Meet Mike Agalliadis, the first Network Support Engineer in Cisco Meraki team in Krakow
“Meet our Security and Software Teams” is a series of articles introducing teams or individuals at Cisco Poland, who work with Cisco’s most strategic technologies. This story is about Mike, who moved to Krakow in 2021 to join and develop the newly formed Cisco Meraki team.
Mike’s passion for networking started in his school bench days. After fulfilling his military service in Hellenic Navy as a computer networking specialist, he joined Cisco Networking Academy where he earned his CCNA. He later joined Cisco CMS team in 2020. When the project he was working on was coming to an end, he was looking for other opportunities in Cisco and came across Cisco Meraki. It caught his attention because, interestingly, Meraki comes from a Greek word for “doing something with your soul”. During his time at Cisco, Mike has also noticed a tendency that everything was moving to cloud environment. He got interested in the topic, and it became another reason for applying to the Meraki team. After passing the recruitment process, he moved to Krakow as Network Support Engineer in the end of 2021.
Mike was the first Network Support Engineer in Krakow, with his other teammates in the UK. As the team grew, Mike helped build the internship program which piloted this past Summer. Thanks to this experience, an unexpected skill he has developed was effective communication. Working with early-in-career talent was very different from customer support, and he has learned a great deal about mentoring and upskilling, creating the bridge between technical and non-technical worlds.
Mike believes Meraki is a revolutionary product that expanded Cisco customer portfolio, allowing to move from complex on site network configurations to a simplified cloud-based device management solution. It’s a product that gave access to seamless configuration of its devices virtually, without the need for deep technical knowledge, such as command lines. When a customer connects Meraki devices to their network, the devices automatically go online within a few minutes. This allows users to efficiently configure and monitor these devices using the Meraki Dashboard, which provides a unified interface for management. This brought more independence and timesaving for the customers, with 24/7 Cisco support at their service. The future of Meraki is bright – Cisco is working on adding more catalyst devices into Meraki interface, such as switches and access points, which are already partially enabled in Cisco Meraki dashboard.
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