Last week I had the opportunity to attend a “Cisco Meraki Masters” session at Meraki HQ in San Francisco .

MerakiMasters

Meraki Masters is a program that sits on top of CMNA to give partners a deeper view of the Meraki product line, vision and roadmap.

Merakify a.k.a. “Don’t spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do.”

Meraki has a strong focus on the “merakification” of the products. Merakification means that all the repetitive tasks a network administrator performs almost on daily basis are now included in the Meraki Dashboard.

Some examples:

  • configuration with standardization through templates
  • backup of configurations
  • device replacement restoring the same configuration
  • software upgrade
  • monitoring
  • troubleshooting
  • you name it

What’s left for a network admin?

The Network Engineer can now focus on design and to search additional business value of information and analytics the network provides.

Will somebody lose his job because of Meraki? Of course yes! If your only value as a professional is typing commands on a CLI that any script or cloud dashboard can do you should definitely be worried! But if you like to focus on the higher end of the job and find how to add value to the business using your skills, a tool like the Meraki dashboard will give you the opportunity to grow as a professional.

Meraki Master benefits

Meraki Masters have access to product updates before the public release and direct contact to Meraki tech support and product managers to provide feedback about customer requests. We can see this like “make a wish on steroids” ;-)

Wrap up

After a great week in San Francisco in a room with other 19 fellow Network Engineers and the awesome people from Meraki I have a better understanding of their vision and their excitement about the technology. I can’t wait to start my next Meraki projects being sure they won’t disappoint me!

So… what are you waiting to merakify your network? ;-)

Can’t share the details but Meraki Labs are awesome!

Disclaimer

Cisco Meraki paid for my flight and hotel to attend the Meraki Masters training but I had no pressure to write a blog post or give positive opinion about their products.