Buy nice or buy twice.

You get what you pay for is a common phrase to extol the value of quality. A sister phrase to this could be, “Buy nice or buy twice.”

In the world of hardware, different manufacturers often use common components and produce products that essentially do the same thing. For consumer goods, style and accessibility can be determining factors, but for hardware that spends its entire life quietly humming away in the background of a darkened server farm, style doesn’t really push the needle too far.

The unsung hero.

Cisco’s optical transceivers are usually in the background, quietly humming away, quietly doing their job. Like a decent basketball ref, they aren’t talked about because they do their job well.

So, it’s hard to make the case for why it matters to pay a little more for something you never think much of. You can’t win on price. You can’t win on spec to spec functionality. But what you can win on is reliability and build quality once you’ve made that case that, indeed, the cheap pay twice. Twice the headache, twice the wasted man hours, and twice the repair costs for optical transceivers not built to the same level of quality as Cisco demands from its products.

Making the case for better.

In an effort to help Cisco make this case, we crafted an anthem video and a rich ebook to shed some light on that difference. Targeting CTOs and CIOs that are getting hammered on budgets, we wanted to arm them with what they needed to make the case to spend just that little more for something that is better in the long run—something that reliably facilitates all the great things a business does. The unsung hero of connectivity, the humble transceiver.

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Bonus—getting to play around in Cisco’s brand and color palette to show the light that moves throughout fiber, split into primary colors like the prism on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

Like, heavy man!