Cisco Meraki

Cisco Meraki is an IT company headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Offers wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobile device (EMM) management, communication, and video surveillance solutions centrally managed over the Internet.

History

2012

Blocking client devices in Russia and disconnecting them from cloud services

In early November 2022, it became known that Cisco had blocked Meraki equipment in Russia and disconnected them from cloud services.

As Viktor LinkedIn Platov, a systems consultant engineer at Cisco Systems, said on his social media page, the manufacturer took control of his personal Meraki devices, removed them from his account and reconfigured the access points. And all this happened without any notification.

Cisco blocked client devices in Russia and disconnected them from cloud services

The company unilaterally disconnected Russian users from cloud services, blocked access points sold in the country, as well as geolocation calculated by individuals. Moreover, she created an SSID of the "12345-Sanctions" type there (the numbers are different on different devices are generated in the same way). According to Habr, Meraki confirmed that this was done by decision of the company.

Moreover, Cisco not only took control of customers' personal devices, but also removed devices from customer accounts in its services and demanded that they be returned to the manufacturer without prior notice and refund for the purchase.

This is confirmed by Reddit users, however, there are no reports of the situation on the Meraki community website by early November 2022.

After the start of a special military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine in February 2022, Cisco began to stop its activities on the Russian market on March 3, 2022, the American vendor turned off access to its network academy for students and instructors from the Russian Federation, and then suspended all business operations in Russia.

On May 26, 2022, Cisco Webex, a webinar and web conference service, stopped serving customers from the Russian Federation due to sanctions. A month later, the company announced its decision to completely leave Russia and Belarus.^[1]

Cisco completes acquisition of Meraki

In December 2012, Cisco completed its acquisition of Meraki Inc.

Cisco intends to buy Meraki

Cisco announced on November 18, 2012, its intention to buy the cloud developer for remote management of network solutions Meraki Inc. This is stated in the message of Meraki.

Technology for the public

Meraki technology allows you to manage networks, including Wi-Fi through the cloud. This solution attracted Cisco.

In his letter to employees, Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas said that Cisco's offer was a surprise to the company and was not planned to agree to the deal. "We wanted to say politely:" Thank you, but we plan to make our own products and present them to the public. " And when it turned out that it was the ability to distribute our technology through Cisco that attracted the giant, we agreed, "Biswas writes.

The deal will allow the technology to be distributed globally through Cisco product sales channels.

Deal financing

According to Cisco, the deal will amount to $1.2 billion in cash. Documents have already been filed with regulators to approve the purchase. If the antitrust authorities respond positively, the transaction will be closed in the second quarter of 2013.

Staff and structure

It is planned that Meraki employees will be fully transferred to Cisco. All three founders of Meraki will remain with the company as heads of the respective divisions, according to the letter to employees.

The company has its headquarters in San Francisco and divisions in New York, London and Mexico City.

Development plans

Sanjit Biswas (Sanjit Biswas) in his letter said that the growth rate of the company suggests that the achievement of revenue of $1 billion is just around the corner. And that will be a key priority for the near future.

As of November 2012, the company has orders worth more than $100 million. The staff increased almost 3 times from 120 to 330 employees.