It’s often said that limitations breed innovation. Working with limited resources forces organizations and individuals to think outside of conventional wisdom. That’s why I often find solutions made for SMBs to be some of the more interesting in IT.
It’s not that enterprise-scale infrastructure doesn’t have it’s challenges. But these questions often revolve around operating at scale, and the challenges of being a large organization. For SMBs, cost is often the consideration in IT. It’s often not a matter of whether they’re doing something with optimal efficiency. If it doesn’t fit into their budget, it might not happen at all.
All of this came to mind reading Lee Badman’s look at Open Mesh’s router debut, the G200. Lee sees this disrupting the SMB wireless market for a number of reasons. For one, it completes Open Mesh’s full-stack portfolio, with access points, switches, and the CloudTrax dashboard already in tow. But added to that is that Open Mesh now offers a wireless solution for SMBs devoid of typical license fees. Instead of buying a ticking license time bomb that will go dead if you don’t pay up every year, Open Mesh gives SMB an affordable buy once, run forever option.
Now that Open Mesh has a comprehensive wireless portfolio, it’ll be interesting to see if they start putting pressure on the other contenders in the space. While I don’t think annual licensing is going away any time soon, I think these vendors will have to begin offering a lot more value to justify that expense to cost conscious SMBs.
Lee Badman comments:
Yes, you heard me right… I said “with no license costs”. If you are not familiar with Open Mesh, the operational paradigm is easy- you buy your components (routers, switches, and access points), you register them in the CloudTrax dashboard, and off you go with configuration and operation.
Read more at: Open Mesh Brings Major Disruption to SMB Space, Goes Full-Stack
