Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch vs Cisco Meraki MS

Likelihood to Recommend

A good system for basic ACD (need to add components for contact center functionalities). Strong reliability.

Directeur - Exploitation des technologies de l'information

Biron Health GroupHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

Meraki Switches are great for most mid to large size environments where ease of management is important for the team of network admins. Meraki can be managed by less experienced admins and Meraki Support is super helpful when needed. These switches can be used in any environment in need of robust switching. Small business with single locations may be better served by more basic switches.

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Mikel Seidl

Systems Administrator

Lake Forest AcademyPrimary/Secondary Education, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Very good omni-channel messaging.
Easy administration.
Low maintenance costs.

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Patrice Tanguay

Directeur - Exploitation des technologies de l'information

Biron Health GroupHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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Meraki MS switches are wonderful at allowing a network admin to configure a VPN mesh network without having to have highly specialized knowledge. Unlike Cisco switches, there is no CLI, there is only a GUI, and Meraki support helps you set it up as you add nodes to your network.
Meraki MS switches are easy to deploy. Full stop.
They can work with any firewall or ASA but I would strongly recommend using the Meraki MX security appliance if you are going to use Meraki MS switches because they were made to work together.
They easily stack. It's all done for you in the Meraki cloud control panel.
They will get an address from your admin VLAN's DHCP scope and keep it. Even if you unplug it and move it, you will not have to worry about addressing it.
The GUI is online and you can reach it from anywhere, so as long as you have the credentials, you can manage the network from any device that has a browser.

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Jane Updegraff

Senior Systems Administrator

DRT Holdings, Inc.Aviation & Aerospace, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

It's not a "all in one" platform. Requires many components
Softphone GUI could be improved
Limited ACD functionality

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Patrice Tanguay

Directeur - Exploitation des technologies de l'information

Biron Health GroupHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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Firmware management could be a little [more] customer change management centric.
Some of the online portal could be more pop-out driven instead of navigating back and forth between pages and reloading the page to do simple things.
Instances where Meraki switches won't have cloud access for long periods of time make it difficult to be able to maintain switch code configuration.

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Trevor Harley

Senior Network Administrator

Birchcliff Energy Ltd.Oil & Energy, 201-500 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

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Cisco Meraki MS 9.4

Based on 26 answers

Cisco support for the Meraki products is great. I have a dedicated representative who I can reach out to at any time. They offer numerous online resources and easy to follow tutorials to help the most novice user feel like a pro. When I need support they were ready and quickly helped me solve my problems.

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Laurance J. Specht

IT manager

Brooklyn Laboratory Charter SchoolEducation Management, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Alcatel system already installed and operational upon my arrival at Biron.

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Patrice Tanguay

Directeur - Exploitation des technologies de l'information

Biron Health GroupHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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I indicated I used Netgear switches before--the Meraki switches replaced those. I have also used Dell, HP, and Cisco (non-Meraki) switches in the past. None of those were bad, per se, but none were cloud-managed switches, either. And none offered the wealth and ease of configuration and monitoring that the Meraki switches offer. When Meraki replaced three of my switches under warranty (hardware failure possibility), all I had to do was physically install the replacements into my rack, add the replacements to the stack, remove the old ones, add the new switches to my account, and voila! The settings of the old switches were transferred to the new ones, so I had no further configuration to do. How? All the settings are backed up to the Meraki cloud!

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Nathan Roberts

Director, Management Information Systems

CareerSource FloridaPublic Policy, 11-50 employees

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Scalability

No score

No answers yet

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Cisco Meraki MS 9.5

Based on 2 answers

I give Cisco Meraki gear a near 100% rating for any business in the small to medium-sized business scenario. Only large organizations have certain business needs that Meraki gear may or may not provide the 99.9% uptime IT professionals and management would demand. Cisco Meraki gear is very scalable as an organization grows and makes it easy to scale up and scale out as needed.

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Trevor Harley

Senior Network Administrator

Birchcliff Energy Ltd.Oil & Energy, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

Great stability compared to previous telephony platform.
Low maintenance costs. Reduced OPEX.
Great uptime with few outages.

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Patrice Tanguay

Directeur - Exploitation des technologies de l'information

Biron Health GroupHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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Biggest reason - remote management. In places that have no IT personnel, it's extremely easy to get a new switch out of the box and have someone plug it in, then do all the configuring remotely. Without this, we could have a switch down for hours, days or even weeks impacting business and have to pay to get someone on-site.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No