Cisco Makes Some Important Announcements, Both Officially and Unofficially
Yesterday, Cisco Systems made a few announcements. Some were public and official, others were somewhat private and pretty quiet. The latter are more interesting, to me at least. Let me explain.
First, the announcements were made of the new Service Provider “Operations” certification track, which has been unofficially abbreviated “SPO”. This brought more than a few chuckles from the Twitterverse, however Marko Milivojevic over at IPExpert wrote a blog post that seemed to embrace the new track. It seems to be more focused on the NOC support side of things, which I suppose I never really looked at as a CCIE level position.
The other huge, public, announcement was that of a new CCNP certification blueprint. Gone are the ISCW and ONT exams, and in comes the new TSHOOT exam (which sounds more like a sneeze than an exam), which is focused on troubleshooting. It seems that with the new CCNA specializations, Cisco is doing away with trying to make a CCNP well-rounded, and instead wants the CCNP to be core routing and switching, just as the CCIE is for the most part. I don’t mind the change, besides the removal of multicast and QoS. I don’t understand why they would not have left these in the new ROUTE exam that has replaced the BSCI.
This brings us to the two less public “announcements”. The first thing of note is that it seems Cisco is now enforcing download restrictions to only allow software to be downloaded that you are entitled to. A colleague of mine received an email stating that he had been caught downloading software he was not entitled to, and then later yesterday a Tweep mentioned that he was getting a warning when trying to download software for one of his devices because he didn’t have a support contract for it (though he went on to say that there should be one – he wasn’t meaning to do anything wrong.)
The final announcement is probably the most compelling one, for me at least. Finally, after years of us Network Engineers fighting with cheaters, a Cisco employee came out and flat out said that “Cisco considers Pass4sure and other braindumps as cheating.” on Facebook. This is of course unofficial, but at least we now have something to point to when the cheaters try to argue with us.
I don’t know why Cisco would never say anything before, but I have a couple theories. First, I think Cisco doesn’t want to acknowledge their materials even get leaked, as this looks bad on them and can possibly lead even more people to seek out brain dumps, and the other theory is that Cisco doesn’t want to name company names, also to not draw attention to the dumps. However, what I feel Cisco needs to do is post an official page, denouncing brain dumps as legitimate study material, and explaining that using such materials is strictly forbidden, and outlining the consequences of doing so.
This brings me to another point. It has for what seems like forever, felt like Cisco was ignoring the cheaters. Sure, they were revising exams, and adding OEQs to the CCIE lab exams, but never really addressing the issue itself. Well, yesterday Anthony Mattke and I were both contacted by somebody in the Cisco camp, explaining that Cisco is in fact doing something about it. This is quite a relief, and welcome news to our ears.
This has been a busy week for Cisco and Cisco certifications, both officially and unofficially, and things are definitely looking positive for the future of Cisco certification. I know I sure feel pretty excited about it all!
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