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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.'"

18 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 fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you've ever decided "Hey, I should manage the infrastructure that lets me access 'the cloud' with 'the cloud', because nothing could possibly go wrong!" then you might have gone shopping with Meraki...

    2. Re:Bad summary by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 2

      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. my college uses them all it seems able to do is block legitimate services that require Internet access, log you out periodically and not let log back in, and slowly throttle your connections bandwidth down to nothing, while not stopping or slowing down torrents which is one of the reasons they started using it. oh and it has stupid site balcklists (well that might be the local admin) blocking things like dropbox,

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    3. 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..."
    4. Re:Bad summary by Ultra64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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.

    5. Re:Bad summary by houstonbofh · · Score: 2

      What the hell does Meraki do? You can safely assume we've heard of Cisco, but not Meraki.

      No, but we can safely assume you have heard of Google. Or that you know how to click on links in the summery...

      OK, perhaps that last bit was too much...

    6. Re:Bad summary by helix2301 · · Score: 2

      Meraki will form Cisco’s new Cloud Networking group, led by Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas. This purchases comes right on the heels of the $125 million purchase last week of Cloupia, which develops software that helps data center operators manage their resources. Meraki today supports 20,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of network devices on its platform. From the way things look Cisco is beefing up there cloud division with great software and great knowable staff as they compete with companies like Oracle and Rackspace.

      --
      http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
    7. 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.

    8. Re:Bad summary by mellon · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Bad summary by Bryansix · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. Accidental Post? by clm1970 · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  3. Re:Hmmm by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 3, Funny

    iHoho's, gTwinkies, Microsoft Ding Dongs#

    --
    ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  4. Meraki: Kings of bait and switch by hughbar · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!
    1. Re:Meraki: Kings of bait and switch by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I really liked the part where they bait-and-switched on their business model and pushed a firmware update to devices already in the field to try to stop anybody who didn't like the new pricing model from reflashing the APs they already owned. That was a nice touch.

    2. Re:Meraki: Kings of bait and switch by UnanimousCoward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As the submitter of the story, let it be known that I put in this /. link as part of the submittal, but it must have "accidentally" lost in the shuffle:

      http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/03/24/1318226/from-happy-hacking-to-screw-you

      --
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  5. Re:Hmmm by Kenja · · Score: 4, Funny

    They would just change the interface to make it harder to eat and then sue all the other high calorie snak makers for patent infringement.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  6. Re:Hmmm by JustOK · · Score: 3, Funny

    Never happen. Wrong color for Apple, and since Twinkies have rounded corners, the others would be afraid of getting sued.

    --
    rewriting history since 2109
  7. 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?