Meraki
More info
- Creator
- Sanjit Biswas, John Bicket, Hans Robertson
- Released
- 2006
- Owner
- Cisco (since 2012)
- Type
- Networking company
Network gear you configure from a web page instead of a terminal — and which stops behaving once the licence lapses.
Meraki grew out of MIT's Roofnet research project, a mesh of Wi-Fi nodes on rooftops around Cambridge. PhD students Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket founded the company in 2006 with Hans Robertson. The idea was cloud management: access points, switches and firewalls phone home to a central dashboard where everything is configured and monitored.
Cisco bought it in 2012 for about $1.2 billion, and Meraki became the corporate escape hatch from CLI culture. The catch is the licensing: without an active subscription, management stops working. The homelab equivalent is UniFi — same idea, no annual fee.