Lots of places I have worked have made IT mistakes in the past. Companies need the courage to recognize and change them.
Mistakes happen when decisions are made without enough research. For example, a company might want a big-name product because it says Enterprise ready. However, the real needs of the company, and the budget are anything but Enterprise.
I worked with a company once that bought Meraki Wireless Solution. It was cloud-integrated and it worked great. The problem is that as the company grew, they didn’t want to pay the continued cost of Meraki equipment. Instead, they chose to buy a third-party solution that was 1/12 of the price of the equivalent Meraki standard.
Of course, they did not get access to all the Meraki software, but honestly, they were not using it anyway. They bought a solution that didn’t fit with their budget and was unsustainable. It isn’t right or wrong, just a decision that wasn’t the best fit for their requirements.
There are plenty of competitors to Meraki that don’t have such steep costs. I have written about Ubiquity before but I like Engenius better. In one job I had set up an Engenius solution that worked great for more than a year. A supervisor decided to replace it with a Ubiquity solution that kept having issues and not working for the customer. Even the customer said they preferred my solution which was flawless.
This is not to brag, but rather to share that the best solutions don’t necessarily need to be the most expensive ones. My solution cost half of what they spent and was better. Meraki is a lot more money, and yet many companies don’t think highly of it.
This is not to trash Meraki but having an honest conversation can save so much money.