wtaw story

Don't know details, but my sense/hope is that we could have done worse.

Per the emails floating around the University:


The Eagle missed a very important conjunction.

The System's announcement says "Chancellor John Sharp today announced a five-year agreement with Cisco to provide IT with support services solutions for The Texas A&M University System that will result in more than $3.7 million in savings over the length of the contract."


The Eagle wrote "Texas A&M University Chancellor John Sharp announced Friday that Cisco, a California-based networking equipment company, will provide IT and support services for the system over the next five years."

That conjunction was a bit important. Misreading it cause the Eagle reporter Sam Peshek to write the headline "Texas A&M System outsources IT, support services to Cisco" which was not what the Chancellor said.

Yes when I first read the Eagles report around 1:30 today- Sam had reported that IT had been outsourced. He has since corrected it

Sounds like a consolidated Smart-net contract for updates, tech support and patches. These have simply been managed by each group are is now one big contract. Saving $ for sure by economies of scale.

They screwed up the reporting. TAMU IT contacted them to straighten out the details.

Basically, Cisco has a partner through which they provide network-related IT solutions. They only people this *may* affect is NIS.