Meraki Renewal

[MartinDT]

Hi,

 

We currently have around 300 Meraki AP's / Almost 500 SM devices.

 

But we're struggling to find any companies willing to give us a renewal price.

I've been given some estimated pricing over the phone, which was astronomical!

 

Can anyone recommend a company who deals with Meraki to assist?

 

Also, has anyone else decided not to renew to the cost?

 

 

Thanks,

[paulkerton]

How long have you had it?

Would the cost of replacing it all be more than the renewal? You can get some amazing pricing on stuff from companies like Cambium and Ubiquiti.

[MartinDT]

Were coming to the end of our initial 5 year license.

On the phone I've been told £30k for another year!!

 

I've been looking at Cambium / Ruckus / AeroHive, as it may be cheaper to replace it. Need to read up on the AP's and work out costings.

We have never had an issue with Meraki, so I would like to keep it, but due to the cost this might not happen.

[paulkerton]

Were coming to the end of our initial 5 year license.

On the phone I've been told £30k for another year!!

 

I've been looking at Cambium / Ruckus / AeroHive, as it may be cheaper to replace it. Need to read up on the AP's and work out costings.

We have never had an issue with Meraki, so I would like to keep it, but due to the cost this might not happen.

HOW MUCH!? That's obscene. I hope your second word was "off!"

 

It won't be cheaper to replace it for a single year, but as soon as you're looking at 2 or 3 years, you'll save instantly.

[MartinDT]

I was shocked too! I was expect about £5k

 

I'm still trying to get another quote, but it was about £20K for the AP's / £10k for the SM... Just for another year!!!

Going to migrate to a different MDM i think, that's easy, some are about 80% cheaper, so will test them out.

 

I was hoping to work it out over 5 years, so leasing a new system over 5 years, would be a lot cheaper than Meraki.

 

Cloud is all well and good, but you are held hostage by the license fees.

[Norphy]

It sounds to me that you might have gone to a commercial supplier, rather than an educational one. Stone are one of many edu Meraki resellers, probably worth contacting them for a renewal quote. There are other vendors on this site which sell it as well but I forget their names.

 

For what it's worth, it cost us about £120k to replace our entire wireless network across nine sites last year, and it won't self destruct if you stop paying its maintenance.

[paulkerton]

I was shocked too! I was expect about £5k

 

I'm still trying to get another quote, but it was about £20K for the AP's / £10k for the SM... Just for another year!!!

Going to migrate to a different MDM i think, that's easy, some are about 80% cheaper, so will test them out.

 

I was hoping to work it out over 5 years, so leasing a new system over 5 years, would be a lot cheaper than Meraki.

 

Cloud is all well and good, but you are held hostage by the license fees.

I'm sure someone like @Wave9_Andy might be able to shed some light on this. I'm sure the pricing of Meraki licenses for education is more competitive than that.

[MartinDT]

They did say it was education pricing, but you can never trust what they say... I've messaged stone to see what they say, we use them for PC's didn't know they did Meraki too.

 

We have a few other sites, needed new wifi soon, so depending what costings I get back, they might not be Meraki!

We are probably going to be around 600 AP's if we get every school on the same system. That's why I like Meraki, plug and play, and all devices can connect at any site.

[paulkerton]

That's why I like Meraki, plug and play, and all devices can connect at any site.

I'm sure Cambium has a cloud based controller system too, and I think it's priced in with the APs. So as long as you have the APs, you get the cloud controllers. You can assign APs to act as controllers if you lose connectivity to the Cambium cloud too.

Not as slick as Meraki, but none of this licensing craziness either.

 

Don't quote me on that though!

[bknaggs]

I found when I was getting quotes to go from the free version of Meraki Systems Manager to the licensed version that included the features Apple added past iOS 9 they were at a level that suggested Meraki didn't want my custom. I think I was being quoted £25 per iPad per year and Lightspeed was £5 per device per year.

[ITGURU]

Cisco Meraki kit seems ridiculously expensive to me. I was offer a trial of some kit but well out the budget. They say the cost covers 10 years service including the license, but the cost of a 48 port cloud managed switch was 4 times the cost of a normal switch I buy with the same features and lasts me 10 years anyway!

Much prefer 1 outright cost.

[Roberto]

They did say it was education pricing, but you can never trust what they say... I've messaged stone to see what they say, we use them for PC's didn't know they did Meraki too.

 

Paul Flack at Stone gave me some very useful Meraki pricing and data when I was looking for my then employer a few years ago. They really are focussed on it and may be able to do better than some other suppliers.

 

We use Meraki where I work currently. It absolutely is expensive but worth it IMO. I’d say the support and tools save us more in staff costs and support calls than the premium for the product.

[MartinDT]

For the MDM side I'm looking at Securly, which is considerably cheaper than Meraki.

 

Still waiting for Stone to get back to me. along with a few others on pricing again.

 

If there's any none Meraki resellers reading this, feel free to get in touch. Or if anyone can recommend a reseller of another make of WIFI, I'll be interested in what they can offer me to move away from Meraki.

[Norphy]

The biggest ones are:

 

Aruba/HPE

Ruckus

Aerohive/Extreme

Mist/Juniper

 

We’re using an Aruba system at the moment, after a very bad experience with Aerohive. We evaluated Mist and Ruckus and I think we would have been happy with either but the Aruba reseller won the tender.

 

We didn’t consider Meraki because of the licensing model.

 

We bought our system from European Electronique who have been excellent

[MartinDT]

What was your bad experience with Aerohive? As that's one we were considering.

 

I've used Aruba years ago, and we had so many issues with it. Mainly due to guest access and splash logins not working.

[Net-Ctrl]

From what we see Meraki renewals are normally high. You could however try Joskos to see what they can do(https://www.joskos.com/) I think they still do Meraki and are an EDU provider. Alternatively if you do come to review the market we could put a Ruckus proposal forward.

[jhothersall]

I got Meraki MR Enterprise Cloud Controller License for 3 Year for 48 AP's was £118.68 per unit so £5,696.64 from ITGL Limited - https://www.itgl.com/

[Primus]

I got Meraki MR Enterprise Cloud Controller License for 3 Year for 48 AP's was £118.68 per unit so £5,696.64 from ITGL Limited - https://www.itgl.com/

 

Wow, you could replace them all with Unifi devices for less per device than the 3 year Meraki licence!

[Norphy]

What was your bad experience with Aerohive? As that's one we were considering.

 

I've used Aruba years ago, and we had so many issues with it. Mainly due to guest access and splash logins not working.

 

Bear in mind that this was for a system put in when 802.11n was still the new hotness and long before Extreme took them over. They may have improved since. I also had nothing to do with the choice to buy it, it got bought at least a year before I started. That said:

 

When they were sold the system, they were sold it under the pretence that it would be self running and not require any external systems. Everything would run either on the APs or on the HiveManager. That was nonsense. One of my first jobs when I joined the organisation was to put in some RADIUS servers because the APs couldn’t cope with the level of authentication traffic they were getting.

 

If you wanted them to do things like GRE tunnels, they would only tunnel back to another AP or a dedicated Aerohive server, which of course meant spending more money.

 

Whenever a policy change was made at the HiveManager, there was something like a 1 in 5 chance that the change would fail to deploy to an AP. Sometimes, re-pushing the config would fix it. Sometimes it failed because the AP had ran out of disk space, so SSHing to the AP, clearing it out and re-pushing it fixed it. Sometimes you had to factory reset the AP. All of this meant that some APs were running the new config and some weren’t meaning getting a consistent wireless network across the estate was hard, to put it mildly.

 

On top of that, the APs were maddingly unstable. They’d die or reboot at random. At one point, an entire school’s worth of APs just decided that they weren’t going to work any more and it took me the better part of two days to fix them. Our vendor were unable or unwilling to do much about it. They blamed everything from the (brand new) switches to the POE provision (nowhere near the limits of the switch. Like >1.5kw available) to the structured cabling in the building (Cat5e, all well within spec, no run lengths more than 80m, less than 10 years old and in good condition) and when they passed the buck to Aerohive, they were again blaming our equipment.

 

If management had not already expressly said not to consider Aerohive during the tender process, I wouldn’t have done anyway.

 

I won’t pretend that there weren’t teething troubles with our Aruba wireless network but it has been a lot more reliable than Aerohive was. The only systems in the last 10 years that I have been more pleased to see the back of than Aerohive are CC3 at my last job and CC4 at this one.

 

Anyway, as I said, this was for a system that’s now old and went EOL a long time ago so make of that what you will.

Edited September 15, 2020 by Norphy

[Sonic007]

I'm switching from Meraki to Ubiquiti.

Good prices and will save tonnes of money. No licensing costs either.

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi

 

We can provide a price for Meraki Licencing renewals and new kit etc. Happy to help if we can. Like many vendors, there is reseller protection in place, generally giving the original reseller some price advantage, but happy to try for you.

 

cheers

[paulkerton]

Like many vendors, there is reseller protection in place, generally giving the original reseller some price advantage,

I know this is common practice, but the amount of times I've tried to explain this to senior leaders over the years - schools don't like this practice at all. I've seen Business Managers and Deputy's and Heads genuinely upset about it, as they can't possibly go through a best value procurement process if the first company to get their quote in will get a discount compared to the others.

 

Of course, they then ask if you can go to the vendor and ask them to not do that for your school - but then you tell them the prices are likely to go up that way, rather than down...

 

Ahh the battles we all have eh?

[Wave9_Lee]

I know this is common practice, but the amount of times I've tried to explain this to senior leaders over the years - schools don't like this practice at all. I've seen Business Managers and Deputy's and Heads genuinely upset about it, as they can't possibly go through a best value procurement process if the first company to get their quote in will get a discount compared to the others.

 

Of course, they then ask if you can go to the vendor and ask them to not do that for your school - but then you tell them the prices are likely to go up that way, rather than down...

 

Ahh the battles we all have eh?

Totally agree it's furstrating. It's there for a good reason (for the vendor and the preferred partner) but agreed, doesn't really work well for a '3 quote' procurement'. To be fair, with many vendors, if there is a full procurement ongoing, they will generally give all resellers the same price. Bit hit and miss though...

[kennysarmy]

Three years ago we put in 51 Meraki AP's and got the subs cost down to £98 per AP for 5 years.

 

I require an additional two AP's to give us some better coverage in part of the school, the latest quote is £100 per AP for ONE YEAR!

 

I think when our full renewal is up in 2 years time we may be ripping out all the Meraki AP's!

[leegcvcc]

I love aerohive if it's any use. 6 years and still loving it! We use LAN3 for the support and they are great. Expensive maintenance at the end of the 5 year deal, but they all seem to be!