New Access Point from Cisco to Support Partners

A new wireless access point, the Meraki MR34, was unveiled last week by Cisco; it allows solution providers to distribute and manage end users' wireless infrastructures through the cloud.

Cisco's new access point will be made available later this year, and according to the company, was developed from "the ground up" in order to be managed by the cloud. Partners will therefore be able to install, manage and monitor the access point, as well as customer's broader wireless infrastructures, in a managed services-based model.

The vice president and general manager of Cisco's Cloud Networking Group, Sanjit Biswas, said: "[The MR34] gives partners the opportunity to go from simply selling boxes to having a recurring revenue business." Biswas is also the founder of cloud-managed networking startup Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco last year for $1.2 billion.

Partners are able to manage the Meraki MR34 via the Cisco Meraki Managed Services Dashboard, which is a piece of software providing them with managed services tools like an MSP Portal. Through this, partners will be able to monitor a number of end-user networks from a single base.

Alexander Open Systems is an Overland Park, Kansas-based Cisco Gold partner. The company's president of wireless, Scott Alexander, said: "We can use [the dashboard] whether we are doing an installation for customers or if customers want us to manage and monitor their environments. We can use the dashboard to gain access to the customer's network and we can have alerts triggered and sent to us, or we can use it just as a deployment mechanism."

Logos or brands can also be embedded by solution providers via the Meraki Managed Services Dashboard; this can also be used to receive or send support-ticketing requests to Cisco staff.

Furthermore, the MR34 access point from Meraki is one of the first to assist 802.11ac, which is the next-generation wireless standard. The MR34 will therefore be able to reach data rates of 1.75 Gbps, which is almost twice that provided through the previous generation 802.11n access points. This also means that it can more easily support the high-bandwidth applications and mobile devices which are currently entering enterprise networks.

Biswas stated: "We are seeing a couple of themes that we wanted to align with, the first of which is device growth. Bring your own device [BYOD] is really fueling this, but there are also just more and more devices being sold with wireless [capabilities] in them."

The MR34 is aimed to benefit those in the enterprise and midmarket space, but also has a third radio which provides security, making it ideal for financial services and healthcare industries. The third radio can scan the Radio Frequency (RF) environments and better identify and protect against interference and potential security threats.

As well as supporting the new 802.11ac standard, the MR34 can also support older 802.11n devices. PoE plus and legacy PoE switching architectures can also be supported, so users do not need to upgrade their existing infrastructures to operate MR34.

Alexander added that this is another feature which makes it appeal to both partners and customers of Cisco. He said: "The product gives us the opportunity to work with a lot of customers that have infrastructures in place today that can support it, and not have to be concerned with ripping and replacing current infrastructures. It's something that can work with what they have." (CY) Link