Securing Your Physical World Digitally

Written by Shawn Hawley- Meraki Canada Segment Lead

Internet of Things (IoT) is something we hear often but brush off in the world of small and medium sized business as being out of scope for return on investment on our needs in day to day business and operations. Here at Cisco Meraki, we are here to tell you that IoT helps small and medium sized business thrive with simple to deploy, plug and play solutions that can help you drive just about every business outcome you can dream up. 

You might be surprised to learn that you are probably using IoT every day already within your own household. Do you currently have a doorbell that captures video when rung or when movement happens within its view, all accessible from your smart phone, or a thermostat you can control remotely from your smart device? These are all examples of Internet of Things, which is defined as physical devices connected to the internet to drive real world outcomes. 

Typically, when we think of a video camera in our local coffee shop, convenience store or restaurant we are thinking video surveillance for use to help solve a case after an incident has occurred. Here at Cisco Meraki our cameras are smart devices that have much more powerful analytics built in that can enable small and medium sized business to gain analytics to drive proactive, impactful business outcomes to help improve customer experiences and give you the data required to make data driven business decisions. Meraki Cameras (or MV as we call them) have powerful analytics right out of the box such as people counting as they enter an area you are monitoring, motion search to highlight incidents that happened in a particular area and heat mapping to see where people are spending the most time in your store or place of business. 

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We also wanted to take a step further on your journey with us and created the Meraki Marketplace www.apps.meraki.io which acts as our app store with applications that you can use in conjunction with our cameras, sensors and access points to drive small to medium business outcomes. Everyangle is one of our 250+ apps that provides retail analytics based on customers’ behaviours in your environment and can even tell you if they came in happy and left unhappy based on facial expression. 

Meraki Cameras are easy to set up by plugging in via power over ethernet or standard wall plug and connect via Wwi-Ffi. No need to run video cable and buy video monitoring equipment as the video stores on the actual camera and can also be stored in the cloud, creating ease of use/deployment for sSmall to mMedium sSize bBusiness owners and teams. Meraki Vison Portal gives you and your team easy access to our mobile app to monitor the video and playback remotely. We have over 15 cCamera models for indoor and, outdoor use, night vision, 4Kk, and much more!

CDW is a partner we work with in Canada to assist our customers in selection of devices based on your environment and needs and can fully manage your Cisco Meraki environment should you wish to offload that work to focus on other business priorities. We also offer our See Try Buy promotion to every customer. We prefer you try out our solution before buying it with no strings attached as we want to ensure our solution performs to your satisfaction and standards. This is why we have a 91% licensing renewal rate because our customers are that happy with our product. Our Marketplace applications offer the same See Try Buy option as we want to ensure you are making the right business decision when starting your journey with us.