A New Data Frontier
Harnessing Cisco Meraki’s unique datasets to drive unparalleled customer value
My favorite book when I was a child was Harold and the Purple Crayon. For the uninitiated, the book traces the adventures of a four-year-old boy who uses his purple crayon and vibrant imagination to draw out his own world, replete with oceans, woods, and dragons. It’s possible I liked the book because my favorite color was purple, but looking back, a far greater reason was the appeal of imagining and creating the future — being at the forefront of what is possible.
Each of my work experiences has in common this theme of pushing the frontier, and Cisco Meraki is no exception. Since its inception, Meraki’s cloud-managed, intuitive networking products have revolutionized the industry. In 2006, when most networking vendors were in a race to build advanced features, Meraki’s founders were developing technology to fundamentally change the way customers manage their networks, using intuitive graphical user interfaces instead of command line interfaces and scalable cloud-based software instead of physical controllers.
Since then, our products and mission of simplifying powerful technology have allowed our customers to focus more on their vision and mission than on managing their workplace networks, providing tremendous value to organizations and people around the world. Meraki’s scalable networking products and security cameras provide reliable wireless coverage, secure network access, and physical safety to the students and staff of Reading School District, an urban school district in Pennsylvania with five miles of hallways and 18,000 students. Our products allow the HALO Trust, a British charity that focuses on clearing the way for safe community development through the removal of landmines and other explosive remnants of conflict, to manage a distributed operation of 8,000 people across 19 countries with a central IT staff of just three people.
The Vision
The combination of our value proposition, cloud-managed architecture, and significant first-mover advantage places Meraki in a unique position to drive the next horizon of our industry. Because our value proposition has resonated with customers, we have grown to over 425,000 customers worldwide and 6 million devices deployed. Moreover, unlike most vendors, who ship a device and lose any connection to it, our cloud-managed architecture gives us access to detailed information on device performance, security, and configuration, in addition to the customer support experience. These factors, combined with over 10 years of operating a cloud infrastructure, give us an unparalleled breadth and richness of data whose network effects we can harness to further enhance our mission of simplifying powerful technology with intelligence.
From the time a customer orders, sets up, and uses our products, we have the potential to measure and optimize the end-to-end experience from sales to support, powered by network effects across our vast customer base. As an example, with the network security data our security appliances collect, we can identify wider-scale issues or attacks that could be spreading through networks geographically or by industry.
The Possibilities
We stand at a pivotal point in our story. Meraki has built an unprecedented foundation for harnessing the power of big data to drive impact. In line with our mission of helping IT teams deliver greater value to their organizations, our north star is leveraging the data we have to create new possibilities for our partners and customers.
We can enable customers and developers to build custom solutions for everything from onboarding new users to network management using our APIs. We can use the detailed, unstructured text notes our support team takes for every case to identify common issues across our customer base in order to provide customers with simpler, more easily accessible instructions. We can help customers determine what kinds of uplinks to deploy to new branch locations based on data from Meraki Insight, our network intelligence solution. The possibilities for impact are enormous, and we’ve only just started executing on these opportunities.
Where We Go From Here
The opportunity to build and help execute against a vision that can revolutionize our industry gives me tremendous excitement. It is important to me that we create an amazing environment for analysts and data scientists, and that we arm them with quality data, tools, enablement, and impactful projects to help them reach new heights in their careers. I want to give new members of Meraki’s DataLab the freedom to experiment, the freedom to innovate, and the freedom to fail. What we are doing in the data science realm requires bravery, resourcefulness, and beyond all else an understanding of how important it is that information flows smoothly and safely across the world.
Just as we did in 2006, we are poised to change the industry once again. Do you love diving into the numbers, have an intuitive facility for structuring problems, and possess data science or machine learning skill sets? If so, come break out your purple crayons and help us draw a new frontier for our industry, our customers, and their missions.
