Merakifying IT
Freeing passionate people to focus on their missions
Back in 1998, I got my first networking job working on Ethernet MACs down at the old Codex office. It was 30 minutes south of my fraternity house in Cambridge, but I liked the drive and found a few shortcuts in the first couple weeks. My best friend and I would usually find some underground sushi place for dinner, and I wouldn’t think twice about pulling into a rest stop, using a pay phone, and calling him to find out where we were meeting. I dialed his phone number from memory.
Today, I work in an office in San Francisco that I love, even more than that old Codex office. Ever since Meraki was acquired, I drive down to Cisco’s famous Tasman Drive campus a few times a month. I don’t know how to get there without Google Maps, I don’t think twice about asking Siri to place a call to my girlfriend on the way home, and I honestly don’t know her cellphone number.
The Internet, along with an explosion of mobile devices, has changed everything around us.
The Ethernet MACs I worked on along with TCP, BGP, DNS, DHCP, SSL, and countless other acronym-ized innovations gave birth to the Internet. I’d say that plaques will be erected to the researchers who led this age of innovation, but those plaques already exist. The Internet, along with an explosion of mobile devices, has changed everything around us. For me though, driving down to Mansfield years ago, I never predicted or guessed it, or even hoped for it. I got into networking because it was cool and challenging. I loved the challenge. It didn’t occur to me it would change the world.
Luckily, I did stay in networking and saw it flourish over the years. Back when we were only trying to connect a few servers and advanced persistent threats were off in the distant future, a router, a switch, and a spool of Cat-4 cable would get the job done for most companies. Just like the pay phones, those days are gone. Today we require ubiquitous wireless, layered security, and QoS, to name a few. IT has become the backbone of most successful organizations and we want it all.
The networking industry I love hasn’t made this easy. As every new requirement was piled on, we added new systems and architectures to provide the most powerful, flexible solutions: tiered switching, network access control, 802.1X, RADIUS, wireless controllers, session border control, etc. It has all become incredibly powerful, but also very, very complex. Most IT organizations today struggle to find the expertise they need just to get by.
Today, network engineers resign themselves to extreme complexity just to set up a small office simply because that’s the way it’s always been. Gateways, controllers, servers, routers, a messy closet full of cables, and thousands of lines of CLI manually entered into archaic software — these are all the norm. More time is spent making the network work than building new technology for the business.
Worse yet, many who don’t have the expertise to set up sophisticated gear are forced to use consumer equipment that isn’t up to the task. This equipment winds up falling over and leaving users unconnected and unproductive. Either way, precious time is taken away from business owners and IT groups.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — these companies have harnessed the power of 20 years of innovation to build cloud technology capable of improving, simplifying, and transforming entire industries. Powerful networking technology made these cloud innovations possible. At Meraki, we leverage cloud technology to improve, simplify, and transform networking itself.
This transformation means keeping the power of the solution and removing the complexity. At Meraki, this is our primary focus. Simplifying IT is our mission because we believe it will allow passionate people to focus on their mission, whether that means teaching school children using new technology, selling the city’s best coffee, or building a business from the ground up.
Simplifying IT is our mission because we believe it will allow passionate people to focus on their mission.
In a ‘Merakified’ world, cloud management replaces controllers and management boxes, a streamlined web interface replaces CLI, cloud native hardware requires no staging or setup, and automatic software management means no more laborious patching and upgrading. The Meraki lineup has grown to include security appliances, switches, access points, phones, security cameras, and mobile device management — all the pieces necessary to deploy and manage IT for most sites. So once someone is comfortable using Dashboard, they can manage the entire thing without learning any new systems.
At Meraki, we’re passionate about handling the messy side of IT— the data centers, the patches, redundant management systems, and automation software. Hopefully, this will mean IT’s passionate people will have time to transform their own industries. I hope that by using Meraki, education IT will spend more time on distance learning, and collaborative tutoring technology. I hope retail IT will hone digital loyalty programs, and providing an exceptional experience to customers. I hope healthcare IT will perfect digitized records and start leveraging the power of big data to improve our wellbeing. I hope in a few years none of us will have to use a hotel keycard, or order at the counter, or go to the DMV, or call for a reservation.
At Meraki we build IT that simply works — all so you can get back to work and do what you’re passionate about.
