How can we help to you avoiding network equipment tricks

You ordered "original" Cisco, but received "OEM", imitated, or fake products?

You ordered "brand new" Cisco, but received S/N-changed, refurbished, new-used-mixed, IOS-upgraded or hardware-changed products?

Are you tired of all these tricks?

--- If yes, please contact ICI.

ICI is working in international Cisco grey market, doing clean business.

Starting our Cisco-selling business since 2007 in international market, mostly covering the developing countries where there is not sufficient Cisco coverage and support, we found that a lot of loyal Cisco users are deeply hurt by 2 sides: Cisco and Cisco partners.

On Cisco side, these customers cannot get good support or even a polite customer call. There are several reasons from Cisco about this issue,

1. Every Cisco sales person (called Account Manager) bears 3~8 million USD annual quota, and has to commit weekly to Cisco sales team, with 95%+ accuracy. This drives them not really to care about the customer's usage of Cisco products, because end users usually cannot commit a 95% accurate time of signing the contract and booking the products from Cisco.

   The ONLY people who can help Cisco AMs commit to Cisco sales managers are the big Cisco partners, especially the Cisco official distributors and Gold/Silver SI partners who are authorized to book directly from Cisco, because they know the EXACT TIME that they would log the PO to Cisco's ordering system.

   Therefore, personally and logically, Cisco AM are forced NOT to care about the end user, but only care about the Cisco partners' commitment to them for sales credit, based on which they could commit to Cisco sales managers.

   What, you buy 50K USD Cisco products annually, but still not even one Cisco guy come and visit you? Bingo, now you know the reason. You are not really important to a Cisco AM!

   Of course, for developed countries and regions like US, Japan, Europe, Singapore, etc., where Cisco has good coverage, this issue is not as severe as in developing countries. However, as we observed, such issue is deteriorating in last couple years, virtually everywhere, due to current economic environment situations.

2. As per our observation, most regular-Cisco-end users, or the network owners already built a countable network equipment engineering team. This means couple things,

   a. They know most Cisco technical details, as Cisco has very good documentation openly, and they do not really need much of "solution-building" from Cisco sales team. What they really need is piloting and solution-verification service. They want a quick and solid (better official) answer --- is my idea correct? However, Cisco field system engineers' (SE) are working under sales team, and generally they are indifferent of this need, because it's not much of their job.

   b. They know most tricks of Cisco products, and they really care the Cisco products quality, because they use them everyday, and really regard the network as their crucial business infrastructure. However, Cisco account teams were not built to suit the needs of these customers' needs directly.

On Cisco partner’s side, usually these companies and people could be regarded as the extension of Cisco sales team. Succeeding Cisco sales team's characteristics, nowadays there are 2 main issues of these teams,

   a. The liquidity of engineering team is too high, which caused the lack of accumulation knowledge and experience to Cisco products. Many Cisco partner engineers do not systematically understand Cisco's product lines and the evolution of the product lines, even for the basic router and switch sectors.

   b. The attention to quality and consistency of procurement and logistics of Cisco products are loosened. Since 2006, the OEM/fake/imitated/SN-changed/mixed/refurbished/hardware-changed Cisco products flooded from China to everywhere in the world, even for the developed countries like US, UK, Germany, Japan, via shell companies in free ports like Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, etc. The good news is that most Cisco users are aware of such problems, or even suffered already, and they wished to seriously get rid of such tricks.

------ Therefore, how do we really bridge the gap between Cisco's service quality and most Cisco users' actual need? How do we simplify this product sales cycle, and help you really save Capex and Opex?

   1. We removed our on-the-road sales team, because we did not see much value of their existence to the customer.

   2. We simplified our service cycle into 3 sections: contact, deal and support.

      a. Contact: in the contact phase, you could get most necessary information about the products we sell, our company philosophy, rough price range of the products, the contact information, and other basic information about us.

      b. Deal: in the deal phase, one of our professional technical-consultant will help you through any detailed discussion about your actual need, including project planning, scaling, choosing the right products, budget making and optimizing, etc. if you are satisfied with our work and price, and wish to conclude a deal with us, one of our commerce specialists will help you with all final prices and terms, generate and sign the formal contractual documents.

      c. Support: immediately after the deal is started, it will be logged in our support system, and be taken care of automatically.

------ The key differentiator of our company is the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for network owners.

1. Guaranteeing the quality helped lower the risk and expenses of repairs and maintenance.
2. Offering lower product prices helped lower the investment in the fast-depreciating equipments.
3. Providing comprehensive post-sales services helped lower the risk of daily network operations.
4. Removing our on-the-road sales team helps lower ICI operational cost and our selling price.
5. Avoid joining the tender of the largest organizations helps ICI focus on servicing most network owners in a systematic and consistent manner.