Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed IT company headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. Their products include wireless, switching, security,

enterprise mobility management Enterprise mobility management (EMM) is the set of people, processes and technology focused on managing mobile devices, wireless networks, and other mobile computing services in a business context. As more workers have bought smartphone and tabl ...

(EMM) and security cameras, all centrally managed from the web. Meraki was acquired by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

in December 2012.

History

Meraki was founded by

Sanjit Biswas Sanjit Biswas () is an American Internet entrepreneur and computer scientist and co-founder of Samsara, an Internet of Things company headquartered in San Francisco, California that provides hardware and software for physical operations. He also c ...

and John Bicket, along with Hans Robertson. The company was based in part on the MIT

Roofnet Roofnet was an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Research included link-level measurements of 802.11, finding high-thro ...

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 Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

. Meraki was funded by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

. The organization started in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is th ...

, 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 the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

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. Som ...

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 i ...

. 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,

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, http://meraki.com/ Wireless network organizations Linux-based devices Cisco Systems acquisitions