We’re building more than just great products at Meraki—we’re also building a great community of reseller partners that can provide our customers with solutions for their IT challenges. In the past few months alone, Meraki has trained over one hundred sales engineers at partner organizations through our Certified Meraki Networking Associate (CMNA) program. We’ve held sessions in cities across the US and in our London office, and we’re continuing to look for ways to expand the program and reach even more of our partners.

Over the course of the CMNA program, pre-sales engineers get a chance to explore all four Meraki product lines: MX security appliances, MS switches, MR wireless access points, and Systems Manager mobile device management. Hands-on lab sessions cover the real-world scenarios involved in deploying a next-generation branch network for a typical company, so engineers leave with the experience and confidence to recommend and deploy Meraki networks for their customers. We’ve designed the class to be a refreshing change from typical classroom-style training, and we’ve even built in a little fun.

The labs also provide the perfect setting to showcase the tight integration among the Meraki product lines and the benefits of cloud management via the Meraki Dashboard. Participants often come into the sessions knowing only about Meraki’s wireless LAN capabilities, so it’s always fun to see their excitement as they come to understand the full potential in Meraki’s entire suite of products for edge networks.

For now, we’re keeping the CMNA sessions quite small to give participants the best possible hands-on experience and attention. Looking ahead though, we’ll be rolling out more courses and new ways to scale out training program to touch more of our partner community.

Take a look at the classroom during a recent session: