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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.'"
What the hell does Meraki do? You can safely assume we've heard of Cisco, but not Meraki.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Just had a thought, what if one on the major tech companies (Google, Apple, MS...) bought Hostess?
This is the 5th or 6th story over the last week that I had already read about in the WSJ. Some of them were stories reported the day after they were in the WSJ.
I'm not sure these stories are what I read /. for.
Then I guess Meraki "accidentally" put out a FAQ on the acquisition too. http://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq
Meraki is mesh wifi that grew out of Roofnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet. 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
Since there's been news of predatory and exaggerated pricing by Cisco recently: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=cisco+pricing they'll make great partners. I'm not taking anything at all from either of them.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
... in Bitcoins.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Iirc they make competition to Cisco WLC. Meraki: Configure in cloud, send radio to customer, connects to Internet and grabs config.
Sucks! Cisco destroyed linksys now another mid size company will become one with the borg.
The /. posting notes that Cisco was quick to remove the announcement however Meraki has yet to react. The post is in their "About Us" section, http://www.meraki.com/company/about
"Cisco to acquire Meraki
In November 2012, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Meraki for $1.2 billion in cash. When the acquisition completes, Meraki will form Cisco’s new Cloud Networking group, led by Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas. Cisco and Meraki are committed to supporting Meraki’s customers and partners, and to continue to improve and expand all of Meraki’s product lines."
Could someone from the FCC please step in and stop Cisco's networking monopoly? Networking should be a commodity market but every time a networking vendor gets any traction in the market, Cisco snatches them up, marks up their product, and generally ensures that there is no legitimate competition.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Open-mesh.com provides a similar capability with remote web management for much lower cost.
If you need to do any wireless backhauls you can use Ubiquiti NanoBridges to create linked pockets of mesh routers.
Meraki needed a "liquidity event," Cisco may regret this purchase.
Meraki is all about what I expected Networking to be in the future. Now Cisco buys it.
I fear Cisco saw the increasing amount of customers asking why they don't do like Meraki. Hell, their battle cards even did not list anything negative about Meraki except that Meraki only had about one hundre employees.
Well, now Cisco will probably freeze the features and start moving in their own technology as new features, where you have to buy large complex and expensive licenses for getting it all.
Meraki was really starting to taking off, and Cisco got rid of a future competitor for lousy billion.
Cisco is know to buy companies that do things better than them. They have no R&D, but buy new technology instead. This was thought to me in university.
~ Best man at your service.
Back when Meraki came out they were a great product. Cheap products that did mesh that just worked. I used them for years giving free wifi to a small area that transferred over 1TB to thousands of clients. Then Google bought them - or invested into them, not sure the exacts - and I didn't notice much of a difference at first. I wanted to expand my area and found the cheap products were end of lifed and no more. They had more expensive multiband gear and then enterprise. I could upgrade but it wasn't worth the expense to add two units when I could redo my whole area by going with openmesh. I've been happy with openmesh, another simple mesh wifi that just works. In fact I'm using it right now, my house is 2 hops from the commercial connection at the office, about 1km away.
I never used the enterprise level gear. If it was as easy to use as the cheap gear I can see why it'd have value. I am surprised that it's a billion dollar value. I wonder how much profit Google made through this?
They are an open source leech and closed their forum, lucky the webarchive has it stored:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071208225620/http://forums.meraki.com/viewtopic.php?t=1841&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0