The End of Sale Notice:  What does it really mean?

As a wrap-up to our series on “When should we upgrade?” we will cover the End of Sale Notice.  Cisco’s End of Sale notice has specific dates for milestones in the life of a product. In the next few paragraphs we will provide details on how these milestones impact you.

The first milestone is the End of Sale Announcement.  This is when the process starts for both the partner and the end user.  This is when all of us should be looking at our networks, and any projects that may occur before End of Sale and Last Day of Shipment.    This is simply the day that Cisco identifies its intentions.  Note that you normally have 5 years of support from this date.

End of Sale Date: This is the date that products will no longer be on the price list and available for sale.  One thing that is interesting about this date is that NEW products are no longer available.  However, some longstanding products may still be in the Cisco authorized refurbished product program.  This would be the only way to get these products.

Last Ship Date: This date is often noted as on or before, based on supply of the product.  The real deal here is you can’t count on this date. It will flex. As with several of the dates, this should be considered carefully during a project plan.

End of Routine Failure Analysis, End of Engineering Support, or End of SW Maintenance Releases Date: Normally, this is when we tell customers to decide how critical their software/hardware is.  If this is a business-critical product, plan to replace it by this date.  Would you run a firewall past the day that you can no longer get security issues resolved or have the vendor check for issues? These three categories all have approximately the same meaning.  They do not all appear on the notices simultaneously.

End of New Service Contract Attachment:  This impacts new purchases only.  If you purchase a product right at the end of the sale period, this may impact you. This is another consideration at the beginning of a project.

End of Service Contract Renewals:  Consider this to be the last leg; a replacement plan should be in place by this date. Depending on the time when a contract is renewed, it might not be renewable for a full year; and when less than 6 months is remaining from renewal date to end of support, Cisco may not allow for renewals.  We have seen this happen.

Last Date of Support:  This signifies a TOTAL loss of support. If a device goes down, or there is a software vulnerability, or you just simply need a TAC engineer’s time after this date, it won’t be possible.  Most commonly, only a partner’s experience can help with a problem up to the point where a software bug is determined to be an issue.

All of these dates may seem pretty easy to understand, but one element that complicates matters is the end of support date that impacts multiple elements.  Great care should be taken when looking at any Cisco voice- or server-based application.  These applications can have hardware and software end-of-sale elements that are not co-located. An example of this would be the end of sale for a specific model of server that supports a voice application.  The replacement server may not support the older versions of the software, forcing multiple upgrades.  Lastly, there may be inter-vendor dependencies that force an upgrade due to end of support.  Consider Cisco Unity and Microsoft Exchange:  these interdependencies can be impacted by an end-of-sale announcement from Cisco that would require changes on the Microsoft side, the Cisco application side, and the Cisco hardware side.

During this series of articles, we have covered several major topics regarding Cisco and general product life cycles.  If you have more questions or would like additional information, please contact a TGA account representative.