Cisco Meraki Adds Cloud-Managed Phone

Cisco today expanded its Meraki product line into cloud-managed communications with a desktop phone. It also extended its Meraki wireless networking and Ethernet switch lines with two new 802.11ac Wave 2 access points and a multi-gigabit access switch.

Meraki has been a bright spot for Cisco as it shifts from its traditional focus on hardware to cloud services and software. Cisco bought the cloud-managed WiFi company in 2012. Since then, the number of customers has grown eight-fold to 120,000, Pablo Estrada, director of marketing for Cisco's cloud networking group, said in an interview. Cisco has expanded Meraki's cloud-management model to include Ethernet switches and security appliances.

The new phone, the Meraki MC74, is managed through the Meraki dashboard and features a big-touch screen display. It's designed for mid-market customers and distributed enterprises. The hardware sells for $599 and the Meraki cloud license costs $150 per year. Cisco is partnering with SIP provider IntelePeer to offer the telephony service at launch, and plans to add more SIP partners over time.

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Estrada said he doesn't see much overlap between the Meraki MC74 and Cisco's other unified communications products. "This will be a natural add-on for Meraki's customers," he said. Meraki's extension into communications fortifies its evolution beyond networking into cloud-managed IT, he said.

Lee Badman, a wireless networking profession and Network Computing contributor, told me in an email that he's interested learning more about the Meraki phone.

"As a user of Meraki in my branch settings, the phone is interesting as it may allow for a more complete solution. The voice component in remote locations can be challenging, and often ends up being a per-location legacy paradigm that can be tough to support," he wrote. "Depending on how Cisco-Meraki implements and integrates the phone, it could be very empowering. The devil is always in the details, though, and I’m looking forward to getting a first-hand operational look at the phones."

Along with the phone, Cisco introduced two new wireless access points. Both the MR52 and MR53 are 802.11ac Wave 2 APs. The main attraction of Wave 2 of the 11ac wireless protocol is multi-user MIMO (multiple input and multiple output), which promises to increase WLAN user density by supporting more clients simultaneously.

Cisco also launched a new stackable multi-gigabit access switch and a 10 GbE aggregation switch. The 24-port access switch is designed to work with the MR53 AP, which features multi-gigabit uplink options.

In a blog post, Todd Nightingale, a Meraki engineer, wrote that because the new APs provide higher capacity and connect more devices than ever before, they can't reach their full potential on a single gigabit link, hence the debut of the new multi-gigabit switch. The argument that Wave 2 requires multi-gigabit uplinks, however, is a point of debate in the WLAN community.