Meraki Go Hardware in Meraki

[Aquatoes]

Meraki Go seems to be  trying to compete with the Ubiquiti/Unifi's of the world. Their price points and equipment is decent and we have many clients asking us if we can manage and support the Meraki Go Line in the small business space. We are an MSP / Service Provider and have over 100 organizations in our Meraki Dashboard and we are losing a lot of small business customers who cannot afford the premium price tag of the Meraki Enterprise line of equipment. It would be awesome to get some Small business priced hardware in the range of what Meraki Go costs but add a license fee to manage it in the Meraki Dashboard.

This would allow us to bring on significantly more clients and manage them under 1 umbrella versus using other vendors like Meraki Go and Unifi to fill that void.

[KarstenI]

Dreaming is allowed ... 😉
But this dream will likely never come true. (Just my guess).

[alemabrahao]

There is a specific community for Maraki GO:

https://community.meraki.com/t5/Meraki-Go-Community/ct-p/go

[Aquatoes]

I know there is 2 separate forums, but I created a post here because I am trying to show that people want to be able to use the Meraki Go Hardware inside the normal Meraki. I know we can't be the only one and hoping that this gets some upvotes here to show them what we need.

[BrandonS]

I don't think they would ever do it because they would be competing with themselves.  They need to protect their profits (and resellers) and keep the consumer/cheap stuff separate.  Many/most network manufacturers do the same/similar.

[PhilipDAth]

I can see where you are coming from @Aquatoes.  You are correctly looking at business cases to maximise your business.  This is how it should be done.

If we flip this around, and look at Cisco Meraki (which you need to do to sell the idea to them), and at business cases to maximise their business - how would you recommend they create an enterprise managed small usiness offering that would not canabalise the low end of their enterprise business?

If Meraki lost 10% of their Enterprise business, and the small business offering gained 10%, Cisco Meraki would be much worse off financially.

If you can pitch such a business case that is compelling for Cisco Meraki (and also for you as an MSP) then I am sure it would gain some attention.

[Aquatoes]

Hey @PhilipDAth so to use a business case from my own examples as reference and other MSPs may have drastically different quantities then us. We install about 8 new sites / clients per month. 75% or 6/8 of those are smaller businesses with a UDM-Pro priced the same as the Meraki GX50 roughly around $370. Let’s just used public CDW pricing as reference an MX67 maybe be around $500 plus a yearly $200 ish license. If they rolled the GX50 at the same existing price point into Meraki Enterprise and then charged say a $100 a year license I would definitely flip over every single client. That would net them an additional couple thousand a month in hardware sales and another $100 per year in residual income on a device they are already selling today for this space. 

today I am not buying any Meraki switches due to pricing and install about 8 switches per month. If they had Meraki go switches in Meraki enterprise at current hardware pricing plus say a $50 year license I would be spending an additional $2k-$3k plus an additional roughly $400 a year in residual license income. 

access points we currently do UniFi which cost about the same as Meraki go access points. If they brought these into Meraki enterprise I would be installing about 10-15 more devices per month. Let’s say a $20 per year license per ap that’s about $2k a month in hardware sales plus about $200 a year in residual licenses. 

if you quantify this by our average per month over a year just us being 1 msp would net them about 75k-100k in hardware sales a year they are not getting today plus about 14.5k a year in residual licensing growth that will just keep growing year over year. 

Now think if they rolled this out and 8000 msps that are probably using Ubiquitous or other similar manufacturers rolled their business over for small businesses as well. 

their opportunity in the SMB space is huge and they are drastically missing the mark and letting companies like Ubiquiti fill that void. 

[PhilipDAth]

A $100/year for a licence is a pretty slim margin ... would Cisco Meraki still be providing technical support out of that $100?  Cisco Meraki would have to pay for all the cloud infrastructure and storage to support those devices on the enterprise platform.

How much enterprise business from the bottom end do you think they would loose by making this offering available?

[Aquatoes]

While yes they are potentially giving up a small amount of revenue as existing partners may gravitate to a slightly less expensive option. But what you miss is that this would open up additional revenue and scalable opportunities to be converted to Meraki who may not fully understand what it is. Additionally it would allow them to gain thousands of partners who don’t need the current higher tiers today that are with Ubiquiti, Engenius, Fortinet due to price. 

I was recently at a conference with over 200 MSPs and 95% of them are using Ubiquiti for majority of their clients solely due to the ability for to get more affordable hardware. Meraki Go is already trying to go after this market and from what I hear on forums and other places it’s falling drastically short simply because the dashboard is not up to par for an MSP to be able to manage multiple organizations as well as Meraki Enterprise.