Enhancing its business in what is potentially the
largest networking market outside of the United States, Cisco Systems has signed up
one of China’s leading bandwidth providers, Data Communications Bureau of
China (DCB), as its first Asian customer for its Network Supported Accounts
(NSA) initiative.
According to Cisco reps, NSA is a support program designed to equip enterprise
customers with the skills required to optimize and support their networks
on an ongoing basis.
“Traditional support programs provide maintenance service on an as-needed
basis, with very little true involvement from customers,” said Liu Ming,
global service manager of Cisco Systems China.
“Through Cisco’s NSA program, the DCB will be
able to enhance its technical capabilities and maintain its Internet and
ATM backbones at an optimum level,” added Liu. “This is especially critical
at a time
when China’s Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days.”
“Although many customers prefer to outsource their network support to
vendors completely, we understand that some large enterprises can realize
enormous cost savings by migrating a portion of support services in-house,”
said Jia-bin Duh, president of Cisco Systems China.
“We designed the NSA program to meet the needs of these customers by
operating as partners in a support relationship,” commented Duh.
The integrated team under the initiative includes professional staff from
DCB, Cisco Systems and Legend Advanced Systems Ltd., another Cisco
partner.
The team will perform tasks such as design review, IOS certification,
performance and change management on an ongoing, long-term basis,
“As part of NSA, we also provide integrated tools for inventory
configuration and exception reports,” added Duh. “Our ultimate objective
for DCB is a
high-performance network with lower cost of ownership.”
