Thanks to a couple of recent conversations, I thought it was time to stir the wireless pot a little. First was my retweet of an excellent DNS workaround post from Justin Cohen (@CanTechIt). One of the responses I got from wireless luminary Andrew von Nagy (@RevolutionWifi):

This echoed some of the comments that I heard from Sam Clements (@Samuel_Clements) and Blake Krone (@BlakeKrone) during this video from Cisco Live Milan in January:

During that video, you can hear Sam and Blake asking for a few features that aren’t really supported on Meraki just yet. And it all comes down to a simple issue.

Should It Just Work?

Meraki has had a very simple guiding philosophy since the very beginning. Things should be easy to configure and work without hassle for their customers. It’s something we see over and over again in technology. From Apple to Microsoft, the focus has shifted away from complexity and toward simplicity. Gone are the field of radio buttons and obscure text fields. In their place we find simple binary choics. “Do You Want To Do This Thing? YES/NO”.

Meraki believes that the more complicated configuration items confuse users and lead to support issues down the road. And in many ways they are absolutely right. If you’ve ever seen someone freeze up in front of a Coke Freestyle machine, you know how easy it is to be overwhelmed by the power of choice.

In a small business or small enterprise environment, you just need things to work. A business without a dedicated IT department doesn’t need to spend hours figuring out how to disable 802.11b data rates to increase performance. That SMB/SME market has historically been the one that Meraki sells into better than anyone else. The times are changing though.

Exceptions Are Rules?

Meraki’s acquistion by Cisco has raised their profile and provided a huge new sales force to bring their hardware and software to the masses. The software in particular is a tipping point for a lot of medium and large enterprises. Meraki makes it easy to configure and manage large access point deployments. And nine times out of ten their user interface provides everything a person could need for configuration.

Notice that was “nine times out of ten”. In an SME, that one time out of ten that something more was needed could happen once or twice in the lifetime of a deployment. In a large enterprise, that one time out of ten could happen once a month or even once a week. With a huge number of clients accessing the system for long periods of time, the statistical probability that an advanced feature will need to be configured does approach certainty quickly.

Meraki doesn’t have a way to handle these exceptions currently. They have an excellent feature request system in their “Make A Wish” feedback system, but the tipping point required for a feature to be implemented in a new release doesn’t have a way to be weighted for impact. If two hundred people ask for a feature and the average number of access points in their networks is less than five, it reflects differently than if ten people ask for a feature with an average of one thousand access points per network. It is important to realize that enterprises can scale up rapidly and they should carry a heavier weight when feature requests come in.

That’s not to say that Meraki should go the same route as Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). Several years ago, I wrote about CSCsb42763 which is a bug ID that enables a feature by typing that code into an obscure text field. It does enable the feature, but you have no idea what or how or why. In fact, if it weren’t for Google or a random call to TAC, you’d never even know about the feature. This is most definitely not the way to enable advanced features.

Making It Work For Me

Okay, the criticism part is over. Now for the constructive part. Because complaining without offering a solution is just whining.

Meraki can fix their issues with large enterprises by offering a “super config mode” to users that have been trained. It’s actually not that far away from how they validate licenses today. If you are listed as an admin on the system and you have a Meraki Master ID under your profile then you get access to the extra config mode. This would benefit both enterprise admins as well as partners that have admin accounts on customer systems.

This would also be a boon for the Meraki training program. Sure, having another piece of paper is nice. But what if all that hard work actually paid off with better configuration access to the system? Less need to call support instead of just getting slightly better access to engineers? If you can give people what they need to fix my problem without calling for support they will line up outside your door to get it.

If Meraki isn’t willing to take that giant leap just yet, another solution would be to weight the “Make A Wish” suggestions based on the number of APs covered by the user. They might even do this now. But it would be nice to know as a large enterprise end user that my feature requests are being taken under more critical advisement than a few people with less than a dozen APs. Scale matters.

Tom’s Take

Yes, the headline is a bit of clickbait. I don’t think it would have had quite the same impact if I’d titled it “How Meraki Can Fix Their Enterprise Problems”. You, the gentle reader, would have looked at the article either way. But the people that need to see this wouldn’t have cared unless it looked like the sky was falling. So I beg your forgiveness for an indulgence to get things fixed for everyone.

I use Meraki gear at home. It works. I haven’t even configured even 10% of what it’s capable of doing. But there are times when I go looking for a feature that I’ve seen on other enterprise wireless systems that’s just not there. And I know that it’s not there on purpose. Meraki does a very good job reaching the customer base that they have targeted for years. But as Cisco starts pushing their solutions further up the stack and selling Meraki into bigger and more complex environments, Meraki needs to understand how important it is to give those large enterprise users more control over their systems. Or “It Just Works” will quickly become “It Doesn’t Work For Me”.