Great news for the Meraki team, who have made a wonderful product. Unfortunately it means I need to find another wifi vendor, as my company chose to resell Meraki specifically to counter Cisco's portfolio.
We're not a Cisco partner, so we became a Meraki reseller in order to be able to provide wireless gear. Now that Cisco has bought them, we'll have to look for another vendor as we're still not going to be a Cisco partner. We're the "not Cisco" guys, Juniper for switching, HP for servers, etc.
That's exactly why Cisco had to buy them. They don't want to lose partner channel sales to companies that won't push Cisco. I expect there are a lot of parties in that boat or at least a very similar one.
Once you've made the step to not buy Cisco for one product the dam is breached and all your purchasing decisions that would otherwise default to Cisco are up for negotiations and alternatives.
This is a strategy that I've been told is effective in getting acquired. If your business is a huge pain in the ass to the incumbent's status quo, then said incumbent will acquire you; they won't shut the product down explicitly, but it'll lead a marginalized existence thereafter.
In essence, everything is supposed to go on as before. What is really going to happen remains to be seen. Money changes everything, and there's a huge difference in company cultures between Cisco and Meraki.
Yes. This refers to the cloud controller, which all Meraki devices connect to, as opposed to the traditional appliance/software that you install and host yourself for your own devices only.
