Case Study: E la Carte enables a small IT team to remotely support 3,500 restaurant networks with Cisco Meraki

Enabling a small team to remotely support 3,500 networks via cloud-managed solution

E la Carte, a Smart Dining™ technology provider that deploys nearly 100,000 wireless tablets for customers like Applebee’s, Johnny Rockets, and Outback Steakhouse, struggled to scale and support restaurants using consumer-grade equipment. Their lean IT team was forced to make costly onsite visits and manage mismatched networking products. To standardize, secure, and scale operations they adopted Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed MR (wireless), MS (switching) and MX/Z1 (security & SD‑WAN) solutions.

Cisco Meraki’s centralized, cloud-managed stack gave E la Carte remote visibility and built-in troubleshooting (packet capture, traceroute, ping, channel/utilization), automated alerts tied to their ticketing, traffic shaping, and Air Marshal for threat mitigation. The small IT team now remotely supports roughly 3,500 networks and over 1,700 restaurants (about 50 tablets per store), reducing onsite fixes, improving PCI‑aware security and operational efficiency, and benefiting from continuous feature updates from Cisco Meraki.

E la Carte

Dan Smith

Director of Operations & Information Security