The "As-Built" Document that No One Reads
I remember sitting in a data center in Chicago at 3 AM once, shivering in the cold aisle, looking at a 200-page "As-Built" document provided by a Tier-1 Global System Integrator. The customer had paid nearly half a million dollars for what they were told was a "Turnkey" Cisco ISE deployment.
The document was beautiful. It had spiral-bound logic, glossy covers, and high-resolution topology diagrams.
But as I tried to figure out why their Guest portal had crashed during a high-profile executive conference, I realized the document didn't explain how the logic worked. It just listed the IP addresses of the PANS and PSNs. When the integrator left the building three months prior, they took the "Why" with them. The customer's engineering team was standing there, looking at me with exhaustion in their eyes, because they didn't know how to troubleshoot the very system they had spent their entire quarterly budget on.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with traditional professional services. It's a "Black Box" model designed to keep you calling the integrator every time you need to move a VLAN.
The Billable Hour Trap: Why SIs Want You to Fail
Most Global SIs are measured on utilization and billable hours. Their engineers are brilliant, but their incentives are misaligned with yours. They want to get on-site, heads down, finish the task as fast as possible, and move to the next project.
Knowledge transfer? It's usually a "Phase 4" afterthought. It’s a three-hour meeting on a Friday afternoon when everyone just wants to go home and the integrator's project manager is checking their watch.
The result is what I call "The Shelfware Cycle":
- Deployment: High-end tech is installed.
- Handover: A document is handed over that no one understands.
- Static State: The team is afraid to touch the config for fear of breaking it.
- Obsolescence: Within 12 months, the platform is out of sync with business needs and effectively becomes shelfware.
Why MINT feels different (because it actually is)
I didn't want Technoxi to be just another SI. I’ve seen enough "perfectly configured" networks fail because the people running them were never empowered to own them.
We became a Cisco MINT (Mentored Install Network Training) partner because the model actually aligns with how humans learn. We don't hide behind a closed door or a "Private" Jira board. We sit in your cubicles, we join your Slack channels, and we share our screens during every single CLI session.
1. Shared Pain, Shared Gain
We don't just "Configure." We mentor. During a MINT engagement, we aren’t just looking at the ISE dashboard; we’re looking at your team's workflow. If we’re building a complex EAP-TLS policy, your engineers are the ones typing the commands while we guide them.
We explain the "Dark Arts" of certificates—the stuff that typically breaks in TAC at 2 AM. We show them how to interpret a Radius debug log, which looks like gibberish to most people but is a roadmap to a fix for an Ex-TAC engineer.
2. No Proprietary "Locks"
Some of our competitors will try to sell you a "Managed Portal" or a "Proprietary Management Dashboard" to simplify the task. To me, that's just a digital leash. If you need their portal to manage your Cisco network, they own you.
At Technoxi, our "Portal" is your team's brain. We use open industry standards—Python, Ansible, and GitOps—and we teach your team how to write the code. We want you to be self-sufficient. If you don't need to call us in six months because your team just handled a major policy shift via a Git PR, then we’ve succeeded.
The ROI of "Doing it Wrong" vs "MINT"
Let’s talk numbers, because I know your CFO is asking.
A traditional PS project might cost $100k. But if your team can’t manage it, you’ll spend another $50k in Year 1 on "Day 2" support and change requests.
A MINT project might cost the same (or less, since it's SKU-based), but it eliminates that $50k bill because your team is the support. More importantly, it reduces the risk of a "Confidence Crisis"—where your security team reverts to Permit Any because they’re overwhelmed.
The Verdict: Projects vs. Capability
If you just want a box checked and a glossy binder to put on your shelf, hire a traditional SI. There are thousands of them.
But if you want an elite, battle-hardened engineering team that can actually defend your network when a zero-day hits at midnight, choose a MINT engagement. We don't just hand over a project; we hand over a capability.
Real-World Deep Dives:
- The Midnight Pager: Lessons from TAC - Why "Perfect" is the enemy of "Secure."
- Beyond the GUI - Moving from "Clicking" to "Coding" your Zero Trust future.
- The MINT ROI Calculator - See how much you save on Day 2 operations.
Talk to an Ex-TAC MINT Principal today and let’s kill the "As-Built" binder cycle for good. We’ll show you how to actually own your network.