Justifying Meraki

[PJ51182]

Hi,

Wasn't really sure where to post this...

The organisation I'm employed by, is currently looking to move away from Meraki for in house and customer installations.

The seemingly constant increases in hardware and licensing has prompted the review.  

Various alternatives are being reviewed. Ubiquiti, Aruba etc.

Has anyone had a similar situation? I would be interested to know, if Meraki was continued to be the solution of choice, how that was justified.

[cmr]

I moved to Meraki from Ubiquiti when they started sending all the telemetry back to China even when you selected the option not to do so.  This was fixed (apparently) in a later version, but that was the end of my engagement with them.  I have looked again more recently for the same reason you pose, but their updating still seems quite hit and miss according to their forums, so I'll stay away from them for now.

My experience of Aruba is limited to their switches and they are perfectly fine, though the GUI could do with some flow improvements and their cloud management doesn't behave as it should.

[PhilipDAth]

>The seemingly constant increases in hardware and licensing has prompted the review.  

They call that inflation.  🙂

[PJ51182]

Yes that's obviously a contributing factor, along with many others. However, the fact remains you can seemingly achieve a very similar outcome for a lot less.

I think part of this is down to Cisco's competition improving their cloud solutions. Another is Cisco moving significantly to being reliant on income from subscriptions in one form or another. 

What I'm getting at is, it is becoming almost impossible to justify the difference in price between Meraki and their competitors.

When faced with a significant licence renewal, it's quite rightly being questioned.

[TBHPTL]

What cloud solutions? Ubiquity? pfft. Aruba cloud is a Frankenstein bolt on joke currently, maybe with Mist one day in about 5 years but that hasn't played out yet, Ruckus an even larger joke with one failed cloud offering after another. If all you care about is price point just go buy a bunch of open source APs and roll your own. You will wait a million years for product, but its cheaper, UNITL IT ISN'T. But if you care about full stack with end to end management, security, real live support and RMA on hardware in a timely manner with lots of hardware options and a true cloud first offering stick with Cisco Meraki. Everything else is a much, much paler shade of green, almost grey. 

Buy your licenses in multi year bundles and then do the cost apples to apples broken down by year, month, week, per day etc . Dont forget to include all things the others leave out on purpose. real PoE, 24x7x365 live support, RMA times, etc, etc, etc. You will see its not as much as you think or the bean counter thinks it is.  More importantly the bean counter isn't the one who has to support this day in and out its you and your team who are likely already understaffed and under funded. What is your time worth?

[cmr]

I think we all know that the Meraki platform is generally a very good solution.  However when people are making videos saying that kitting out a home with five APs for $750 is quite expensive, Meraki suddenly looks way out.

I thought Meraki Go was meant to be the home / very small business option, but that's on the way out now so it does leave the lower end somewhat unserved, which is a shame...

[Brash]

Speaking from my experience (albeit a little biased):

In terms of the other options you discussed, most vendors are moving to the same model.
You can generally still buy locally managed switches and routers without subscription licensing, however there is typically no cloud telemetry, no cloud monitoring/management capabilities. Vendors will then typically tack on a subscription license for centralized management and control, access to firmware for upgrades, advanced telemetry etc.

Meraki based its business model on cloud management, cloud monitoring, single dashboard, ease of use etc. The devices were never designed to be locally managed and therefore subscription licensing is all that's available. The best thing about this is that because this is the only way to use the devices, Meraki is committed to adding features and building out the dashboard in better and better ways.

I personally wouldn't place Ubiquiti/Unifi in the same basket. I managed a Unifi network before moving to Meraki and despite it being 'enough' for basic connectivity, we had all sorts of issues across different firmware versions and controller versions. There were so many undocumented bugs which you would often find from searching forums/reddit rather than any assistance from support. I still believe they are fantastic for home/small office but awful if you're managing more than 5 or so devices (or more than 1 location).

TLDR: Yes, the prices can be expensive but if it's the best fit for your business, I would still front the cost. If it's not, check out the cheaper options (and ensure to fully understand what they do and don't offer).

I've gotten too many grey hairs from people making poor business decisions based solely around cost and not what meets the business need.