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Cisco To Buy Meraki For $1.2 Billion

Posted by samzenpus on from the circle-of-business dept.

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.'"

4 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Bad summary by Nimey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Bad summary by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They are a better Aruba Networks.

      Now, just another car hitched-up to the Cisco fail-train. The LAST thing Cisco needs to do? Acquire more hardware.

      Software-defined networking is where Cisco will be commoditized into irrelevance. Sticking a management interface and IPAM "in the cloud" is not SDN.

      But Cisco cannot realize revenue, in the way they have scaled their operations, on software. They cannot transform their business, and they will slowly die.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Bad summary by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have heard of Google. Is Meraki a Google subsidiary? Shouldnt the summary include this information.

      Seriously, the summary is supposed to summarize the story. Give you a gist of what is happening. What Meraki does is important part of it. Expecting people to Google every word in the summary or to RTFA, is unreasonable.

  2. Used to use Meraki, switched to openmesh by witherstaff · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?