T-Mobile US partnered with Cisco Meraki on 5G-based Connected Workplace offering
While many medium-sized enterprises want to pursue various digital transformation strategies, they’re often under-equipped in the IT department to manage the complexity of combining connectivity and compute at scale. To address this mid-market niche, T-Mobile US has partnered with Cisco Meraki to launch the 5G-backed Connected Workplace offering.
T-Mo has packaged up 5G internet service with cloud-managed networking; Connected Workplace is meant to take the heavy-lift away from the user and includes installation, software licensing, gateways, access points, and a three-year device upgrade cycle, among other components.
In an interview with RCR Wireless News, T-Mobile’s Chris Melus, vice president of product development, said this product launch is based on feedback from the target customers. “They have very lean IT departments,” he said. “This is a fully managed service…very straightforward and very competitive pricing model. It just makes it simple.”
T-Mobile US tapped Cisco Meraki for cloud-managed networking, including 5G gateways, access points, switches, IoT sensors and smart cameras, cloud-managed firewalls and the Cisco Meraki Dashboard.
Melus talked through the current reality of mid-market enterprise networking that’s marked by cobbled together multi-vendor hardware/software systems governed by disparate contracts, rate plans and support models. “It’s a big problem,” he said. “We’re simplifying all of that and doing it the way the Un-carrier does which is making it really easy to consume, really easy to operate and lets businesses do what they do best.”
For buyers, the process would start with network design services, an analysis of the RF environment, consideration of access points, security needs, then installation and turn up. Melus said customer sites are being brought online in less than one day. “We believe that’s fairly typical,” he said. “Our goal is to get people up and running as fast as possible with the least number of visits.” That said, T-Mobile is also supporting same day configuration changes for Connected Workplace customers.
Focus on this particular market segment is somewhat consistent with T-Mobile’s larger focus on bringing competition to underserved markets and acquiring new customers. As Melus put it, “SMB is a fantastic segment for us. We love powering America at this level. We listened to those customers…[and] that really shaped our philosophy, our strategy, around building the product.”
Big picture, he said these type of customers “want digital transformation. They just don’t know how to get started.”
