It fits well with being able to rapidly bring bodies into a project and implement change X across hundreds of stores, while having a standing IT team of 5.

If you have onsite (fulltime) IT, its likely not the best option.

I'd be particularly interested in comparisons of Meraki/Mist/etc. for small enterprise and campus.

Last I worked at Meraki was 2015; I don't remember any artificial limiting of bandwidth at that time.

Hard in what way? As long as the control traffic has paths between all relevant devices over the management LAN, why does the cloud need to be used at all?

2. Most customers who want this have multi-site setups; in that case, you need paths across the public internet too. Again security footguns, and also reliability ones.

3. Remote work is very very common for IT people.

4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up.

There are on-site controllers available. They've just lost out in the market because of the amount of in-house IT expertise they require. No one wants to deal with that shit, and outsourcing the security and reliability problems to a specialized third party is usually a good idea.

In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.

But with a cloud-managed system you have a professional, single-purpose organization dealing with those challenges. Which you are getting for the rock-bottom price of your licensing/support plan. Building a good internal IT organization is hard and expensive, and most businesses have other things to do.

> plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly.

Generally these systems only need internet connectivity to change the configuration and for some monitoring features. In practice, customers are okay with these being unavailable during internet outages as long as both the management platform and the ISP are on a pretty strict SLA.

(Compare, for example, the usual downtime from your 1-4-person IT team not having someone with the right skills on call.)

> and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site.

Who has the cash for that?

> In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.

That was my original point: "Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market"

I don't know what your standard for a 10-to-50-employee small business is, but "point your browser at this IP address" is usually beyond their in-house technical skills [1]. Small businesses whose core competence is software/networking, or who by coincidence have that expertise in-house, are a tiny niche market. No one [2] cares.

[1] See for example the rise of the Managed Service Provider, which was a large and growing subsegment for Meraki back in 2015 or so. Showing up, installing the hardware, setting up the wireless, and then managing it from your office a few miles away is a big business opportunity, and is a much more efficient use of limited skilled IT labor.

[2] No one with substantial resources and a profit motive.

But with a cloud-managed system you have a professional, single-purpose organization dealing with those challenges.

Just to be clear, are you thinking of the professional, single-purpose organization we've been discussing today in the context of a catastrophic data breach, the one we've been discussing in the context of incompatibilities with other vendors, lock-in effects and expensive licensing, or a different one?

Generally these systems only need internet connectivity to change the configuration and for some monitoring features

So as long as the equipment is set up exactly how we need it and never needs to change or be checked for any reason, everything is good. It's hard to imagine why these devices need a UI at all, when the engineer who installs the equipment could just set it up once and then you're done.

In practice, customers are okay with these being unavailable during internet outages as long as both the management platform and the ISP are on a pretty strict SLA.

John: Bob, the Internet is out again. Who do I call at the ISP?

Bob: We don't have a dedicated contact, it's just the business support number on their website.

John: I'm in the queue, at number 17. What's our maximum time for someone from the ISP to contact us about an outage? That might be faster.

Bob: No-one will call, but if it's not back by next business day we do get £50 off next month's bill.

(This is roughly how that conversation probably goes when you're a 20-person organisation with two floor of an office building on a business park outside a small town.)

(Compare, for example, the usual downtime from your 1-4-person IT team not having someone with the right skills on call.)

What's an IT team?

Who has the cash for that?

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. No one [2] cares.

And yet as someone who has worked for software development businesses for an entire career and whose customers/clients have mostly been other relatively small organisations of one type or another, I have never met one that didn't. Of course that could be because I've tended to work with other technically-inclined businesses, but the same is true even for schools or my own business's accountants. I'm not claiming this is some sort of universal truth, but I don't think the market is nearly as tiny as you're suggesting, at least not in this part of the world (the UK).

Remember, we're probably not talking about setting up encrypted WAN tunnels across continents and multiple layers of switches in a data centre here. We're more likely to be talking about getting an Internet connection with suitable firewall set up, connecting a handful of switches and APs and making sure everyone knows the WiFi password, and installing everyday software on the staff PCs and mobile devices with maybe some basic configuration and enabling updates.

[1] See for example the rise of the Managed Service Provider, which was a large and growing subsegment for Meraki back in 2015 or so. Showing up, installing the hardware, setting up the wireless, and then managing it from your office a few miles away is a big business opportunity, and is a much more efficient use of limited skilled IT labor.

They're not unheard-of here, but again, in my experience such arrangements are far less common in smaller organisations than just having a couple of people on the staff who also "set up the IT" and know enough for the kinds of everyday admin tasks you're talking about.

"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.

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?

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).

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.

That’s a senseless statement in the context of a cloud solution that requires Internet to work.