Meraki MDM vs everyone else

[Cooky]

Has anyone here used Meraki's MDM solution? (not wifi)

Their website claims their solution is 100% free, even if you were to manage thousands of mobile devices.
Just wondering why then would anyone get something from their competitors, say Citrix XenMobile (former ZenPrise), or AirWatch?

What's the major difference between Meraki, and the others?
What's lacking from the Meraki, that would make people use a paid solution?

http://meraki.cisco.com/products/systems-manager

 

[kevnich2]

Hmm have to take a look at that. Cisco and free, hmm those don't ever go together. We're currently evaluating air-watch. Seems pretty good but hard to beat free.

 

[stlcardinals]

From the FAQ on the website:

How much does it cost?
Cisco Meraki Systems Manager is 100% free.

How much does support cost?
Email support is free for all customers. Phone support is available with the purchase of an Enterprise Support license starting at $20 per device for 1 year.

Why is Systems Manager free?
We want everyone to have an opportunity to interact with the Cisco Meraki dashboard. Once you interact with the dashboard via Systems Manager, we believe you'll love the ease of management, and you'll consider other Cisco Meraki products when you’re ready to upgrade your WiFi, switching, or security appliance infrastructure.

 

[Cooky]

Thanks for the posts.

So it seems the free MDM offering is a bait for customers to buy more stuff later on, which I don't have a problem w/, except the phone support cost - $20 a year per devices seems not much at first, but when you multiply that by number of employees it gets expensive quickly.

 

[seepy83]

This bit from their FAQ isn't terribly appealing:

What prevents a user from deleting the Systems Manager profile from a managed device?
On iOS devices, due to Apple's restrictions, there's nothing that prevents a savvy user from doing this. Thus, we encourage administrators to provide incentive to the user to keep the profile on the device, for example by including the wireless network credentials in the MDM profile. Then, if the profile is removed, so is network access. Administrators can also configure email alerts to be sent in the event a profile is removed.

In my opinion, it's not real MDM if users have a way of removing the Admin/IT control over the device and still have access to corporate resources from it.

That being said, my experience with MDM is limited to BES. We bought-in to the BlackBerry ecosystem 6 or 7 years ago, and haven't had a compelling business reason to ditch it for something that supports IOS and/or Android. A user can wipe their Blackberry, and jump through some hoops to remove our Policies from it, but they're cut off from email and other company resources if that happens.