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Riding the Refresh Cycle

Matt Miktus

With almost two decades in various IT realms, an ever-changing landscape of technological innovation, I’ve witnessed a constant tenant – aging hardware needs replacing… perpetually. Regardless of whether or not a company’s core infrastructure is on-premise or cloud hosted, most employees remain terrestrial, as do their hardware companions. At the forefront of the hardware refresh are the workstation (both mobile and static) which seem to rotate out on a two to four-year cycle. Personal communication devices like iPhones, Android, the random Blackberry (people still use these?), seem to be on closer to a two-year cycle unless the bowl of rice couldn’t save it from that mishap at the fountain last Saturday.

Network infrastructure appears to adhere to the confines of ROI models, with some equipment surviving in broom closets until they grow fuzzy beards and grind wearily to a halt as fan bearings wear out; this usually falls into the 3-to-5-year range. Servers are upgraded in similar fashion to their fuzzy, closet bound counterparts. Storage grows, endlessly, to the jubilant glee of the storage vendors.

The hold out, in my experience, are phone systems and the requisite desk phones.

The lonely phone; standing proudly in the cubicle or hung sloppily off the wall in a stock room. Generally overlooked if it provides the familiar buzz of dial-tone when needed, maintains the call throughout the duration, and completes with a simple click. Traditional digital phones connected to legacy PBX systems live on long beyond the cool silver-gray plastic has faded to antique-yellow-beige. Replace a line cord, or handset if it’s dropped, and soldier on. IP Phones and telephony endpoints are rarely replaced in the same cycle as other productivity or infrastructure hardware regardless of the fact they are small electronic devices sitting on the LAN, running embedded OS, web servers and encryption algorithms. They often bridge VLAN’s, live in unsecure environments like home offices or maintenance departments. Yet, when the time comes to budget for hardware, the thought of refreshing these devices is, well, generally not a thought at all. The notion is “the phone works, why replace it?”

If you purchased 1,000 Cisco CP-7941 phones in 2007 when they were first released, Cisco continued to support these in, and through, Communications Manager 12.5. Other, older models continue to work, even though there has not been a firmware update in some time. This practice, however, will end with the release of Cisco Communications Manager 14 – slated for 2020ish. At that time many IP Phones models will be deprecated and will stop functioning regardless of their operational state. This practice is not uniquely Cisco. Avaya, with their Communications Manager product, also maintains a version compatibility matrix, and will force a customer to replace endpoints of a certain vintage for a variety of reasons.

As word spread on open forums in the Cisco Support Community, anger and frustration permeated the conversation. Playing devil’s advocate here, Cisco has maintained support for devices that are nearly 15yrs old, which far exceeds the EOS/EOL lifecycle for many of other network products. Their rationale appears multi-faceted but related to three main points.

  1. The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) handling support cases directly related to aging endpoints
  2. Increasingly larger firmware to handle complex security requirements and enhanced feature sets
  3. Assumed / implied – the move away from Cisco’s proprietary SCCP as a protocol

Representatives from the IT departments in large enterprises with a global presence, to the SLED (state, local, education) space, rattled sabers over the idea they need to “suddenly” replace thousands of devices in short order (many 7900 series devices have been EOL and EOS since 2017 and earlier). Considering the Cisco Communications Manager lifecycle, 10.5, 11.5 and 12.x are the actively supported revisions, with an ‘n-2’ support matrix; Essentially, the latest and two revisions back are supported fully. Using this model, 12.x will be well supported into 2025, giving IT Directors approximately six to seven years to recycle and replace legacy endpoints.

For some, this seemed reasonable – others, not so much.

Current owners may continue to run Communications Manager 12.x for many years. Some may elect to stay on 11.x for an equally long time if no new feature or enhancement grabs the attention of the C-Level forcing their hands. There is nothing forcing one to upgrade even after the SmartNET contract ends, other than the hardware on which it resides staying in good, operational status. Many feel Cisco is painting them into a corner, forcing them to consider costly replacements, deploying Jabber as an alternative, or moving away from Cisco all together.

It would seem almost absurd to expect the iPhone 4 (released 2010) to work flawlessly in 2018. Even more so to expect less than a chuckle if you walked up to the Genius bar with it and said, “this thing is slow for some reason.” Yet the same expectation is levied upon the lowly desk phone. From the cheap seats here, I feel the issue requires a paradigm shift when accounting for the phone system.

No longer is it just tip-and-ring, bridge clips, 66/110 blocks and endless bundles of 25pair cable. The phone system has been replaced with a complex collaboration system bridging multiple media sets into a seamless integration. The phone is merely one extension of this amalgamated suite, but no less important than the graphic designers uber-expensive Mac. Moreover, it is certainly as important as the workstation and the mobile phone in terms of inter/intra office communication.

Communication is paramount for enterprises to flourish and ideas to grow. The system one chooses to leverage for this process requires the same attention as every other aspect of an enterprise network.

Matt Miktus

Matt Miktus, Shared Services Engineer / Cisco Collaboration SME, CDI

Matt Miktus, Shared Services Engineer / Cisco Collaboration SME, CDI, has almost two decades of networking design, installation, troubleshooting and management experience. In his current role, Matt is responsible for managing all existing unified communications (UC) opportunities and engaging Cisco sales and technical contacts as required for UC knowledge and business development. He also works with customers, product management, partner sales and technical teams to prospect and develop UC sales, design, installation and business plans. Matt is a graduate of Roanoke College and in his spare time enjoys spending time with his family, skiing, traveling and riding his motorcycle.