On Mon, 2002-07-01 at 10:16, Arron Scott wrote:
I actually agree the multi-vendor thing is sensible, but there is also value in focussing on each of our equipment at appropriate times. If we have a Cisco night, then we can do it at the Cisco office, we can use all the gear in our labs, have multiple Cisco and Partner engineers there, and can do it at no cost.
You're right. Infact it would be hard to do it any other way. But.... I do have a point here - read on.
Next month do it at some other vendor, and the next another, then whoever has the skill and interest can lead it. The only issue is whether other Vendors are welcome to other vendor nights, which I would expect is a no.
Why on earth not? I know that Cisco in the past has had a closed door approach to this sort of thing. But remember that this is not a sales opportunity. There should be no reason why other vendors should not attend. Infact I'd love to have an opportunity to learn more about the latest Cisco gear, and I'd certainly invite you to any VendorX presentation I was giving.
These shouldn't be selling nights, and should be focussed around the engineering issues the attendees have.
All the more reason why people should not be excluded. If there was a night at the Cisco offices, then I'm hardly going to be standing up professing to know more about Cisco routers am I. Nor am I going to be standing there all night saying "Oh but VendorX does it this way" Because that would make me look like a Moron(tm). You act like a guest in someone elses house, not like a pest.
NZNOG already provides a vendor neutral environment, and if we choose to have an interworking night, where we play around with some inter-vendor stuff then that's cool too, but we have little room in NZNOG for a group to talk about issues regarding one vendor (other than slamming them for some issue or other). Maybe this would allow a little more useful education in specific areas and technologies of interest to the members.
No one was talking about using a mailing list to facilitate these discussions. That would just be impractical. And this brings me to my point. If you call this thing the Cisco User Group, with an agenda to provide Cisco support/discussion and Cisco cert study, then thats all it will ever be. You will never be able to get useful content from any other vendor, no matter how much interest there is in the membership. This will force people to become members of a multiple number of groups. I suggest that you call it the Network Users Group, or something similar. And have the mandate to be MultiVendor. You can then have Cisco sponsor every meeting if thats what the members want. But at least you will be able to request help from other vendors should your members be interested in their equipment. Narrowing the focus is really doing your members a disservice. It would be like an IT consulting company who only offered solutions as long as they were from a single vendor, ignoring any other solution. You should offer your clients/members the freedom to choose. Remember - every reply has said MultiVendor is a good thing. At some stage in the future, they are going to want to look at another box. Dean - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog