 Tommy here from Orange Systems. Have you been considering using Ubiquiti 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 Ubiquiti. I am not paid for, endorsed, or sponsored by Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti 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, and 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, it 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 install on customers. It 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 and my company, head over to LauranceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short 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.LauranceSystems.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've seen when decisions were made and fully disclosure upfront, yes, I'm as angry as everybody else about the whole discontinuance of Unify video. That was actually one of the product lines we were getting into. We thought it 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 Unify 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 a share as of October of 2020. Their current market cap is about $12.67 billion. 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 objectively at these type of companies. Unify's money comes from this line of business that 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 the Unify video. They've dabbled in phones. And I say dabbled 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-site 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 Unify equipment and the gap that they have left in the market. So this was bought, I think, around 2013 or 2014. And it worked perfectly fine until I pulled it out of my house. I just moved and realized, wow, this is a really old APLR 2.4 gigahertz. But this was, you know, one of the original ones when we first got started around 2013 with using Unify 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 upgrade 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 as we have found the Unify networking gear. Specifically, the Unify switches and Unify 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 Unify 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 Unify is going to be the gaps they have. First gap is support. Flat out. This may be a real problem for you as an IT 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 feel 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 Unify controller software for free, you configure it, you adopt all of these different devices to it, you can even have it set up for a 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 that 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. And that client for us is sometimes internal IT 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 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 Unify 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 Unify 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 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 Unify'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 Unify sells it. 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. Not saying it's wrong. 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 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 don't. Now, this is all those things about ubiquity that I kind of like though is the upfrontness, the fact that they 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 our 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 Unify, but I'm aware that third-party authors have also created documentation on the Unify 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. Unify, 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 are fine with doing this. And this is where Riley Chase and Hostify, he said, well, that's a market gap. 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 have an 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 Unify 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 it 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 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 Unify's website and buying it directly from them. But 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 Unify 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 out in the field and this comes up constantly where people call us for network engineering help and are trying to get the Unify 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 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 and 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 WAN side, the UI doesn't currently, as of right now, not in 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 10 to firewalls and, you know, if I is just not gotten around to it despite years of requests. So in terms of what we stand behind, what we recommend, how we feel is that their routing and switching is top notch, that their firewalls are 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 Unify, 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 PF Sense. 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 with network engineering. And that's not just for Unify. This goes for pretty much anything. We've helped people sort out problems with their Cisco networks and you name the product we've probably at some level worked with those devices and found a network engineering problem. Someone didn't read the documentation. Someone didn't understand the implementation and Unify is 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 Unify 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 Unify dream machine in there. Any of their routing stuff has just been kind of just not really up to par in my opinion for doing these type of deployments. So that's my thoughts on Unify. If you're an IT provider, you're an MSP, you're a manager's provider, you want to deploy this to your clients or you're a business thinking about switching over to this platform, these devices that are switching and access points are solid. The other stuff is I did mention though the protect and I'll leave a link again like I said to the video where I talk about 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 Unify 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 it's unfortunately for those wondering also doesn't tie directly to the same dashboard 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 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 focused on selling the 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 and if you're interested in hosting for it I got a link to hostify down below if you're interested in them. Also you can talk to Riley and see his opinion on Unify Equipment as well. He books times to help people and their decisions with things related to it if you've got questions about it. 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