In my previous employment, I used to deploy Meraki solutions for retail stores. They really liked the the Presence analytics feature. Basically, they could tell how many clients came into each store and how many clients came out, using the MAC addresses, not some kind of analog solution. So not only could they know how many clients came in and came out, but also how many returning customers came to each location. They could take that data and match it up with the other locations, and get a lot of marketing information from that too.
In addition to Presence analytics, Layer 7 filtering allowed me to filter connectivity by service and not by port. Also Easy VPN connectivity between the Merakis, multiple SSID configurations, plus I could segregate one SSID from another. One more feature I would add is Facebook integration.
It improved the marketing solution of the company where I deployed it and it improved the way they gather marketing data tremendously. Instead of sending emails to customers with their old access-point solution, each client that came into the store - by checking into the store, they could connect right away to Wi-Fi - the store could get a lot of the social media data from their clients. That's how they got automatic marketing going, by the clients checking into Facebook. So their friends could see right away their check-ins, and so on.
It's funny, because these are solutions that are more in the marketing area rather than the network, but there's no other solution that provides this.
The process of getting licensing can be a little bit painful, especially if you're doing it each year. The customer support could also take a while to get on the line.
I'd say around five years.
No issues with stability. It was good. Once I deployed it, I totally forgot about it. It did its job, network-wise.
I would say it's about a seven out of 10.
Previously we used a different solution that only offered the ability to get emails from customers, and this provided a much better solution for a retail environment.
Merkaki was there before I was hired, and I'm the one who took it and presented it to my supervisor. From there, I went and presented it to the company where I deployed it. It was a great story. It was only after about two weeks at my new job back then, I brought the solution to my company, and then I sold the solution, configured the solution, designed the solution, and maintained the solution day-to-day. So it was something that I did my own research on.
Look at all the features it has to offer, not only network-wise. For example, the Meraki MR12 is an excellent solution for retail, and you also have a Meraki that has great switches where you can control everything over the cloud, and so on. There are different features that fit well so I'd recommend looking into everything it has to offer, and all the solutions.
I give it a 10 out of 10 because I don't see any other product in the market that offers the same solutions, at least for retail.