4 ms·

> What cash? When we have a new starter, John or Bob sets up the WiFi on their laptop and company phone and adds those MAC addresses to the whitelist for the ne

> What cash? When we have a new starter, John or Bob sets up the WiFi on their laptop and company phone and adds those MAC addresses to the whitelist for the network. Normally John works in development and Bob works in sales, but they do know a bit about networks so this is fine. Well, as long as they can get to the GUI, anyway. "Small businesses whose core competence is software/networking, or who by coincidence have that expertise in-house, are a tiny niche market." You have that expertise in house. Having looked at sales numbers and market research for a company that sold internationally and cross-industry: yes, your experience is very unrepresentative. > even for schools... Tangent: schools are honestly pretty technically sophisticated! We sold to some of them at Meraki, but they were drawn to us more for labor savings than to compensate for limited expertise. Education customers typically had very few (especially in perpetually-underfunded US primary and secondary schools), but very competent, IT people. They were feature-hungry power users. In part that's because, even with low employee headcount, they have to provide a surprising level of IT services per student as well. A school with 80 employees and 1000 students probably has the IT workload of a white-collar employer with 500+ headcount.

Silhouette 6y ago
You have that expertise in house. Having looked at sales numbers and market research for a company that sold internationally and cross-industry: yes, your experience is very unrepresentative. OK, let's assume that's true for the sake of discussion. According to your market research and sales numbers, what is the big market for these cloud-managed products among smaller organisations, and how do those organisations generally manage their IT facilities?
- azernik 6y ago
  Generally, they either: 1. Use low-cost consumer hardware with zero centralized management, and set it up with the same expertise and judgment as your typical residential deployment. 2. Have one admin person with the wherewithal work with web UIs, and wants a simple setup-and-forget system. UI not much more complicated than a single-AP residential deployment, user management workflow no more complicated than adding a G-Suite user. If they can use the default password for the admin system, they will (which e.g. Meraki and Aruba don't have in any meaningful sense).
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    OK, so let's look at the second of those, since the first is consumer level and not really our target market for professional grade networking equipment. Your original contention was that it's hard to implement a single pane UI without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. If our hypothetical one admin person with some idea of what they're doing, together with any automatic assistance the relevant devices provide, can set up enough local networking that all of those devices can reliably access the Internet and support cloud-based configuration, then a similar process can set up those devices to support single pane configuration using the LAN only. At that point, looking back to the four "hard problems" you enumerated a few comments ago, I still don't see a strong argument for needing the cloud dependency. The risks around network setup and reliability don't seem any worse for LAN-based configuration than cloud-based. In fact, LAN-based clearly has an advantage by not relying on any external infrastructure. It also has the advantage that if you want to get more serious for a larger deployment, you can run independent cabling and create a dedicated management network for control signalling, while most places aren't going to have an independent second Internet connection for management traffic if you accidentally break your configuration so your main data network loses Internet access. Managing multiple sites is probably a non-issue at this level of the market. Remote access for IT/support people is easily provided if necessary by having safe and easy VPN setup as part of your user-friendly interface. This has the added advantage that your tech people can also reach any other parts of the network they need, and so you might have required this functionality anyway. And if it's locally configured, you can always quickly shut that VPN access off again in case of any security worries, without needing anyone else's remote systems to be working properly before you can secure your own in an emergency.

Silhouette 6y ago

You have that expertise in house. Having looked at sales numbers and market research for a company that sold internationally and cross-industry: yes, your experience is very unrepresentative. OK, let's assume that's true for the sake of discussion. According to your market research and sales numbers, what is the big market for these cloud-managed products among smaller organisations, and how do those organisations generally manage their IT facilities?

azernik 6y ago
Generally, they either: 1. Use low-cost consumer hardware with zero centralized management, and set it up with the same expertise and judgment as your typical residential deployment. 2. Have one admin person with the wherewithal work with web UIs, and wants a simple setup-and-forget system. UI not much more complicated than a single-AP residential deployment, user management workflow no more complicated than adding a G-Suite user. If they can use the default password for the admin system, they will (which e.g. Meraki and Aruba don't have in any meaningful sense).
- Silhouette 6y ago
  OK, so let's look at the second of those, since the first is consumer level and not really our target market for professional grade networking equipment. Your original contention was that it's hard to implement a single pane UI without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. If our hypothetical one admin person with some idea of what they're doing, together with any automatic assistance the relevant devices provide, can set up enough local networking that all of those devices can reliably access the Internet and support cloud-based configuration, then a similar process can set up those devices to support single pane configuration using the LAN only. At that point, looking back to the four "hard problems" you enumerated a few comments ago, I still don't see a strong argument for needing the cloud dependency. The risks around network setup and reliability don't seem any worse for LAN-based configuration than cloud-based. In fact, LAN-based clearly has an advantage by not relying on any external infrastructure. It also has the advantage that if you want to get more serious for a larger deployment, you can run independent cabling and create a dedicated management network for control signalling, while most places aren't going to have an independent second Internet connection for management traffic if you accidentally break your configuration so your main data network loses Internet access. Managing multiple sites is probably a non-issue at this level of the market. Remote access for IT/support people is easily provided if necessary by having safe and easy VPN setup as part of your user-friendly interface. This has the added advantage that your tech people can also reach any other parts of the network they need, and so you might have required this functionality anyway. And if it's locally configured, you can always quickly shut that VPN access off again in case of any security worries, without needing anyone else's remote systems to be working properly before you can secure your own in an emergency.