Spotlight on Cisco Meraki

Why is Meraki such a great opportunity for partners?

With Meraki , resellers benefit from  recurring revenue streams and have the opportunity to expand their capabilities into Managed Services. This is without any additional investment. Meraki lowers TCO by HOSTING the management element of all their networking products, WHICH includes security, video and soon telephony. This means all customer equipment no longer requires onprem hosted servers and networks to enable partners to gather and represent their customer’s infrastructure.  It can now be done within a single pane of glass via the Cisco Meraki Cloud! The portal, simply known as MERAKI Dashboard, boasts the capability to manage an unlimited number of customers with an unlimited number of networks. With the IT changes we have been seeing in the last 2 years, the real opportunity lies within recurring revenue through support service and managed service packages all of which Cisco Meraki addresses in full.

Should partners be focussing on a new type of selling? Focussing on Lines of Business and opening new revenue paths in their customer base?

We all know that IT departments are having budgets squeezed as available monies reduce & flow to other parts of the business. Meraki Partners need to open conversations around real world ‘business outcomes’ with the likes of operations, logistics, and finance, marketing & sales. By doing this you become a trusted advisor & create more relevance with your customer

What does selling Meraki allow a partner to achieve with their customers?

Legacy networks require immense pre-planning and major server requirements to run intelligent applications and provide visibility of the network- primarily for Security reasons!. This does however, have a direct impact on CAPEX and OPEX expenditures, which in turn increases a business’s TCO significantly. Customers can take advantage of Meraki hosting all of their network management in the Cisco Meraki Cloud and by using their simple GUI interface they have great Visibility of applications and Control- Not to mentions the industries tightest Security built into every single product. This helps to free up IT Management costs which were originally required to install and troubleshoot these tedious network solutions. So companies can use their IT resources for more proactive work and reduce overall IT costs.

Give me an idea of a couple of features that Meraki customers can enjoy?

GeoFencing, Pushing new apps, monitoring visibility, NW diagnostics, ability to scale

If a partner is interested in moving forwards with Meraki, what should they do?

Engage your Meraki distribution lead @ IM, attend a free M360 training course to learn the benefits and how to install, engage the Meraki team in London and work with distribution on joint lead gen activities