CCIE Trek

A blog of Jeff Rensink's trek to the CCIE summit (again)

Archive for October 23rd, 2008

The battle for CCIE training vendor supremacy

Posted by jrensink78 on October 23, 2008

There seems to be a bit of marketing war going on with the CCIE training vendors lately.  CCBootcamp took a shot at Internetwork Expert in their blog last week.  IP Expert released a study that they commissioned by the Tolly Group comparing IP Expert and Internetwork Expert in terms of value (guess who won?).  Internetwork Expert also calculated some updated numbers to show that they are the industry leader.  Of course, this comes at a time when Cisco throws their hat into the CCIE training ring.  Plenty of shots have been fired at them as well.

Is it me, or does it almost feel like the political races?  Maybe everyone has caught the campaign fever :-) .  Obviously, every company wants to feel that they are the best.  Or at least are the best in some facet of their business.  Outside of Cisco, who has yet to release their training program, all of these companies have had some pretty good success with helping people to earn their CCIE.  So they all must be doing something right in one respect or another.

Personally, I like it when the customers do the talking.  Their reviews are usually a bit less biased that what you’ll get from the vendors.  I think in the end, the “best vendor” is going to be different for different people.  It all depends on individual needs and how each company’s strengths meet those needs.

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Rock the vote!

Posted by jrensink78 on October 23, 2008

No, I’m not talking about the presidential election.  Although, it’s important to vote for that too.  I’m talking about voting for your favorite blogs on IP Expert’s new CCIE>Blog site.  It looks like they changed from a 5-star rating scale to a good/bad voting method.  I think that’s a good change, as most every site that was rated before was 5 stars.  Not much differentiation there.  Now, it makes it easier to see the more popular sites by number of votes instead of just a star rating.  Also, it prevents some brand new blog with a single 5-star vote from shooting to the top of the list.  I have already gone and voted for the sites that I visit on a daily basis.  I think I even got the first ever vote registered.

By the way, thanks to whoever rated my blog 5-stars.  That made my day :-)

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