Prime LMS 4.2 Vs Prime Infrastructure 2

Question

Hi All,
  I am working on a project and was looking for a better solution for doing the monitoring of their Cisco network. The environment comprises of around 350+ Wired devices and couple of AP and wireless controllers.  They currently use Cisco Wireless CS solution.
While analysing, i saw that cisco is coming up with Infra 2.0 and it is projected as replacement solution for LMS going forward.
Is it better to go with infrastructure 2.0 instead of LMS 4.2 considering that this project may last for another  3+ years ?
I am looking for some expert openion from the experts in this forum..
Skr.

Answer 1

Have a look at the comparison guide posted here.
Right now,  there are still a couple of things you cannot do with PI 2.0 that you can with LMS 4.2. Cisco projects more things will be rolled into PI 2.1, but then that remains to be seen. Early 2014 is the latest projection I've heard for that.
One upside is the license for LMS is still included with new PI purchases based on this feature gap. So you can cover your bets and use PI 2.0 for wireless management (getting all the heritage and capability of WCS / NCS) while using LMS (with the CiscoWorks functionality and large knowledge base and documentation set built-in) for wired management. It's a bit messy to run two systems and they have do be on separate hosts (or VMs) but that gives you the broadest functionality right now.
Going forward, PI is where the Cisco developers will be working - i.e. we won't see an LMS 5.0 (or maybe even 4.3, TBD). All the new features will be developed for PI; so there's that to consider as well.
The problem I see is that even if PI 2.1 closes the feature gap completely, there's still not going to be the knowledge base for a while getting all the tips and tricks figured out. The PI 2.0 documentation, for example, while an improvement over 1.x, still falls way short of that provided for LMS - by an order of magnitude in my estimation.