Usual disclaimers apply.
First, there's no question that Cisco certifications will continue to
have value.
Second, the networking market is not homogeneous. There are factors
where characteristics of the IOS that are quite desirable for
enterprises are specifically undesirable for carrier markets. The
enterprise market tends to want rich feature sets, and the carrier
market wants control and availability. IOS contains a good deal of
functionality and complexity for dealing with legacy protocols.
Several consequences here. Even though Cisco has a substantial number
of release trains, Cisco still does not allow users to create images
that contain only the features they need. This isn't evil; there's
reasoning behind it. One reason is that Cisco could not possibly do
pre-release testing and post-release support on every linkable
combination of features. Another is that while user-specific linking
(ala IBM MVS) reduces resources and complexity in the running code,
it has significantly more setup requirements.
Another consequence is using feature-rich code in a "carrier-grade"
environment. The more complexity, the more things to go wrong.
Small and medium business users typically need different kinds of
operator interfaces than do carriers and very large enterprises.
So one of the reasons that a Juniper is grabbing carrier market share
is that it consciously both made its software more and less complex.
Its command interface is more like C or at least UNIX configuration
language, optimized for programmers rather than Windows-oriented GUI
fans. Such a language lends itself to scripting and customized
configuration generation.
Its real-time software, however, does not support non-IP and indeed
legacy IP features. As a consequence, it's more testable.
In my day job doing product design, I find myself constantly
interpreting between the carrier and enterprise viewpoints.
What does this mean for the value for other vendor certifications?
Something aimed at a niche market may very well not have an
equivalent to the CCNA. Not too long ago, I was part of a team
developing certification for a cancelled carrier router project.
While we identified a three-level certification hierarchy much like
Cisco's, the minimum skill set to be useful in a large ISP market was
much more like a CCN/DP than a CCN/DA.
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