"Some partners are not white-labeling and themselves providing a managed service, and some are white-labeling," said Cisco's Asif.

There are currently 50 third-party certified applications being used with Meraki; Cisco expects that number to double within the next six months. Vendors running applications on Meraki include location-based services specialist July Systems; Zenreach, a marketing platform startup; and Purple WiFi, a network software and location services provider.

"We've developed some resources so that technology partners can very quickly start to build on the Meraki platform," said Pablo Estrada, director of marketing for Cisco's Cloud Networking Group.

Cisco said Meraki partners can move licenses from one customer to another. The partner owns the title with the ability to transfer the licenses between customer networks. 

"The partner holds the title, which means that if they're holding the license, they're also holding the hardware itself if that's the model that they want," said Cisco's Asif.  "At no point, is Cisco as the service provider saying, 'This is our license.'"

Although Meraki was considered more of an SMB play a year or two ago, there is now a strong demand from enterprises, according to WWT's Elfanbaum.

"I'm finding there's a lot of interest and demand on multi-branch and multi-locations [in] very large organizations, which is different than a couple of years ago," said Elfanbaum. "The demand for [Meraki] in the Fortune 500 for the right use cases is definitely increasing rapidly."

Elfanbaum said Meraki had had a "significant impact" in WWT's growing profits in 2016. "There's clearly opportunities to innovate around the marriage between the network and the applications that ride on it," he said.

Partners say they're planning to convert Cisco's traditional networking customers to Meraki when refresh opportunities arise.

"When you look at [Cisco] ISE and wireless LAN controllers and Prime and then the route-switch of that, it's not easy to implement, and it's not easy to maintain and for many it's overkill – your killing a fly with a sledgehammer," said Aqueduct's Ahluwalia.

"Meraki fits for a lot of people, and you get that enterprise networking-class service in a very simple management structure, and format and that's the key. It's absolutely something that makes networking far easier … It's absolutely a game-changer."