Cisco To Buy Meraki For $1.2 Billion

UnanimousCoward writes "Several outlets are reporting Cisco's intent to acquire Meraki for $1.2 billion. From the article: 'Cisco Systems of San Jose, California, says it is buying Meraki Networks of San Francisco for around $1.2 billion in cash. The news of the deal leaked on Twitter, when Cisco accidentally posted the news on its blog and swiftly removed it, but it was too late. Cisco is hoping to focus on smaller and medium-sized campuses with Meraki and its products.'"

Accidental Post?

[clm1970]

Then I guess Meraki "accidentally" put out a FAQ on the acquisition too. http://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq [meraki.com]

Meraki: Kings of bait and switch

[hughbar]

Meraki is mesh wifi that grew out of Roofnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet [wikipedia.org]. They sold 'open source' oriented mesh hardware for a while and then closed the infrastructure and raised prices. Declaration of interest, I got caught and remain mad with them, they're a good example of [what I call] 'open season', jackals who scavange on open-source. Here's some of the detail: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Meraki-Annoys-Partners-Customers-88249 [dslreports.com]

Since there's been news of predatory and exaggerated pricing by Cisco recently: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=cisco+pricing [slashdot.org] they'll make great partners. I'm not taking anything at all from either of them.

Re:Bad summary

[Ultra64]

"they are a crappy Internet proxy service for "open wifi" where none of your traffic is encrypted but still requires a user-name and password."

This is inaccurate. It all depends on how you configure your network. You can have encryption, RADIUS authentication, MAC whitelist/blacklist whatever.

" oh and it has stupid site balcklists (well that might be the local admin) "

No "might be" about it. Nothing is blocked by default.

"while not stopping or slowing down torrents which is one of the reasons they started using it"

Then they have a configuration problem. We have no problem doing this for one of our networks.

They *are* crappy, but only because their hardware is absurdly expensive for the speeds it provides. Ubiquiti's Unifi is much better performance/price. Their controller software isn't as advanced though.

Re:Bad summary

[mellon]

They do mesh networking, and remote management. So you buy a bunch of their boxes, hang them all over the place, hardwire them to your network where you can, rely on the mesh where you can't hardwire them. They form a mesh, which you manage from a web site Meraki runs. It's not a bad system for running a wifi infrastructure, if you don't mind the monthly fees and the somewhat underpowered routers.

Re:Bad summary

[Bryansix]

Let me reply since I actually support a Meraki network. The client already has it before we took them over. So basically on the service its just another networking gear vendor. However when you get into actually supporting it, its pretty nice. Instead of needing access to the internal network to manage things, we login to a central dashboard which is hosted by Meraki themselves. Because the device configuration is replicated on their servers then the support experience is different and improved because by simply knowing your account and the proper authorization, they can see your entire configuration. Furthermore the devices all talk to each other and of course to the dashboard. Now Cisco has this with its wireless controller hardware but its nowhere as easy to manage. Meraki has downsides too. One feature is an agent which tracks all the network devices both on and off the network. The agents exist for Windows, Mac IOS and Android. While the feature is cool, its now adding another thing which needs to be managed. They've had bugs too which were not very friendly to figure out like one that just randomly rebooted the firewall every so often. Overall though the experience has been good. If Cisco can integrate the best features of Meraki into its products then maybe the barrier to managing Cisco devices will finally go away.