In an earlier blog, I echoed Gartner's recommendation: Beware the Single Vendor as Trusted Advisor, referencing their Vendor Influence Curve.

I'm here at Interop and customers are getting the facts (verified by independent third parties) on Green networking (50% less energy consumption), on performance (20x better), on reliability (7x the resilience) and on TCO (50% reduction) of our networking solutions.

One customer (an educational institution) apparently is stopping an order for $2M of Cisco gear when they heard this story!

The bottom-line is that enterprises need to do due diligence and look at alternatives to Cisco in the data space. That's exactly what this institution is doing.