In 2015, brothers, Anil Varanasi and Sunil Varanasi, founded Meter, a networking-as-a-service company in San Francisco, selling proprietary networking hardware and software products with full-stack service rolled into one package.
Adopters can buy the entire networking infrastructure for a monthly subscription. Meter, besides supplying all the products under the hood, also oversees the process of setting up and installation – as well as handles the donkey work of managing 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, days of decision-making, expensive acquisitions and endless vendor negotiations, companies are left with a lifetime of support and maintenance pains to deal with. This they cannot do without a dedicated staff trained to do the job.
About ten years ago, the brothers noticed a slowdown in the number of new talents entering the networking space. For many years now, the industry has been grappling with a dwindling labor market while number of applications, devices and users have jumped up steadily.
This is made worse by low innovation in the hardware space. “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,” commented Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder.
A Novel Way of Wooing Customers
Meter decided to get creative and experiment with the traditional business model to rein in the costs and connect with struggling customers. This led to a portfolio of hardware built from ground up, 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, he told.
“On the product side, our incentive is much aligned with customers,” Anil Varanasi pointed out, speaking about Meter’s unique policy around its 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 added.
Meter’s OpEx model excludes the cost of hardware. Customers can avail Meter’s managed service solution in exchange for a subscription without bearing the upfront cost of hardware or the expense of 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.
When moving to a new solution, the sticker shock of hardware refresh is one of the biggest drawbacks. This model can help lift that creating lifelong customers for the company.
Meter’s software products blanket the hardware enabling “the fortuitous loop” of one enabling the other.
Meter’s team of network engineers designs, installs and configures the hardware, and post-deployment, supports and manages the network making sure everything is running smoothly, software updates are pushed timely, 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.”
No Need to Sink Old Investments for New Ones; Meter Has a Way Around
But with even a fully managed, integrated solutions like it, customers face the difficult proposition of ripping out their older infrastructure, which comes at no small cost, making a switch a distant possibility.
Meter introduced a buyback program to expose its solution to new customers. The program allows customers to trade in their older legacy hardware for a credit that is adjusted from their billing when the subscription kicks off.
By giving customers a chance to redeem old investments in parts, Meter hopes to eliminate sunk cost and offer the opportunity to upgrade outdated equipment.
What does Meter gain from it? Meter profits from the exchange by learning, said Anil. As the team dismantles and recycles old and existing infrastructures, “learning about how the network is set up and feeding that back into our own design and configuration” is the biggest value they get from it.
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 work with existing ISPs. Meter Connect handles negotiations, billing, and support on behalf of 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. As location addresses and floor plans are shared, the work begins. Meter’s network engineers sit down with the customer to plan and design the network. The resulting topology, besides being mapped squarely to the footprint, also allows connection to PoP infrastructures and other data centers.
Old infrastructure equipment are removed from the floor, and cabling and installation 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”
From the integrated software layer, configuration, validation and testing and onboarding are carried out.
Once the infrastructure is live, operations kick off. Meter covers all bases including servicing, updates, lifecycle management, and troubleshooting, said Anil.
Meter believes that the vertical integration – a strategy that ensures better quality by gaining greater control of parts of production – effectively leads to “great product and a great service for IT and networking teams”. One clear advantage is that the buyback program, coupled with the OpEx model, will help many enterprises struggling with the cost blowouts of multi-vendor solutions, streamline expenses and sidestep a load of inefficiencies that come from it. Currently, Meter also offers a capital lease model.
Watch the presentations from Networking Field Day event where Meter explains the technology with a demo and dives into the architecture.
