Case Study: Westmont College achieves campus-wide high-performance, cloud-managed Wi‑Fi with Cisco Meraki

Westmont College and the best technology decision it made in 30+ years

Westmont College, a 1,100-student liberal arts campus in Santa Barbara with about 300 faculty and staff, was struggling with a failing Aruba 802.11b/g wireless network that delivered poor coverage and required specialized staff knowledge. CIO Reed Sheard and his team selected Cisco Meraki’s Wireless LAN (MR) solution to replace the legacy system and address widespread connectivity complaints while keeping management simple for a small IT staff.

Cisco Meraki replaced 272 Aruba APs with 270 Meraki APs (MR14s indoors and MR58s outdoors), using cloud-based centralized management to blanket the 100+ acre campus and support two satellite sites. The Meraki deployment now serves more than 1,500 clients per day transferring over 180 GB of data, enabled faster troubleshooting via the Meraki dashboard, and helped Westmont earn InfoWorld 100 recognition for its cloud-centric IT transformation.

Westmont College

Reed Sheard

Chief Information Officer and Vice President