Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed IT company headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. Their products include wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobility management (EMM) and security cameras, all centrally managed from the web. Meraki was acquired by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

in December 2012.

History

Meraki was founded by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, along with Hans Robertson. The company was based in part on the MIT Roofnet project, an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. Meraki was funded by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

. The organization started in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

, in 2006, before relocating to

. Meraki employed people who worked on the MIT Roofnet project. In 2007, Meraki selected San Francisco for their community-based Free the Net campaign. They started putting gateway devices in the Lower Haight neighborhood to provide

Internet access Internet access is a facility or service that provides connectivity for a computer, a computer network, or other network device to the Internet, and for individuals or organizations to access or use applications such as email and the World Wide ...

and giving away

repeater In telecommunications, a repeater is an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it. Repeaters are used to extend transmissions so that the signal can cover longer distances or be received on the other side of an obstruction. Some ...

s. In the first year of the project, the growth of the network was primarily in the

Mission District The Mission District ( Spanish: ''Distrito de la Misión''), commonly known as the Mission ( Spanish: ''La Misión''), is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. One of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the Mission District's name ...

. By October 2007, they estimated 20,000 distinct users connected and about 5 terabytes of data transferred in this network. In July 2008, Meraki said 100,000 people in San Francisco used its "Free the Net" service. Since then, Meraki discontinued this public service, though many access points remain active, but with no connection to the Internet. On November 18, 2012, Cisco Systems announced it would acquire Meraki for an estimated $1.2 billion.

Products

Access Points (MR)

Switches (MS)

Security Appliances (MX)

Customer data loss incident

On August 3, 2017, the engineering team made changes to the North American object storage service; the change caused some deletion of customer data. Cisco stated that the change was due to the application of "an erroneous policy". The data loss mostly affected media files uploaded by customers. Lost data included: * Systems Manager – Custom enterprise apps and contact images. * Meraki Communications – IVR audio files, hold music, contact images and VM greetings. * Wireless Device Dashboard – Custom floor plans, device placement photos, custom logos used for interface branding and reports and custom splash themes. On August 7 Meraki announced that some data on the cache service could be recovered. On August 9 customers were informed that recovery efforts were still underway but that they "do not expect to be able to recover most assets".

References

External links

*{{official website, https://meraki.com/ Wireless network organizations Linux-based devices Cisco acquisitions 2012 mergers and acquisitions Computer companies of the United States Computer hardware companies