Cisco Live: Catalyst-Meraki Integration

Kerravala called the new cloud management capabilities of Cisco Catalyst an overdue change. Customers that use both Catalyst and Meraki can use the Meraki cloud portal to provision and manage Catalyst switches.

“Lots of customers run both, so it makes sense that they’d want to use one dashboard to manage both,” he said.

However, Kerravala said he’s curious as to what happens next. Will the integations impact either the Meraki or Catalyst platforms or end points?

“If you’re buying Catalyst, there’s a lot of unique features and customer configurations you want to do. And if you’re Meraki, you want simple management,” he said. “So when you combine the two, do you add a bunch of complexity to the Meraki device, or do you dumb down Catalyst management? In the latter case, why buy Catalyst? That’s going  to be interesting to watch how that develops.”