In 2015, brothers, Anil Varanasi and Sunil Varanasi, founded Meter, a networking-as-a-service company based in San Francisco, selling proprietary networking hardware and software products with full-stack service rolled into one package.
Adopters can buy entire networking infrastructure for a monthly subscription. Meter, besides supplying all the hardware and software under the hood, also oversees setup and installation process – as well as manages the donkey work of maintaining the infrastructure beyond Day 1.
Complexities of setting up internet infrastructure for business have been on the rise, making it harder for slim groups of network engineers to wind up everything inhouse. 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 the bulk of the work – a lifetime of support and maintenance.
This cannot be done without a dedicated staff of skilled network engineers. Ironically, for many years now, the industry is grappling with a dwindling labor market while the number of applications, devices and users have been on a steep rise.
Even worse, the rate of innovation in the networking hardware space has been consistently low. “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,” noted 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 the costs and connect with struggling customers. This leads to a lineup of proprietary 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.”
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, Anil Varanasi told.
“On the product side, our incentive is much aligned with customers,” he said, referring to Meter’s unique pricing policy around hardware, at the Networking Field Day event in California.
“We are not looking to sell a box of hardware for a margin to our customers. We want to sell great networks,” he told.
Meter’s OpEx model offers customers its managed service for a subscription without having to bear the upfront cost 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 said.
The sticker shock of hardware refresh when moving to a new solution is one of the biggest deterrents holding companies back. This model can help eliminate that barrier creating lifelong customers for Meter.
Blanketing the hardware is Meter’s software products that together enable “the fortuitous loop” of powering one another.
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 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 with even a fully managed, integrated solution like it, customers face the difficult choice of having to rip out their existing infrastructure. Meter offers a buyback program to expose its solution to those customers who are worried about losing old investments. 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 hopes to eliminate sunk cost while presenting 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” is how Meter keeps innovation in its own product alive and kicking.
Meter also offers an ISP procurement service. For the past five years, Meter Connect, a managed and ISP-agnostic service, has aided customers to find the best internet service provider in their area and help 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, customers reach out to Meter – directly or through its network of partners – with site details, like address and floor plans. Meter’s network engineers have a sit-down with the customers about planning and design. The resulting topology, besides being customized squarely to the footprint, is also extensible to connect to PoP infrastructures and other data centers.
Old infrastructure equipment are removed from the floor, and cabling and installation of the new hardware block begins.
“We’ve seen that if you do the Day 1 part really well, a lot of times you avoid mistakes that will bite you 6 or 12 months from now,” he said. Extra attention is paid to ensure that everything is set up to work optimally
From the integrated software layer, configuration, validation and 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 the vertical integration – the strategy of gaining control of production to ensure better quality – effectively leads to “a great product and a great service for IT and networking teams”. One clear advantage is that the buyback program. Coupled with the OpEx model, the model will help many struggling enterprises organize their spend and sidestep a load of inefficiencies that come from 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.
