Design Tip: Cisco Retail Price List, Creating Your Own Price Estimates

The Cisco Price List

If you didn’t know that Cisco pub­lishes their Recommended Retail Price List on a monthly basis, then raise your hand ? Yep, thought so. Thats about 95% of the audi­ence, the usual.

It’s one of the lesser known “reseller secrets” that any­one can get the latest Retail Price List on request. You can ask your Cisco Partner/​Reseller, who would usu­ally have it (and if they don’t, you should think about using another part­ner). Sometimes your Cisco Partner will refuse to give it you, stat­ing that that it is con­fid­en­tial inform­a­tion, which it most cer­tainly is not. Typically, I would then speak to my Cisco Account Manager who will then send it over.¹

If you part­ner hasn’t heard about it (and you really don’t want to change reseller) then tell them to request it from the their whole­saler who will be able to get it for them.

What does the Price List look like ?

Its a spread­sheet that lists the part num­ber, descrip­tion and the retail price in US Dollars for every product that Cisco offers, includ­ing Smartnet (in all its myriad forms).

Making the most of this treasure

One of the most dif­fi­cult parts of being a designer, is decid­ing which product or scen­ario is most use­ful to the require­ments. For example, I need to install a WAN con­nec­tion and I know that a Cisco 2811 would be enough, but how much would a Cisco 3825 cost and could I jus­tify that know­ing that I might need the IOS Zone Based Firewall in the future. Normally, I have to ask my reseller to give me a price on both mod­els and the options in the IOS fea­ture set.

Typically, this takes a few days while they pre­pare an offi­cial quote and work through the num­bers before present­ing you the inform­a­tion. More often that not, you need to get things changed and updated, again a wait for sev­eral days. And so the cycle goes until you get what you need.

And then the reseller wants to con­stantly bug you² to find out when you are going to pur­chase it. This means wasted time on the phone and email, you need to be nice enough to the per­son so that they will pro­duce quotes in future but really you want them to bug­ger of and leave you alone.

So I have a bet­ter way to do this.

Cisco Dynamic Configuration Tool

The first step is to use the Cisco Dynamic Configuration Tool to pre­pare the list of part num­bers required for the given solu­tion. The Cisco Dynamic Configuration tool is a fun­da­mental part of estab­lish­ing each and every com­pon­ent that goes into the pur­chased product. For example, pur­chas­ing a Cisco 3845 router requires not only the hard­ware, but also the flash, memory, mod­ules and other accessor­ies to exactly come together. The only accur­ate way to do this is the use the tool provided by Cisco.

For a selec­ted con­fig­ur­a­tion, it will check and val­id­ate your con­fig­ur­a­tion to make that all the mod­ules can be installed (say, not installing too many NM’s, or the wrong type of ESW’s), and the the flash and memory has the capa­city to run the IOS image that you have selected.

This detail in vital on build­ing the cor­rect part numbers.

Note: help is avail­able within the tool and you should go there for a com­plete intro­duc­tion. You do not need a Cisco CCO login to access the tool.

It is really import­ant to use this tool because will col­lect together all the line items that Cisco wants you to buy. Because there are vari­ous busi­ness units within Cisco that may pro­duce the over­all product the line items can vary from zero cost to sub­stan­tial sums. Selecting which IOS image to use is often a real prob­lem and the Configuration Tool does all the check­ing of the ver­sions, memory and flash. This tool is the same one that resellers use when quoting.

When you are fin­ished with your con­fig­ur­a­tion get the dynamic con­fig­ur­a­tion to email you the parts list (shown below):

Product                       Description                                                 Quantity
CISCO3845                     3845 w/AC PWR,2GE,1SFP,4NME,4HWIC, IP Base, 64F/256D        1
S384AISK9-12420T              Cisco 3845 ADVANCED IP SERVICES                             1
MAX-28/38-FLASH-BN            64 to 256 MB CF Factory Upgrade and 256MB USB Flash Token for 2800/38001
NM-4T                         4-Port Serial Network Module                                1
NME-NAM-80S                   Cisco Branch Routers Series Network Analysis Module         1
NME-XD-48ES-2S-P              EtherSwitch Service Mod 48 10/100T POE + 2SFP,Std Image(SMI)1
FL-WEBVPN-10-K9               Feature License IOS SSL VPN Up To 10 Users (Incremental)    1
CAB-SS-232MT                  RS-232 Cable, DTE Male to Smart Serial, 10 Feet             1         

Using Excel to cre­ate your own Estimates

Since I can spend sev­eral hours work­ing out prices and mod­el­ling dif­fer­ent solu­tions, I need a bet­ter way to make my own estim­ates. I need some­thing that I can quickly enter the part num­ber and auto­mat­ic­ally cre­ates an estimate.

If we have an entire spread­sheet with retail prices, we can use this to cre­ate our own pri­cing system.

1. cre­ate a new sheet in the price list.
2. cre­ate some head­ings that look some­thing like this:

3. Since I am buy­ing in English Pounds I add a cur­rency con­ver­sion. It’s an estim­ate but usu­ally enough to give a rough idea
4. Add a field for state /​ gov­ern­ment taxes
5. And a field for your estim­ated dis­count from retail price
6. Enter a Cisco part num­ber into the field

Now we need some Excel for­mu­las to lookup from the price list. When I look at the spread­sheet that comes from Cisco, the pricing2/​pricing3 tabs are only the Cisco main­ten­ance prices there­fore we don’t need to look them up. I delete these sheets. All of the prices for the actual equip­ment are in the first sheet.

Description

=IF(B12<>"",VLOOKUP(B12,pricing1!C:F,2,FALSE),"-")

The logic goes some­thing like this: If there is some­thing in Cell B12, then lookup the value in B12 the the area pricing1!C:F and return the second column value. This is the Description. This is very use­ful to make sure the product is actu­ally what you want.

US Retail List Price

=IF(B12<>"",REPLACE(VLOOKUP(B12,pricing1!C:G,4,FALSE),1,1,""),"-")

The logic is: If there is a part num­ber in Cell B12, then lookup the value in B12 the the area pricing1!C:F and return the fourth column value, con­vert it to cur­rency (REPLACE func­tion) instead of text. If noth­ing in Cell B21 then just put a dash. This is the US Retail List price for the item.

Calculating Street Price

To make an estim­ate of what you would actu­ally pay for it:

=IF(B12<>"",D12*E12*DLR_PND_RATE*(1-Rough_Discount),"-")

The logic is: If there is a part num­ber in Cell B12, then lookup the value in B12 then mul­tiply: the num­ber of units you want to buy * the US List price * Currency Conversion * Discount applicable.

Working out your discount

Get any recent quote from your reseller /​ sup­plier and change the dis­count num­ber until it is about the same quote. I would tend to keep on the more expens­ive side to give you a safety margin.

Final Outcome

Recently I was try­ing to under­stand the dif­fer­ence in price between a 50 and 100 device license upgrade for Cisco Security Manager. So I put the part num­bers in and got the following:

Now I rap­idly make a decision whether to even bother get­ting a price for 100 Device License because it’s too expensive.

And the estim­ate on that Cisco3845:

Wrap up

You need to be cau­tious with this tool. Price lists can change sig­ni­fic­antly and the exchange rates can also change. I mostly use this tool to give me a rough idea of vari­ous solu­tions. For example, how much would Cat4500 cost com­pared to Cat6500 ? What about com­par­ing a 5 con­text or a 10 con­text license for a ASA fire­wall in vir­tual mode ?

However, it makes my work much easier and hope­fully it will be use­ful to you. Please feel free to leave com­ments and ask ques­tions. I am hop­ing someone can sug­gest some enhancements!

Footnotes

1. NO, I will not make it avail­able for down­load, it doesn’t belong to me [back]
2. they call it ‘fol­low­ing up’ [back]

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