In 2015, brothers, Anil Varanasi and Sunil Varanasi, founded Meter, a networking-as-a-service (NaaS) company in San Francisco, selling proprietary networking hardware, software and full-stack support as one product.
Adopters can buy the entire network infrastructure for a monthly subscription. Besides supplying all the hardware and software under the hood, Meter also offers setup and installation service – as well as manages the donkey work of maintaining the infrastructure beyond Day 1.
Complexities of setting up internet infrastructure for businesses have been on the rise, making it harder for slim groups of network engineers in small and mid-size companies to wind up everything in-house. One setup, depending on the physical footprint, can take months to a year to fully deploy. After months of planning and budgeting, expensive acquisitions and endless vendor negotiations, companies are left with support and maintenance works, the bulk of the load.
This cannot be done without a dedicated staff of skilled network engineers. Unfortunately, for many years now, the industry has been grappling with a dwindling labor market while the number of applications, devices and users has exploded.
On the other hand, the rate of innovation in the networking hardware space has slowed down. “Somehow in the last 10 years, everybody’s come to agree that hardware is commoditized, and it’s sort of become its own self-fulfilling prophecy where nobody’s really spending a lot of time making great hardware,” said Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder.
A Novel Way to Woo the Customers
Meter gets creative and experiments with the traditional business model to rein in costs and connect with struggling customers. This leads to a lineup of homegrown hardware equipment constituting security appliances, switches, access points and PDUs.
“The goal is to make infrastructure for the most ambitious companies in the world – and that’s across offices, life sciences labs, schools, retail, warehouses and manufacturing,” Anil Varanasi said.
Four key verticals dominate Meter’s customer base – schools, shipping carriers, financial organizations, and fast-growing firms that rely on high-performance, dependable network connectivity, he told.
“On the product side, our incentive is much aligned with customers,” he said at the Networking Field Day event in California, talking about Meter’s unique pricing policy around hardware.
“We are not looking to sell a box of hardware for a margin to our customers. We want to sell great networks,” he emphasized.
Meter’s OpEx model offers customers its managed service for a subscription without having to bear the upfront costs of hardware or updates. “We take the capital risk entirely on ourselves for the hardware. We never charge for the hardware, including when we do upgrades, invent new things — any reason it might be,” he told.
The sticker shock of a hardware refresh when moving to a new solution remains one of the biggest deterrents holding companies back. This model helps eliminate that barrier and can create lifelong customers for Meter.
Blanketing the hardware is Meter’s software bundle that unlocks the full potential of the gears.
Meter’s team of network engineers designs, installs and configures the hardware, while another group supports and manages the network post-deployment, making sure everything is running smoothly, software updates are pushed on time, and troubleshooting is done when things break.
“We believe in order to build great networking, you have to do it all together. Doing it separately is not something that we found can lead to incredibly great outcomes for customers,” he said.
No Need to Sink Old Investments for New Ones; Meter Has a Way Around
But even with a fully managed, integrated solution like Meter’s, customers face the difficult choice of having to rip out their existing infrastructure. To minimize the damage, Meter offers a buyback program that allows customers who are worried about losing old investments to recoup their losses. The plan allows them to trade in old legacy hardware for a credit that is adjusted from their billing when subscription kicks off.
By giving customers a chance to redeem old investments, Meter eliminates sunk cost while presenting them the opportunity to upgrade outdated equipment.
What does Meter gain from it? “Learning about how the network is set up and feeding that back into our own design and configuration,” said Varanasi. It is how Meter keeps innovation alive in its own product set.
Meter additionally offers an ISP procurement service. For the past five years, Meter Connect, a managed and ISP-agnostic service, has aided customers in finding the best internet service provider in their area, or helped them work with existing ISPs. Meter Connect handles negotiations, billing, and support on behalf of the customers. “Think of it as Kayak or Expedia, but for ISPs,” he said.
This is how it all comes together. Typically, a customer reaches out to Meter – directly or through its network of partners – with site details (address, coverage area, floor plans, etc.). Meter’s network engineers sit down with the customers and discuss planning and design. The resulting topology, besides being squarely customized to the physical area, can also be connected to PoP infrastructures and other data centers.
Old infrastructure equipment is removed from the floor, and new cabling and installation of the hardware block commences. Extra attention is paid to ensure that everything is set up to work optimally. “We’ve seen that if you do the Day 1 part really well, a lot of the times you avoid mistakes that will bite you 6 or 12 months from now,” Varanasi said.
From the integrated software layer, configuration, validation, testing and onboarding are carried out. Once the infrastructure is live, operations kick off. This includes servicing, updates, lifecycle management, troubleshooting – the whole nine yards.
Meter believes that its vertical integration strategy effectively leads to “a great product and a great service for IT and networking teams”.
One clear advantage is the buyback program coupled with the OpEx model, that can help many struggling enterprises streamline their spend and sidestep inefficiencies that come with using multi-vendor solutions. Currently, Meter also offers a capital lease model.
Watch the presentations from Networking Field Day event where Meter explains the technology and dives into the architecture to learn more about the platform.
