Cisco Does CCIE Training Programs ? Not Really, More About Image and Brand

CCIE is start­ing its own CCIE Study pro­gram. What does this mean ? Allow me to pontificate.

Blocking poor train­ing programs

Recently, I have noticed a num­ber of new CCIE train­ing pro­grams. These pro­grams don’t look par­tic­u­larly pro­fes­sional and may cause dam­age to the CCIE image in the near future (if they haven’t already). Consider, you have paid USD$7000 to attend a month long boot­camp and head off to the exam and find out that you are woe­fully under-​​prepared. Who do you blame ? Not the train­ing pro­vider whom you know and ‘trust’, not your­self but Cisco. By releas­ing accred­ited train­ing, this means that you can’t “blame” Cisco if the train­ing is not up to a suit­able standard.

I think this is the most import­ant reason for the Cisco 360 initiative.

Accredited Courseware

My impres­sion is Cisco is deliv­er­ing accred­ited course­ware and every train­ing part­ner in the world will have the oppor­tun­ity to deliver CCIE train­ing pro­grams. Of course, instruct­ors will have to cer­ti­fied, and the com­pany meet some min­imum require­ments and install lab equip­ment. I pre­dict the num­ber of com­pan­ies offer­ing CCIE train­ing to increase rap­idly as they will think this is an oppor­tun­ity to grow by adding CCIE to their exist­ing CCNP/​NA/​SP/​DP offer­ings and increase rev­enue. Of course it won’t be and they will exit the busi­ness by the end of next year.

Cisco will be tak­ing a nice fee for provid­ing the course­ware, along the lines of roy­al­ties that are paid by accred­ited Cisco train­ing com­pan­ies today and provid­ing all the accred­it­a­tion and audit services.

Course and Study Material

According to blog and mail list com­ments, Cisco has reached out to exist­ing train­ing pro­viders to provide or develop the new train­ing mater­ial. That is a smart move. This means they are more likely to sup­port the Cisco offer­ing in some form.

“Most of the CCIE train­ing vendors (NLI, IE, IPexpert, GK, NIL, NMC,etc.) were involved in this bid­ding pro­cess — and have a great level of know­ledge as to how the pro­gram has been struc­tured, ” Wayne Lawson, Founder and President of IPexpert, email to group­study secur­ity CCIE.

Standardised Training

The real ques­tion is whether unof­fi­cial train­ing will sur­vive ? At the moment we have quite a bit of vari­ation between the sup­pli­ers. To high­light this look at many peoples com­ments about how dif­fer­ent Narbik Kocharian’s boot­camp is.

Many people feel that a com­bin­a­tion of vendors is the best choice, provid­ing dif­fer­ent approaches and assist­ing in know­ledge absorp­tion. There is no right way to get pre­pared for the CCIE exam in its cur­rent form. It is worth con­sid­er­ing whether stand­ard­ised train­ing will lead to exam changes ?

Partner Marketing Dollars /​ Training Credits

One of the more dif­fi­cult prob­lems in our industry is that Cisco Partners struggle to have suf­fi­cient cer­ti­fied people((and I won’t go into the lack of invest­ment, men­dic­ant selec­tion and life guid­ance that occurs in a part­ner busi­ness sigh)). In the last few years we have seen Cisco add sev­eral pro­grams that help Partners pro­gress indi­vidu­als through the CCIE cer­ti­fic­a­tion pro­cess as well CCxA and CCxP . For CCIE Mendicants who work for Partners, this includes the online lab read­i­ness assess­ment, which is an off­shoot of a part­ner sup­port pro­gram, access to internal train­ing mater­ial, access to online lab envir­on­ments and more.

A Cisco Partner will also receive train­ing cred­its based on the volume that they sell, as part of a mar­ket­ing incent­ive pro­gram. With this announce­ment, Cisco can now deliver CCIE train­ing and fund them with the train­ing cred­its without hav­ing to pay an external pro­vider or at least, have a more effi­cient model for pay­ing for training.

I sus­pect that the cur­rent method allows for some of the major pro­viders to deliver CCIE train­ing on Cisco’s behalf¹.

Its not so much about the money

I know that Brandon Carroll thinks that Cisco is look­ing for a another rev­enue source, and I am sure that they will make a profit from this by accred­it­a­tion fees, course mater­ial licens­ing and so on. However, I don’t believe this is the primary motiv­a­tion. Cisco does not like to devi­ate from its core busi­ness, and train­ing most cer­tainly is not what they would want to do. I con­tinue to believe that Cisco provides train­ing so that they can sell more hard­ware and software.

Summary

So there are two key drivers

- provide an accred­ited train­ing pro­gram for CCIE study to con­trol the brand and product image.

Note that just like all other Cisco cer­ti­fic­a­tions, you can choose a non-​​accredited pro­vider. This will stop poor qual­ity train­ing pro­viders who are rip­ping off mendicants.

- allow Partners to spend train­ing cred­its on Cisco courses in a more effect­ive manner.

I am fin­ished pon­ti­fic­at­ing and will resume nor­mal service.

Reference

CCIE Pursuit — Cisco to launch own train­ing program

Network World art­icle Cisco puts CCIE learn­ing on the fast-​​track

Footnotes

1. I have no know­ledge whether this is true, it is pure spec­u­la­tion. It seems prob­able to me [back]

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