I recently asked who was doing CCIP and got a raft of responses - "Its just like the CCNP", "Just got get your CCIE", "It doesn't make sense".
Rather than continuing that thread I thought I'd highlight the differences and mention why the CCIP is more interesting than CCIE in many cases. The CCNP covers routing, switching, remote access, and troubleshooting. When completed, the cert holder is capable of entering IOS commands without having too many of them spelled out, and can identify the correct books to read to fill in his/her knowledge gaps. No disrespect intended - I've got it, its done wonders for my career, but the biggest effect I've seen is that it has let me accurately articulate just how much further I have to go. The CCIE is full of useless crap from the perspective of a service provider. DLSw+? I mean, do I care about this? And IPX? And Appletalk? If you're in a provider environment I *suppose* you could argue it might be of some use, but I bet I can make just as good an argument for getting your real estate license as a career booster. Now look at the CCIP. Nothing *but* routing as a fundamental requirement. If you read the other stuff you can see Cisco things this is for the big boys only - you'll be working 12xxx boxes and you don't care much about ISDN dial support. Where are you going to get good MPLS information? Cisco Press has a book out, but CCIE != person who read and fully understood that book. I need to configure it, not just be able to define the acronym. And then there is multicast. Conceptually simple, fundamentally evil, and known to attract wing nuts with business plans based on it. I've got two wing nuts with their checkbooks cocked and locked right now - if they can't run a single 384k stream from their site and have it fan out to N+1 paying remotes I get to keep eating Ramen, instead of moving up to TV dinners. There are a lot of other very heavy things in the various CCIP tracks, I'm just touching on the ones that can be done with gear I can afford and appeal to my existing customer base. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=45893&t=45893 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
