliable 'appliance'. But that doesn't mean they're the better choice in all situations or in even most small office setups.
Agreed--network products aren't a sliding scale with budget routers on one end and enterprise gear on the other. Enterprise gear is often the best solution available for specific requirements, and if a business doesn't have those requirements, it makes sense to go with a cheaper alternative.
At double the price I could consider them for anyone, at triple or quadruple the price I could consider them for some of my customers (or even myself). But the prices as they are now, and the fact that the equipment itself is proprietary (meaning; you are tied into the same line of future products - from the same manufacturer), means that they are essentially acting as a monopoly and I guess that is what I disagree with the most.
Emphasis mine. In many cases, a Sonicwall can be replaced by a Fortigate, or vice versa. Sure, you could be using the one feature Sonicwall has that no other vendor does, but odds are that you aren't, and that feature isn't a must-have anyway.
This is in stark contrast to buying an Asus, a Netgear or a Linksys product (or all three, if needed) and having the same effective performance from (my) customer's point of view.
For my business, the concerns are 1) is it reliable, and 2) does it do the job? For every piece of SOHO equipment my customer has tried, the answer is no.
Maybe my customers are the wrong target audience for the 'good stuff'. All I know is that the bottom line doesn't lie; the benefits received from the extra $$$$ will not be seen in their (or my) lifetime.
Probably the case.
