Should You Be Using UniFi Equipment for Your IT Business?

tom here from orange systems have you been considering using ubiquity in your company well i want to make a video talking about the nuances and details of whether or not you should choose this product line full disclosure this video is not paid for endorsed or sponsored in any way by ubiquity i am not paid for endorsed or sponsored by ubiquity ubiquity and me have a relationship though where they do occasionally send me products it actually started with this product i bought in 2013 i did a video review and it's actually my review of the product and this is actually how a lot of my youtube channel videos work out i'll review something and then the company contacts me and goes hey you reviewed our product we'd like to send you one of our new versions of the product and you can review it and i just close that in my videos i have all ethics policy where i dive into that but there's been many times people will comment in videos i just want to be upfront that no i'm not directly not any type of compensation other than getting to keep pieces of hardware minimal amounts of pieces that's my compensation for doing any of the videos if you want to look at his compensation i don't have to return the hardware i get to keep it and do what i want with it usually just ends up in our lab back here it's pretty much where all the ubiquiti equipment that gets sent to us it's not something we go installing customers it's just yeah we stick it in the lab before we go any further let's first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrencesystems.com if you'd like to hire a share project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now let's give a little bit of background about ubiquity itself and i think this is an important thing to think about when you look at a company because i seen when decisions were made and fully disclosure upfront yes i am as angry as everybody else about the whole discontinuance of unified video that was actually one of the product lines we were getting into we thought was a great small business solution unify has done a great job on user interface not just for network equipment but also for their video equipment until they discontinued the unifi video platform and pivoted to the unify protect platform i'll leave a link to that video so i'm not going to be talking much about those that particular product lines but yeah i think that was short-sighted but when people say the company's going out of business i just referenced this page right here that their current stock price is 198 dollars a share as of october of 2020 their current market cap is about 12.67 billion dollars and their ceo is on the forbes fortune list etc they're not going anywhere doubt it they had a product line that i think they made mistakes on and i think this is something you have to look very you know objectively at these type of companies unifies money comes from this line of business they have here selling wireless products wired products and all their networking stuff under the unify moniker so we have the network equipment and we have the protect equipment which is now their video line that was used to be called unified video they've dabbled in phones and i say dabble because there's a phone box phone offering right here one and the door access is another line of business you're trying to get into i did a review of it i think it's interesting but it's also very new they built their company on their networking gear and that is where i believe the mainstay of all their revenue comes from is from this and they have quite a bit of offerings on here and we have used quite a few of their site to cite pieces of site-to-site equipment and some of the edge products are a little bit more targeted towards the isp space but the edge products are pretty good too but narrowing it back down to the unifi equipment and the gap mic that they have left in the market so this was bought i think around 2013 or 14 and uh it worked perfectly fine until i pulled it out of my house i just moved and realized wow this is a really old ap lr 2.4 gigahertz but this was you know one of the original ones when we first got started around 2013 with using unifi equipment and testing it out and it's been amazing we've done all these deployments and years later we're coming around to upgrade those deployments and we're pulling out working units and upgrading them to people who want faster wi-fi etc or adding more to cover gaps and the amazing part is this is still supported after seven years it's under their long-term support contract they're letting us know there's an end-to-life date to it but still seven years for network equipment in the field that's pretty good five years probably a more reasonable life cycle but hey they supported it until this year when they said it's going into long-term support we have an end-of-life date for this but that's kind of my point is we have found the unifi networking gear specifically the unified switches and unifi access points to be an absolute excellent product line that have really held up with extremely low failures based on the quantity over seven years we've installed and because we do consulting and network engineering consulting that includes a lot of the unified equipment that is something that we become very familiar with these large installs whether or not there was problems with them they just seem to work it's been something that we've been very happy about but when it comes to the entire product line you can't look at it the same way now the first problem with unifi is going to be the gaps they have first gap is support flat out this may be a real problem for you as an i.t or msp company going i don't like the support they offer because it's kind of non-existent yep you do not have an easy grab the phone pick it up and someone's going to you know hold your hand through network setups but there are gaps that are created in markets and there's people who fill those gaps there are more than me who offer consulting on setting up network equipment that being said what you save in licensing fees and that's what makes them kind of a market differentiator you get the unifi controller software for free you configure it you adopt all these different devices to it you can even have it set up for multi-tenant where you don't have to have one controller per site one controller can host many sites and that scales up quite a bit so you can have one server that you host as an it provider manage all of your clients through this dashboard and pay no licensing fees for it but of course you should charge for your time to manage all of your clients therefore your margin is whatever you want to charge versus if you use a company has licensing fees your margin is whatever you added on top of what those other companies charge so you can look at it two ways you can learn yourself like we did and fill that gap of knowledge you can hire a third party consultant like us or any other company that offers this type of service and say all right i want to hire this company to train us to set it up and get it going and turn over the keys which we do once we turn over the keys so to speak and configure it for a client that client will go on and manage it that client for us is sometimes internal i.t teams that we set these up for school districts are a pretty good example where they look at it and they go the licensing is coming up again on you know this popular brand whatever it is of wireless access points and switches and that will lead to them going okay we don't want to pay that renewal again that's kind of high on licensing can you set up this unifi equipment and we'll just host the controller internally in our building because we have our own server stack and away you go now this is something i think unified does a great job of i think this is where their bread and butter is is being able to sell those type of solutions now another reason you may not like them though is the reason these companies are have all the hardware and didn't buy the hardware from us and just bought a level of consulting from us is another problem a lot of it msps have because they're trying to make margin on all the hardware and unify sells to anyone you can buy this on amazon you can buy it on unified's website you can find the prices and people contact us all the time tom who's the best wholesaler because i called around and they're almost like no markup on these i'm like yeah that's pretty much how unifi sells it um the margin is extremely low even if you're buying bulk of them you're not going to make the margin you'll make on companies that sell channel partner direct that is another reason you may or may not want to do it if you're trying to make all your money selling hardware not selling solutions that's fine that's a business model a little bit different than we follow i'm not saying it's wrong you if you're making money at it and your customers are happy you've got a good business model that being said this may be why ubiquity is not a good solution or fit for your msp because you make margin on hardware and you need someone to help you out with all the network engineering because you don't want to stop and take the time to learn it that's perfectly fine someone has to be paid for the knowledge exchange you either pay the company by licensing fees which covers covering a help desk at a hotline so you can get help and then the channel partner program and everything related to that so it doesn't get sold directly to your clients you have to be the go between where the clients anytime they want more equipment they can't just add it they have to buy it through you and you make your margin percentage you set on it that being said maybe you want to do it they maybe you don't now this is one of those things about ubiquity that i kind of like though is the upfrontness the fact that they've put technology relatively affordably in hands of tons of people lots of consumers lots of end users lots of small it teams it got the time to sit and read through the documentation they have a lot of documentation that's how we learned it we did not get certified from ubiquity we did not go through any training programs we literally read what is completely available on their website books you can find and download that are available on our website and there's even third party authors i'm writing a third party author books i've only read the free stuff that you can get from unifi but i'm aware that third party authors have also created documentation on the unifi equipment if you want to read further into it and become an expert for us it's just seven years of usage that has brought us to where we're at now one more little side note the controller itself is free but some people don't know how to set up a server to host it on because that may be a skill set not every it person has and this is where riley chase who is the owner of hostify developed his software as a service once again to fill a gap unifi for whatever reason never got really into offering a hosted version of their controller where you could host an instance of it and pay them some people perfectly you're fine with doing this and this is where riley chase in hostify he said well it's a market cap i'm going to solve that market gap by doing hostify which basically if you don't want to maintain the controller maintain the updates maintain the server and secure it this is where you can reach out to hostify by the way a couple things i've affiliate link down below to get you a discount to get started with hostify if you're interested and i'll link to the videos where i interviewed riley and we talk about hostify as a product of note my video is older and it references a free version that he had that free version is no longer offered sorry about that he does have minimums but he is very helpful in setting up these if you don't want to deal with hosting the controller yourself you reach out to riley he'll take care of that part of it as well now the final thing i'm going to talk about with unifi is the exact products we use and i'm going to bring this up because there's a signal to noise ratio problem and i don't mean with wi-fi when you sell a product to the general public you end up with the general public immediately skipping any part where it said here's these step-by-step instructions and going right for plugging it in and going it didn't do the thing i thought when i plugged in i thought i would just plug this in and magic wi-fi would show up this is the downside when you have a lot of inexpensive equipment put in the hands of consumers they create tons of noise in forum posts this is the double-edged sword that 12 billion dollar market cap has to do a lot with selling massive amounts of equipment once you open the world up to the consumer market you get to first sell lots of equipment second get lots of people who may be complaining about said equipment because now the bar for entry is an amazon prime account and free shipping to get this or just going over to unified's website and buying it directly from them but uh yeah you can get this in the hands of consumers so easily that well you end up with a trouble of trying to figure out is there really a problem with the switches or is it a lot of people that don't understand vlans because well the majority of people that just get started in networking things like vlans and how the integration of all this works that's sometimes a little bit challenging but before we get too far off topic on that i will comment though all the equipment that we use access points and their switching equipment and their varied switching equipment like the rack mounted or even the not rack mounted equipment we've seen extremely few failures and great reliability and very good serviceability in terms of features and function but their routing equipment the unified dream machine dream machine pro usg usg pro anything that unify has made for routing equipment right up here to october 2020 has been lackluster it will check boxes that make marketing people happy saying it has filtering and gives you this or that it's all just in deployment and practice extremely basic that is the one thing we just don't deploy on the field this comes up constantly where people call us for network engineering help and are trying to get the unifi routing equipment to do something beyond its capabilities and then they are stunned and shocked how a company with a market cap that big and a popularity that they have doesn't have all these features that they thought it would have such as the way the vpn works or the filtering features or the way it does any dpi it is so basic it's enough to make the marketing team happy they can put it on the box and say this supports you know deep packet inspection until you actually use it and realize how basic it is it's not particularly useful so when it comes to actually deploying all this equipment and what we actually stand behind and put in our clients and do a lot of support with and recommend to people it's always the same thing it's the switches it's the access points it's setting up the controller to easily manage them and give visibility it's just not the routing equipment that is still something that they for reasons unknown to me they've taken the time to develop into the door access field but they've decided to not fill all the gaps in feature requests that have been suggested in their forums for like five years that even adding multiple ips to the wan yes that basic of a feature is missing from the routing equipment so if i have a block of ips static ips i want to assign to the lan side the ui doesn't currently as of right now not talking about beta or future have an option where i can just assign blocks of ips easily to a wan interface that is a pretty basic function that you'll find even in some of the lowest end of firewalls and unify has just not gotten around to it despite years of requests so in terms of what we stand behind what we recommend what how we feel is that their routing and switching is top notch that they're firewalls or me and but the good news is they're using standard so the compatibility with whatever firewall we actually have a company that's got a meraki firewall and unify switches and it works fine we've seen mix and match of aruba we've seen mix and match with a variety of equipment we haven't really found any major compatibility issues between unify and mix and matching your network so if you only wanted to go with access points from unifi you could if you only want to go with their switches you can and vice versa if you want to go with their switches and access points which do give really nice visibility in their dashboards but then use something that's a more full-featured firewall insert your favorite brand here that is great we've used them with pfsense we've used them with untangle creating vlans across these variety of brands has not been really an issue and the majority of the problems that we get consulting calls for have very little to do with the hardware and almost always to do with the misunderstandings people have of network engineering and that's not just for uni unifi this goes for pretty much anything we've helped people sort out problems with their cisco networks and their you name the product we've probably at some level worked with their those devices and found a network engineering problem someone didn't read the documentation someone didn't understand the implementation and unify's not immune to that you just see a lot more noise about it because they see it sell to the consumers so this is my thoughts on efi product line i feel confident selling it we have done 300 plus access points thousands of users on these devices they've held up well over the years we've got apartment buildings we've done we've done stadiums we've done a lot of outdoor indoor venues and we found they're going to be very reliable but any of those venues zero of them have a usg zero of them have a unified dream machine in there any of their routing stuff has just been kind of it is not really up to par in my opinion for doing these type of deployments so that's my thoughts on unifi if you're an it provider you're an msp you're you know managed service writer you want to deploy this to your clients or your a business thinking about switching over to this platform i these devices that are switching and access points are solid the other stuff is yeah i did mention though the protect and i'll leave a link again like i said to the video where i talk about you know them discontinuing it and my review of the protect line i have a few videos on those i still think and we've moved some of our small businesses over to protect because well when they discontinued unified video we did have to do something for them so we had to replace the recording devices that's actually been pretty reliable they still make me a little nervous because of the road map problem they have but you know i think this is not a terrible product line and i'll leave a link to that video in case you're wondering but um it's unfortunately for those wondering also it doesn't tie directly to the same dashboard um so you don't get as much visibility as you thought but it's worth mentioning that's one of the reasons i put this in here we do still sell a few of these i'm going to do an updated video pretty soon on my review of protect because it's had a few updates and a few features but that being said um if you're interested in this you don't have to sign up you don't have to become any type of ubiquity partner i don't really dive into any partner programs with them or i'm not aware of any that would offer you anything unless you're buying absolute incredible quantities and you want to go directly to them the margins are not that great focus on selling a solution and that's what we do and if you need consulting hey like i said in my little trailer in the beginning we do offer consulting for equipment um and if you're interested in hosting for it i've got a link to hostify down below if you're interested in them also you can talk to riley and see his opinion on unifi equipment as well he books times to help people and their decisions with things related to it if you've got questions about it all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to lawrences.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurensystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 82,067

Rating: 4.9292173 out of 5

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: RFwEOiez8Wc

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020