I'd like to see Cisco focus more efforts on customer self-service interfaces. There are a great many things that I don't need or in many cases want to engage my partner on until I'm ready to place an order.

For example, I am a heavy user of the Dynamic Config Tool. Even when I was a partner's engineer I greatly preferred to use that simple interface over Informix any day of the week. As a direct customer and now a customer through a partner, I still find great use in it. Unfortunately it's slated for termination in the next few months and as best I can tell, there won't be a replacement in functionality for customers. Instead it appears that we're being forced through partners for even the most basic of product building and/or list pricing. In most cases I have no need to call on a partner to help build a router parts list the way I want it. I can build the BoM myself quite easily and significantly faster than calling on my partner and consuming their limited time resources. I could easily find myself building half a dozen BoMs or more to arrive at the appropriate solution as well. All that could be handled in an hour or two with ease. Calling on a partner to provide the BoM may take days or weeks. They're just as busy as we are so I hate to consume their time building BoMs that we aren't serious about buying. I need access to a tool like DCT to build my own hardware configs and get basic list pricing. This is essential to me being able to perform my engineering duties.

Likewise, I need access to CSCC (though I greatly prefer the old SCC). I'm trying to prepare a $200k SmartNet renewal. Unfortunately I can't even access my current contracts via the CSCC tool. The transition to the CSCC tool from SCC was frustrating enough back when it happened several years ago (2009?) and at the time I had a $330k/yr SmartNet renewal. At least I could see all my contracts and what products were on each. Now I don't even have that option.

I hope some of the options become available in the future. I believe Cisco will find their customers to be more efficient and more prosperous (and thus Cisco) if they can become a little more self-sufficient. The Partners are still there to help us vet our orders and help us engineer complex solutions. However many of us need little to no hand-holding on the vast majority of Cisco's common products. Speeding us up and not slowing us down only serves to speed up how fast we can put in orders. :-)

Thanks
Justin