Comment by 9x39
2 hours ago
Small businesses? Sure. I've seen Unifi networks with a few hundred MACs often enough.
Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.
What kinda of small businesses? My friend does consulting and most of his business is on small (100-250 employees) size and sometimes small start up, typically in the office construction phase where he comes in and set up network infrastructure. He never seems anyone asking for UniFi, but again, might just because the cost? He feels UniFi is price competitive at that scale but no one wants it for some reason.
When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.
Upmarket electrical trade, engineering offices, MSPs commonly, smallish healthcare, an equine event center, a bank.
I see tons of small businesses (mom & pop, restaurants) with a UI AP or two, of course, but that's not what you meant, I don't think.
The places that COULD use UI often just don't care, and want the cheap toilet paper (netgear, ebay whatever) since cost discipline can be critical. I think there's a niche of biz with enough margin that networking/cameras get sold together and they don't insist on lowest price. My guess would also be the MSP that is quoting the job also heavily influences whether UI is used, plenty of dinosaurs out there.
Bigger places want routing, network virtualization, etc from the big players you mentioned. UI doesn't want to mess with BGP, spine-leaf, sd access/wan, etc. There's also like the 24/7 support options they want, and access to the partner/VAR/contractor networks so you have tons of options. The sales deals and dinners unfortunately factor into this too...
Thank you! He recently did a job on a newly constructed venue hall for about 300-400 people. He originally quoted full UI which has everything the company is looking for, from network to security camera. The company didn't want that, I think he ended do a combination of Cisco and some odd security system.