The Cisco Smart Care Service & Appliance

Introducing Cisco Smart Care Services

Cisco, as most IT engineers know, covers a wide range of products and services. These range from routers to switches, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (ips), intrusion detection systems (ids), servers, wireless lan controllers (wlc), wireless access points and much more.

What a lot people aren't aware of is that most of these products come with a 90 day warranty - something that's really odd when compared with other vendors who usually offer at least one year warranty. On the other hand, only a number of hand-picked Cisco devices offer lifetime-limited warranty - for example, the Cisco Catalyst switches (lower to mid range models). Effectively, these lifetime-limited covered devices means that if they fail, it takes 20-25 days for Cisco to replace them.

For the above, and many more reasons, you should always choose to purchase the additional warranty extension service for each device. This is know as a 'SmartNet service'.

The Cisco SmartNet service comes in many variations, however in its most basic form, it extends up to one year the warranty for the device it is purchased, with a next business day replacement (NBD). The SmartNet service also entities you to download minor upgrade for the device's IOS or firmware.

The big problem with SmartNet service is that when dealing with a lot of equipment e.g 8 routers, 15 switches, 2 firewalls, it can get quite tricky and you need to ensure the renewal of every SmartNet happens within a specific period, otherwise you'll need to pay a lot more money to renew it.

Sounds fussy and a laborious task? Want more from Cisco than a simple warranty coverage?

Enter the new SmartCare service.....

The Cisco Smart Care service is the most advanced support services Cisco has offered until now. Due to the extensive features and services offered within the Smart Care service, we've broken the article down into smaller sections to make it easier to follow.

To begin, please continue reading...