Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of.

Speaker 2: 0:01

Network Engineering podcast. In this podcast, we'll explore tools, technologies and talented people. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

Speaker 1: 0:23

Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering. My name is Andy Laptev and tonight we have a very special episode. This is a sponsored episode with the good folks at Meter. Meter is a networking as a service company. They are making really cool strides in the NAS business and we're going to do a few things like define what that is and see what kind of problems they're solving and how they're doing it. Anil is a really cool guy. He's a career network engineer. He's one of us people, so I think that that's really important. If you're going to come on the show, you better be a network engineer talking about your product. So Anil has the credentials. We're also joined by Chris Miles in the future in Australia. How are you doing, chris?

Speaker 2: 1:08

Doing well. Brother, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:09

Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. So, anil, let's tell folks about yourself. Who are you, what do you do? How did you get to be a network engineer to this CEO of a NAS company?

Speaker 3: 1:25

Andy, chris, thanks for having me and thanks everybody for tuning in. I studied networking in college and I've always felt networking is one of the most important things in the world. And maybe a career bet my brother and I who I started meter with made about decade and a half, two decades is that we all will use internet more than we currently do, and we thought that was a pretty safe bet to make at that time and we continue to believe that's a very safe bet to make today. And everything that we do this podcast or doing anything it's all just packets somewhere floating around through wires between radios, and we wanted to have an opportunity to build really great hardware, really great software for networking, and so meter at the core is just a networking. We believe in a couple of things that I think the industry lost a little bit of track of, especially as users and customers. We felt like everybody thought hardware was commoditized, nobody was really paying attention to software and nobody was integrating products together. So what we set out to do is, instead of building a point solution, instead of saying we'll just build access points, somebody else will figure out the rest, we'll just build a security product, somebody else will figure out the rest. We'll just build a security product. Somebody else will figure out the rest. We said why don't we take the time and build really good products for the entire stack? And so today, meter builds everything from routing, switching, wireless PDUs, isp marketplace that's built in SD-WAN, vpn, all of it wrapped together along with applications and software to give network engineers really good control and really good visibility to the level that I would want it as a network engineer.

Speaker 3: 3:20

You mentioned networking as a service. We don't really think of ourselves as a networking as a service company. Oh, I apologize. No, no, you don't need to apologize. Networking as a service is something we do, but at the core, what we really believe is on networking itself across hardware, software, operations, and the four big product lines that we have that do this is. One is our ISP product that's called Connect. Think of it as Kayak or Expedia for ISPs.

Speaker 3: 3:51

How it started is that we found it really intriguing that you couldn't buy the internet on the internet, so that's how it started. Then we have our wired products that are routing, switching. Then we have our Wi-Fi product and about a month ago we announced our cellular product and what we're hoping is in any space if there's a packet moving, it goes through meter, hardware and software and really from designing the hardware operating systems, firmware, distributed systems, apis, applications we just think it can be way better If there's a company that really cares about the hardware, cares about the software and integrating it all together. We got started about a decade ago. We've been relatively quiet because we wanted to start talking about meter when we knew we had the best products for networking. So that's why you probably heard more about us in the last couple of years, in particular in the last year, because we feel like we've crossed that threshold. So that's who we are, that's what we do.

Speaker 1: 4:59

That's a huge like you've integrated the entire stack. That is a big. That is a big task. You are you are you are very brave and I don't know why, as you were talking, I kind of thought of just you know, I'm trying to think of other integrated solutions and, like Apple came to mind, right, they have the hardware and the software and they're able to provide a more integrated, more secure, better experience than a bunch of disparate parts and it kind of sounds like that's where you're going is it's?

Speaker 1: 5:27

it's your hardware, it's your NOS, it's your people, it's it sounds like a good. Give a much, much cleaner, um, I guess, experience for for your customers. So so who? Who are your customers? Right, like I'm a network engineer. So is this something? I mean I guess you're marketing to businesses, correct? People who need networking, infrastructure and things installed. Right, how does someone like me? Right, it's all about me. I want to know how this is impacting our network engineers. So we're going to get into the product. I like I know that you have. What's the new? You have a really cool natural language feature.

Speaker 1: 6:09

Yeah, command, which I'm really into, because the more I see that in networking platforms, I get really excited because, you know, as fun as it is learning arcane syntax in a bunch of different CLIs, right, which was the whole job for a really long time I love the fact that I can just speak to the infrastructure in natural language and get insights. I think that that's super valuable. You know, there's a lot of AI-ification of everything, right, and we've almost become kind of immune to it, like oh, great AI. But when I saw the demo up on your site, I'm like, oh, this is like, this is real, this is useful, I can ask a question and get really valuable insights. It looked like I could build, I think, like my own dashboards too, based on the data that. So I think I know this is a mainly audio podcast and I think that we should show some stuff at some point, you know, during this.

Speaker 1: 7:01

I know it's still early. I'd like to see, but I guess back to my original question. So let's say, I'm a business and I'm starting up and I need internet, right, I need infrastructure. So I call you guys and what do you do for me? I think you do everything.

Speaker 3: 7:16

Yes, so our customers are folks like you mentioned that are starting up new businesses, all the way up to some of the largest companies in the world, so large public companies. A lot of network engineers are listening when we all congregate on the internet. If you imagine the form of the internet that runs on meter. The largest hedge fund in the world, bridgewater runs on meter. Whole gamut of companies. Actually, chris works at a company that runs on meter, another networking company that I just found out before we hit record and so our customers and who we're building for is entirely for network engineers network engineers and the premise of our business when we started it was precisely that nobody was building products for network engineers anymore and that felt very obtuse. We felt that as users ourselves. It felt like random products, random features. You know forgive me, andy, but crazy marketing stuff that didn't make any sense and we're just like where are the real products? Who are the people that really love this? So our products are built for network engineers. Our customers range from businesses that are just getting started up to the largest businesses in the world that have the most security, compliance requirements and really large technology and networking teams, and when somebody signs up.

Speaker 3: 8:52

Our work starts with first making sure the right ISP gets to this business, because no matter how great of a network you have inside of a space, if you don't have great when coming in and out, kind of pointless. So that's where our Connect product comes in, which is exactly that of Kayak or Expedia. You just literally type in an address, we'll show all the ISPs you can purchase and you can purchase it instead of waiting two weeks of going back and forth to figure out who's available and what price. And we actually made that entirely a free product because we wanted to also contribute to the community. So anybody can go to metercom slash connect and just use it.

Speaker 3: 9:31

Then we work with our partners so some of the largest channel partners to some of the smallest ones or us that understand a space, and we design a network. So both we can work with the channel or work directly with the customer to design a network. Then it's our rack that's installed entirely, that has PDUs, routing, switching and everything you can imagine there, from high availability to host monitoring and DNS security and stateful firewall and all those things that are built in that you would expect that are deeply integrated together, along with indoor and outdoor wireless. And then now, as I mentioned, a cellular product that, instead of you having to go spend a lot of money on DAS and other systems, cellular deployed just like Wi-Fi, we deploy that. Then we give what we hope is beautiful software with our dashboard and things like command that you mentioned, that give full control to our customers, who are, again, primarily the networking teams at the businesses that we work with.

Speaker 1: 10:42

So quick question is this how do I interact with the infrastructure? Is this a GUI? I'm guessing I have an API on the backend.

Speaker 3: 10:50

Yeah, just primarily the dashboard and primarily command. Command. Like you mentioned, we launched it about two months ago and it's been an incredible success, not just in networking but in technology as a whole. Many people thought it was one of the best applications and models that people had ever seen. So real software directly available to customers.

Speaker 1: 11:14

So we don't have to learn a new CLI, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 11:17

No, yeah, that's where command comes in.

Speaker 3: 11:19

It's beautiful, and one of the things about software that's challenging is either you're designing it for the novice or you're designing for the expert.

Speaker 3: 11:30

When you start a new software project, you're kind of told pick one. And I think what's been interesting about command that we built entirely in-house it's not APIs, we're calling elsewhere and it doesn't go to something like OpenAI or it's all meter is command is flexible and kind of goes around, depending on the user, and the premise of command is that software should be soft, and so, along with the dashboard that's fully fleshed out, command can do things like give information for anything you're asking, take action. It can be really complicated action. Like you know, create me a new SSID with this VLAN and make sure it auto rotates every day at 2pm and put it on all the access points. You can actually say that and then we'll go do it, and then command also just generates software on the fly, just the way you want it. We want every one of our network engineering and IT teams to have a software engineer just for them, but it's a full software platform integrated deeply into the hardware.

Speaker 1: 12:37

So one of the reasons I love live streaming is we have a live audience and I might have just found you a customer because we have someone in the chat saying wait, did I hear right A DAS replacement? I might be interested. We're looking for a new solution. I am not familiar with DAS. I'm Googling it on the side so without me giving a terrible explanation? Do you want to hit a high level, like what is DAS, and why would this gentleman be smart in getting it to you, sure.

Speaker 3: 13:04

So DAS stands for Distributed Antenna System. So when you go inside of a building today, when you open up your phone, the goal is both for the carriers and IT teams is that you should have five bars on your cell phone. But that's actually really hard, challenging and expensive to do On the carrier side. Carriers have to go install antennas, rent out rooftops and spend a lot of money, and then companies install these systems called DAS systems. If you pull up an image, go to Google Images, you'll see there are these antiquated systems that look like servers in Matrix that go in basements and then they have antennas that are distributed throughout a building and so when you pick up your phone, your phone is going from you know signal from your phone to one of these DAS antennas to one of these outdoor antennas that are popped up, and then it just meshes all the way through next stop, next stop, next stop to get to whichever carrier that you are.

Speaker 3: 14:07

What meter cellular enables you to do is a couple of really interesting things. Just like there's a Wi-Fi AP, there's now just a cellular AP and it's connected to the full networking stack that we built. This is the advantage of building integrated products. And now, when you open up your phone, instead of it going from your phone to an indoor antenna, then hopping all these external antennas, it actually just goes from your phone to the cellular AP and directly through internet to whichever carrier you have. So you, as a customer, can get great cellular that's deployed in 75% less time, with something like 80% less of the cost, and cellular deployed as easy as Wi-Fi that's again integrated into the entire networking stack that a company already needs.

Speaker 1: 14:58

All right, so hopefully our listener Nully heard that. They should reach out to these folks. It sounds like they have a really good solution.

Speaker 3: 15:07

Yeah, shoot me an email, Anilatmetercom. I'm super simple.

Speaker 1: 15:11

I never thought about, I guess, cellular in large buildings and how difficult that would be. I mean, I know how hard it is to get Wi-Fi in buildings. But yeah, the cell towers are outside. You know, you don't have typically access points inside.

Speaker 2: 15:22

So if you see those little knobs on the ceiling that aren't APs. That's typically what those are.

Speaker 1: 15:27

They're little antenna repeaters basically.

Speaker 2: 15:31

I do have a question Now. You've kind of already touched on this and I think I know where you're going, but I want to give you the opportunity to expand on it.

Speaker 2: 15:40

So you know, if I think about the landscape of networking vendors today, obviously there's a lot of them, or there's a lot out there, there's a lot that have been around for a very long time and you know they probably have claims as well that they do everything in the stack, kind of similar to what we're talking about today. But my question is you know, if I think about your all stance, obviously you're relatively new to the game. You've already made quite a bit of headway. Your all stance, obviously you've, you've, you're relatively new to the game. You've, you've, um already made quite a bit of headway. Do you feel that being a startup in this scenario kind of helps you guys with um releasing better products, just because you don't have the years of technical debt that maybe some of the other people do in this space? And can you maybe elaborate on on what your, what your uh input is there?

Speaker 3: 16:23

yeah, we've only been around 10 years where, like you mentioned, there's others that have been around 20, 30, 40 years. So totally we've only been around 10. We've not been around as long as some of the other folks. I think it's less technical debt because of the years. I actually think it's more about our business model and how our incentives are aligned with our customers that enable us to do things that others can't. So a couple of things that I'll mention here what that means.

Speaker 3: 16:58

One is meter builds an entirely integrated stack. We don't sell individual pieces of hardware, so we don't just sell an AP. We don't sell individual pieces of hardware, so we don't just sell an AP. We don't just sell a switch. We sell networking. What that enables us to do is always know what's above us in a stack and what's below us and have the right APIs, right protocols and right the transactions between each piece of hardware to be able to build great networks. It enables us to make different choices on hardware.

Speaker 3: 17:28

We are not expecting our APs to also do some routing and some switching. Our APs only do wireless and that leaves a lot of room on the chipsets, because we all use the same Qualcomm chipsets. We use the latest, greatest Qualcomm. So does everybody else. But it allows room to go do more and really focus on wireless really focus on wireless.

Speaker 3: 17:58

And our business model also is that we take on the capital risk entirely instead of our customers. What that means is there's zero cost for the hardware, including when we release new hardware. So every four or five years there's a new Wi-Fi spec for my triple E, or when there's new switching algorithms or routing or new hardware, we make new hardware. Or when there's new switching algorithms or routing or new hardware, we make new hardware. All of our customers get upgraded to that new hardware as well. But what that means with our business model that we take on the capital risk and hardware costs are zero is that we only get paid if we provide a good product and a good service to our customers. That means our incentives with our customers are very much aligned. We are not looking to make a box and sell that for 25% margin and hope to sell you a new box every 18 months. 25 is low, I was being generous. But our business model is entirely aligned with our customers.

Speaker 3: 18:51

And if you take a step back and think about it, networking is the last part of the technology stack that, until meter came along, wasn't aligned with customers. Everything from compute to storage, to CRMs, to everything, was that if you provide me a great product, that's when you get paid. But networking was that you pay me upfront. And great product that's when you get paid, but networking was that you pay me upfront and then you'll never hear from me again until I want to sell you another thing. So that actually enables us to do much different things on how we can integrate hardware, integrate software and build products other people can't. Because we know what's above us and below us in the stack, because each part of our stack is built to do one thing that it's good at and great at, and how our business model is set up so that our incentives are aligned with our customers.

Speaker 1: 19:46

Yeah when we were originally talking. We did an episode a while back on networking as a service and somebody in the chat said network attached storage, no, the other NAS. But I wondered how? Because hardware is so expensive at least traditional hardware that we're used to I had thought how do you get a return? Like for you to just hand me tens of thousands of dollars of hardware. I'm assuming I'm signing a contract because you need to get a return, I guess, on all the hardware you just handed me. So is it safe to say that we're in some type of contract so that you can get your return?

Speaker 3: 20:24

Yeah, not just tens of thousands of dollars. With our largest customers that have tons of locations, square footage and a lot of footprint, millions and tens of millions of dollars of hardware, and I don't mean to make it sound different than the traditional model, because you're in the same boat.

Speaker 1: 20:40

If you spend $15 million with a big vendor, right? You're in it for five to seven years, and whether you have a good experience or not. So it's not a downside of this, but I'm just wondering. I'm expecting some type of long-term relationship, just so you can it is long-term Three, five, seven years are generally what we see from customers.

Speaker 3: 20:59

But what's implicit in all of these contracts that we do with our customers is that we're providing them great products and great services, and that's where it's different than before, where you're not just giving us the money and then that's the end of it. We have to earn the right to have you as a customer, but it is definitely something because we believe in building the right products. It's definitely a bet we're making that we will get to keep the companies as customers, but also those networking teams, no matter where they go, as customers as well, because we would like to obviously build the largest networking company possible, and not only do we want to keep the companies, but also the people forever.

Speaker 1: 21:41

How do we get you deployed? Is this Greenfield Good?

Speaker 3: 21:45

question. About 40, 45% of what we do is Brownfield, and what we also have is a buyback program, so there's no sunk costs. Let me break that down a little bit Generally. When an IT team has to make a decision, they have to work with finance, they have to work with procurement, they have to work with vendor management offices. It's not just a technical decision, it's a business decision, and they have other colleagues and departments that they owe an explanation to which is hey, we just spent $10 million on networking gear. What's happening? You want to use this new thing? What happened to all that money that we just spent? Or you just spent 100K. What happened to it? So we actually buy out all the legacy hardware that companies have to make the switching costs easier over the meter as well, so that it's much more palatable for procurement, finance and other teams. And again, we serve IT and networking teams and our job is to make their lives easier.

Speaker 1: 22:47

I'm guessing that you're also. You're attractive to the finance departments, right is I know? That a lot of the as a service stuff is, you know, opex versus capex, right? So that's? I mean that's this model right, I have a recurring bill we have both models some cost, oh okay we have both models.

Speaker 3: 23:04

Um, you know, we have customers that are owned by pe firms. Opex hurts their eDA margins, so we have capital lease models for those folks as well, and we have pure OPEX models as well. But what's inherent in both is that we're taking the capital risk on the hardware, not our customers. So our customers get to have the benefit of the fact that Meter is taking the risk on the hardware, that meter is taking the risk on the hardware and meter is on the hook to provide really great products and services to customers to earn and continue to earn their business.

Speaker 1: 23:40

You told me to ask hard questions, so I'm going to Please Otherwise it's not fun for me either.

Speaker 1: 23:46

Well, no, but I think it's fair. So I'm following you and so far this is compelling. I have experienced quality issues right With different vendors software, hardware. So how's your quality, if you can make a generalized statement? You know, I'm guessing you have support for RMAs, right. Hardware is going to fail. Nothing's perfect Because it's integrated. I'm assuming it's a very tight integrated experience and the assumption I'm making is that the quality is high because I've seen your customer list. It's large. If you weren't doing a good job, people would be yelling about it on the internet, because that's what people do on the internet is they yell at everything they're mad about, and I've never heard or seen anyone yell about how mad they are at meters. So can you talk about your quality? Just your NAS, your hardware, things that would be important for folks.

Speaker 3: 24:36

Yeah, I think. Before jumping into specifics, which I will, I want to tie it back to what I was mentioning on the business model itself. What's tied to quality is actually speed to market, and one of the challenges we think the legacy vendors have with their model is I'm sure you've seen this in marketing from all these companies they want to and need to say world's first Wi-Fi 7 AP. They all want to and need to Absolutely For a lot of different reasons. They need to be first to market. They're like we're doing Wi-Fi 7. I'm going to put this random chip in there, this random protocol, just because I'm trying to get Andy to buy one more time, even though he just bought three years ago. I need to convince him that he needs this new box.

Speaker 1: 25:25

It's that new iPhone. Every two years I need the new one. That's right.

Speaker 3: 25:29

We don't have that affliction. You will never see us be world's first. In fact, those are kind of the silly statements you will never hear me to say like world's first Because it doesn't matter for world's first, does it actually work? Does it work for me? So again, it ties back to our business model is we don't have to and we don't need to go do those silly games and play finite games. We like to play infinite games that keep going forever.

Speaker 3: 26:08

Second is, like you're saying, because we have this business model and this vertical integration and we sell the entire network, there's three important things that affect quality. One is a unified operating system across the entire platforms is a unified operating system across the entire platforms and what that buys us is the ability to know that, oh, ap version this and firmware version this for firewall doesn't work or some feature. Those issues don't occur. Actually, when people think about quality issues, they go to code quality and testing quality issues. Yes, those things happen, but in reality, the actual issues in networking for quality come from integration issues. Even with the same vendor, which is you might have this version of the switch not work with this version of AP, not work with this version of firewall and this one feature wasn't tested properly because of that, those kinds of things.

Speaker 3: 26:53

Because we have a single unified firmware image and operating system, we know what actually works together and those are releases that are cut that way every quarter with that in mind. What it also buys us is a single API across the entire stack, and how that shows up is both in quality but also in usage. When you want to make changes, you can make change in one part of the stack and actually have it traverse everywhere, really simply, and enable us to build great software for our customers because of it. And the third thing it buys us is also a unified stats pipeline actually knowing how the entire network is doing throughout the pipeline of a packet, from ISP, routing, switching, wireless through firewall, through DNS security, through VPNs, through SD-WAN. All of it is connected with a unified stats pipeline. That actually was enable us to build much higher quality products because of the stance we took on the entire network, because of our business model and how we're set up to build hardware and software.

Speaker 1: 28:09

You just made me think of troubleshooting. So I have a problem. People are calling in, they can't reach an application. Let's say I'm thinking the traditional troubleshooting I would do. I do some captures, some PCAPs, right. So how do I troubleshoot this? Is it any different From what you just described? It sounds like I have insights that's right, Just at my fingertips.

Speaker 3: 28:30

Yeah, so you can do all the traditional stuff from understanding everything from client health metrics to packet captures. But it's a unified thing instead of you having to go look at every part of the stack. It's a huge advantage being able to get that. That's a push from the system rather than a pull from every part from you as an engineer. Second, you referenced command earlier. One of the things you can ask.

Speaker 3: 28:58

Command is just like Slack or Teams. You can actually just hit at and get to a location or get to a meter hardware or get to a client device. So you can just hit at and say Andy's Windows let's say that's your computer's name and say tell me the health of this client and give me a five-bullet summary. And at the speed of a Google search it will go and summarize all the things which you can go look at yourself, because you have logs available and connection history and all those things available, and just get here's the five bullets. Hey, his snr kind of sucks, or you know, andy wasn't supposed to really use 2.4, but he's actually on 2.4, um, those kind of things old school man 2.4 forever.

Speaker 2: 29:45

So it sounds like something andy would do, probably. How dare you five five?

Speaker 1: 29:50

gigs, five gigs, forever. I. The more you talk, the more questions I come up with. So, please, you know we well and Chris jump in, jump in whenever. So, can I, can you do cloud peering? So, like somebody in the chat said, you know they're curious if BGP supported it. So that just made me think, okay, well, can I, can I peer to my CSPs from your infra? And then what does that look like? You know, A, can we connect? And then B, are there any insights there that you can pull in? Like again, something's broken? I'm going back to my production days. Yeah, I railed, I cried against, you know, about cloud, because when something that was hosted in the cloud broke, it was very confusing and complicated to figure out which cloud it's in. How is that routing built? What exactly broke? It was just magic somewhere else. So I guess we'll take it one at a time. Do you? Can I peer with CSPs with public cloud with your?

Speaker 3: 30:47

Yeah, so we can. We can connect to a pops public cloud, direct connect, all those things. But I want to also answer the second question you had, which is do we have visibility and observability and what's happening there Once you do connect? We have it on the connections itself, but not beyond. Those are things we will build later on, but we don't have that today. I want to be clear that I'm not.

Speaker 1: 31:09

And I wouldn't expect it to. That's not even like a fair ask, but I'm just thinking all the things you connect to right. Yes, so you connect to cloud, which is good, that's important. I mean, you guys have thought all this through. It's not like, oh well, we only do Wi-Fi in-house and you got to figure the rest out like you guys.

Speaker 3: 31:23

No, no, routing, switching, security ISPs.

Speaker 1: 31:30

And I like that. It's I guess it's one bill. I don't care when the bill comes, I'm assuming monthly, not that it matters, but where I'm going with this is licensing. One of the things that has always really made me nuts is, you know how do I say this? Subscription licensing. I don't want to say anybody's, you know patented license term and then Make it look like I'm talking trash on that particular vendor because I'm not. But the subscription licensing model as a person who came up again it's. It's tough being around and being an old school person, because back in my day this is how it was done and it was better, you know, when I had a perpetual license and that thing was good forever. I really enjoyed that, because I've been hit with outages when subscription licenses expired and we weren't paying attention to the logs and bad things happen.

Speaker 2: 32:14

So but I'm guessing you're subscribed. The phrase I heard a lot was one throat to choke. I don't know if that's really where you want to go with that, but I heard that a lot Totally.

Speaker 1: 32:29

But I don't get the sense from Meter that you know like. Licensing isn't going to be a problem because you're not hitting me with this separate monthly bill to keep everything working and the features up. It's all integrated, it's one bill everything you need.

Speaker 1: 32:38

Yeah, which I really like. That's even just simplifying the operational model. Just that alone. I know it sounds it should be table stakes, like your licensing model shouldn't bring infrastructure to its knees and people at vendors will say, oh no, it doesn't we send log messages and warnings. And people at vendors will say, oh no, it doesn't. We send log messages and warnings. And well, okay, yeah, because we're all sitting around watching logs for expiring subscription licenses, like right, we're understaffed, we're not, we're doing other things, so okay, so, licensing is easy.

Speaker 1: 33:05

It's integrated Code. Upgrades is another thing that came up for me, did you? Say you release quarterly F.

Speaker 3: 33:11

Firmware is quarterly, for dashboards and other things weekly, sometimes daily. We have a really nice velocity, but in general it's more driven by customer outcomes. One of the things we really care about which I think also the industry has kind of lost a little bit is, as we started doing more fancier and fancier features. I think the basic networking stuff wasn't done to perfection. So that's the other thing we try to do is we try to do the basics really right, like my brother who I started meter with. If you guys have them on and say like, hey, tell me about STP and how it should be implemented, not used, be implemented, not used, implemented That'll be a fun conversation.

Speaker 3: 34:03

So we try to do the basics right. The software is derived from the outcomes from customers and really just going everything deriving from those interactions with customers and how customers get to use our hardware and our software. Because at the end of the day, I think IT and networking teams have one of the toughest jobs in all of any industries actually, because they're only thought of when something doesn't work. When the network is working, nobody's calling a networking guy or gal saying, hey, the network is fantastic, good job. Never, it's never happened.

Speaker 3: 34:44

It's only when it doesn't work.

Speaker 2: 34:45

Proving innocence rather than that's right Function.

Speaker 3: 34:48

That's right. That's right. So all the software that we build code upgrades, how we do firmware, how we do testing, how we do firmware, how we do testing, how we do dogfooding, how we do canary upgrades. All of that is tied back to trying to understand the lives of our customers, which predominantly again, are IT and networking teams.

Speaker 1: 35:04

Did you say dogfooding? I haven't heard that before. Yeah, dogfooding.

Speaker 3: 35:09

So it kind of started with Google a little bit about 15, 20 years ago, and then others before it. So Sun Microsystems had it, silicon Graphics had it, apple had it for a little bit too. Which is, our colleagues all try to run meter networks in their homes too and with the latest builds, so that in this process we're developing it and using it ourselves. It's running in our office, in our labs, in our warehouses, all of that together and it's like part of this process. But we, like right now I'm running the latest build, I think, from Friday or Monday at my house right now, so I get to see exactly what's happening, what might be broken, what is, does a feature feel right?

Speaker 3: 35:55

And again, that's really important too, which I think was lost in networking too, which is somehow networking got all the junk software. Networking didn't get beauty, and I don't mean beauty as in just pixels, but actually how it works, how it functions and how it flows through. And we think that part is really important too, which is actually all of us using it deeply, knowing these products, understand these products and as users, does the beauty actually flow through the product? And yes, it has to look beautiful. But beauty isn't just form, it's also function.

Speaker 2: 36:34

Yeah, I do have another one and you know, I know, andy, you said ask hard questions, so I'm going to. I don't know if this is going to be a hard one, but I'm going to, I'm going to try to go that route. So, and I and I I asked this question out of the context is I'm someone that works for a networking vendor. I know how important trust is with your customers Because obviously, like you said, if the network is down, everything's down right. So when you want to introduce a new networking vendor into a customer environment, a huge thing is trust.

Speaker 2: 37:07

So another thing that's very prominent in networking is the need for integration with systems, endpoints, et cetera, right. So if we think about this customer base where you have, where you say you're doing, 45% brownfield migrations onto meter, what does that look like from an integration perspective? If, say, potential customers like, look, I really like what meter's doing, but I, maybe I like I either one, I really like my current wireless vendor, my switching vendor, and you know I have licensing that runs out through this end of the year and I don't want to move this day one. Is there integration options for that? Fair enough, easy question.

Speaker 3: 37:55

We sell it. We sell a network or we don't. We'll buy out your licenses. We'll buy out your hardware. We'll make it easy on you but we sell networking. We don't sell Wi-Fi. We don't sell routing. We don't sell switching. We don't sell security. We don't sell DNS security. We don't sell SD-WAN. We don't sell VPN. We don't sell ISP management. We sell networking.

Speaker 2: 38:18

That's great. I mean, I actually think that's a great answer because I think if you, as the vendor, if you can stand firmly on what your product is and what it isn't and you stick to that, then I think that goes a long way. So I actually like that answer a lot. Good, a long way. So, um, I actually like that answer a lot. Good. Um, I guess kind of compounded with that like what, what do you tell customers that are kind of on the fence like hey, I don't know if I want to completely rip out my stack and put in something brand?

Speaker 2: 38:46

new right, you know, I mean yeah, I mean, if we use the apple example, there are there's pluses, there's minuses to kind of a I won't say a closed ecosystem, but you kind of know where. I won't say a closed ecosystem, but you kind of know where I'm going right A full stack that's driven by one vendor, right? So what is your kind of main selling point that you would articulate to prospects, new customers in that camp?

Speaker 3: 39:08

So I think it's three things. It's P P, p, product process, pricing. First, on the product side performance, reliability, security and integrated products. I think the delight of being able to go to our DNS security and saying you know, andy, can't watch any more TikTok that being a single line, it could be crushed. That being a single line, it could be crushed. That being a single thing to do and not having to go buy a separate DNS product and figuring out how to integrate it into the firewall. And what's going on with the other DNS? How's it going to propagate product at the end of the day? How well we perform.

Speaker 3: 39:50

If you look at even VPN performance, we blow away everybody in the industry. Straight performance we blow away everybody in the industry. Straight performance you know everybody talks about is nobody does benchmarks anymore Because, guess what? Everybody's asymptotically gone towards mediocre stuff. As meter gets more out there, you'll see us actually do benchmarks. We believe what we're building and we know what we have. That's much better, so much better reliability, security, performance, integration and beautiful products.

Speaker 3: 40:21

That's the first one. It's on the product side. Second is on the process that is delivered because of the products. Like I mentioned, right when a customer signs up. We have our connect product that enables us to help them procure ISPs. Then we have an entirely onboarding product where networking and IT teams can in line, answer a bunch of questions on how they want the network to be. All of it, every single piece of our hardware, down to a port on a switch, is virtualized in the backend.

Speaker 3: 40:53

This has become like an overused term now digital twin kind of thing, but in practice I'll tell you what it means for us, which is every configuration of a network can be actually configured in the backend, in the cloud, before it's applied down to the hardware. There's no way of bricking this thing, and so going from ISP onboarding, configuration, integration and deployment of networks for a lot of customers process is what's attractive. And the last one is pricing. We generally in networking it's been huge CapEx and huge OpEx with licensing and renewals and all these things to purchase networking gear. We are zero CapEx and if you do the TCO out over the course of three, five, seven years, it is remarkably in the favor of meter customers. So depending on who you are, how you're set up and where you are in the life cycle, it could be some combination of product process pricing.

Speaker 1: 42:02

Yeah, got another hard question.

Speaker 1: 42:05

Sure it's not really hard and I'll set us up with you know. So again, I think it's compelling. Even the ISP marketplace, like the first stop that you hit in this experience I've never seen anything like that. We at places I've worked, we had entire teams of analysts that did all the telco stuff for us because we were busy in the iron. So the fact that you can just go to a screen I thought you said that it's open to you you don't have to be a customer to even you don't have to be a customer to even you don't have to be a customer.

Speaker 3: 42:37

It's what we're providing to the industry. Please go to metercom slash connect. It's called Meter Connect. Use it, give us feedback. We'd love to hear from you. Anybody can use it, send it to your friends, send it to your aunts, send it to your kids.

Speaker 1: 42:51

And there's pricing in there too. Right Like I can go in and I need an MPLS.

Speaker 3: 42:54

Go from saying here's what I want from 5G coax, shared fiber, dedicated fiber, starlink. Here's the pricing. Just give me a contract that normally would take weeks what I just mentioned Absolutely To be able to do. So all of that is in there. Connect is super loved product.

Speaker 1: 43:20

Yeah, andy, I think your kids would love it too, for sure, so I can order it right from there, right? And then does that kick off. That's right, I mean, I'll get an install date, or right.

Speaker 3: 43:31

That's right.

Speaker 1: 43:32

It just happens, that's pretty. That's right Again. For anyone who's had to try to order a circuit, this is very simplified process. It's it's a. It's a logistical nightmare the old school way. Um, again, hire teams of people to do all that and and manage the billing and forget it right yeah so.

Speaker 3: 43:52

so that's for sure. For one location where you described as soon as you have multiple locations that have come up in different times renewal management, contract management, that stuff is harder Then. What you're also talking about is I now have 500 locations with a primary and backup. That's a thousand ISP connections I'm managing and I have to pay. So Connect has that buying, contracting, consolidated billing, so you can get a single line item. We can pay and make that easier for you, and because we buy so many connections, in majority of the cases we get you better pricing than you can ever get.

Speaker 1: 44:35

That's nice and the billing's integrated right, Because I can't tell you how many outages I work because we forget to pay the bill. Right, I mean, it's a thing.

Speaker 3: 44:43

I hear that all the time.

Speaker 2: 44:44

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3: 44:46

So what does?

Speaker 2: 44:46

support. Look like in that scenario? Like, if you know there's a circuit outage from something that you've procured through Connect, who do you call? From something that you've procured through Connect, who do you call?

Speaker 3: 44:54

So it's two separate models. If you have our entire network, there's one support. If you're just buying the ISP using the marketplace, it's a different one. If you have our full network, we have host monitoring built in. We have ISP monitoring built in, because it's art of networking. I'll give you a preview on what's coming. We will automatically track how your ISPs are doing against the SLAs you signed as well. That's coming. So if you have the entire networking stack from us, we can keep track of the whole thing, and then we're the ones doing through our APIs and contacts. We know when it goes down alerting that comes in. You get the full service. But if you just use the marketplace to buy, that's whoever is on your team, however you want it. We just made that transaction easier for you, but we're not responsible for that circuit.

Speaker 1: 45:48

Are you monitoring utilization? Oh yeah, If I'm getting saturated and I should upgrade and all that stuff, Because again that's a whole other thing, right?

Speaker 3: 45:56

Oh yeah, we proactively let our customers know that you're saturating it. Here's what's happening. This recently happened with us with a robotics company Because of how they were getting throttled. I think we ended up finding a bug in the I won't say which carrier, but in the carrier itself. Then we were able to do that, but we proactively, a lot of times let our customers know. I think the times we're actually most proud of this happened recently, when we tell our customers they're paying for a much bigger circuit than they need and say here's all the data from the last six months or a year You're actually spending $2,500 on that primary circuit. You don't need that two gig circuit, you're okay with one gig. Save a thousand dollars a month. Those are the ones we're actually the most proud of. Yes, we tell them when they should spend their most money, but I think it's really nice to be able to go to a customer and say please spend less.

Speaker 1: 46:49

The hard question I never got to. I was trying to set it up and I did a poor job doing it, but this is obviously a lot of benefit for businesses, right? So this is a show consisting mostly of network engineering folks. So and you and I had talked about this before we started recording I seem to have how can I say this and not sound like a big wimp but I become threatened by things that disrupt the model. Let's say that. So you know, automation, I felt, was a threat to my job, right, cloud, I felt, was a threat to my job. Now, as it turns out, as I've learned over time, that stuff's additive, right, that it's not that it's taking away my job. It's that these things like automation and cloud can actually make my job better or easier or more efficient, or I can offload things for my company in the cloud, but it doesn't mean they're firing other networking people.

Speaker 1: 47:47

So, to bring this full circle, meter is doing my job, I think, and I am threatened by it. So what do we say to network engineers who look at your full integrated, you design, you deploy and you manage the network, which is, I think, what my job is? What do we say to those folks who might be like, well, this is great, but this is a network engineering show and they're taking our jobs?

Speaker 3: 48:16

Yeah, and I think it's a valid question. You know, andy, you're somewhere in mid thirties.

Speaker 3: 48:25

You know you've been doing networking for the last 15 years or something. But I think the reality is this you know, I studied networking about 20 years ago. Now, when I go back to the university where I studied, they don't even offer the networking degree anymore. That's just a fact. As a network engineer, we have to come to terms with this fact. I recruit from some of the best universities all the time Stanford, mit, whatever. These kids don't even take networking classes because they're not even offered that much anymore. They get one week of networking in a distributed systems class.

Speaker 3: 49:01

So I think the first thing to actually realize is the inflow of talent just isn't there. That's one. Two, it's been the same number of network engineers for a while. There's actually a massive shortage. If you look at companies like Google that have Google University and other things, they're trying to train others into networking because the flow isn't just there. I'm happy to send you this link, but you should look up Bureau of Labor Statistics data on it on how many software engineers have grown network engineers which don't have the inflow that's coming in. So it's roughly been the same number of network engineers for a while.

Speaker 3: 49:42

But coupled with that, there's two things that are happening. One is the number of devices and applications on a network have grown dramatically. Network have grown dramatically. Two it used to be that there was one IT or networking person for every 75 to 100 people in a company. Today, the average is about 250. So you are in a situation where there's no new inflow of talent and the existing people asked to do way more than they currently are. And the network has become more important than it's ever been because everything in the world is packets. Now, as we all get old and actually studied networking, I don't know who's coming behind us, but even the folks that are today doing it. If you ask them hey, do you have time for that project you want to get to, or anything, or how are your KPIs? How are you dealing with it? When was the last time you monitored the network? When was the last time you did upgrades? It's a lot to be able to do with no new talent coming in, more expectations and more network load than ever before.

Speaker 1: 50:50

It's untenable, right Like we seem to be heading toward catastrophe.

Speaker 3: 50:55

So that's actually another huge premise of why we started Meter is, if you're in that position, we did not feel like there was a company that were building hardware and software for me as a network engineer, for me to be able to do my job well, which is serve my colleagues so that the overall company can do better Networking is this Archimedes lever for the rest of the business?

Speaker 3: 51:17

One of the things I really care about is making networking cool again, like truly, but I do think companies like us. We hope to be augmenting network engineers so that they can do much better things for their customers, but the reality also is there's not enough of us. Networks are falling apart. There's end of life, end of support networks out there, with some of the largest retailers with credit card data flowing through that who knows when was the last time they did anything with it. So I hope what we actually do is build such great hardware and incredible software. That's why even something like Command came in. Is that we want to build something so good that all the folks that are young, like you, andy, that grew up doing CLI, would love to use Command.

Speaker 1: 52:09

Just keep calling me young man. No, that makes a lot of sense and it rings true to a lot of the things I've been hearing for at least the past year or two. We don't have new talent coming in. I can't believe. Yet I keep hearing that that computer science courses have basically networking from the curriculum.

Speaker 1: 52:34

You said something earlier on that rang true for me when I was a cable guy at an ISP and I saw the statistics, the you know. You know today we have five wire. You know five computing devices in a home and you know, in two years we'll have 10. And there was kind of this Moore's law type math of the explosion of devices just in residential areas. And that's when I thought, wow, networking will grow for quite some time and I will definitely know this is a good career to go into. So it's such a strange thing to have that you said it before that explosion of end users and everything is on the network. I mean we have thermometers and fish tanks now that are IoT. There's just so many devices and the fact that we don't have the talent coming into the industry to support all this and it's just going to keep growing.

Speaker 1: 53:27

So I'm comforted that a company like yourself is addressing that? Because it sounds to me like if I am a network engineer working at a company using meter, I can do a lot more with less people like myself. I mean, we have less of us. So I guess we need tooling like meters to be able to manage a huge infrastructure, get more insights, that more kind of integrated solution. So isn't it funny I'm threatened by meter and yet you're trying to help me. So I'm glad we're having these conversations out loud, because when I see this I'm like, oh great, as a service, they're trying to make me go away, but there's less of me every day, every month, every year. Like we need help.

Speaker 3: 54:11

Yeah, I mean, we think of network engineers as farmers and we're just shovels Imagine doing farming without shoveling or a tractor or a plow and we felt like you know, there were some legacy vendors that build a shovel, a plow but it kind of stopped there. We need tractors for network engineers and it needs to be really great products. Again, the simplest way for you to know if people have cared about networking the decade or two is if you pick up a networking product that might be hardware or software, do you actually find it beautiful? And I'm sorry there's not a single beautiful networking product out there until we came along. That tells you how much people actually care and we want to build that. That lever is important. That productivity multiplier is important.

Speaker 1: 55:03

And this has been very informative for me. We got some great interactions in the chat. I think we found you a DAS customer, so that is awesome. Any parting thoughts? I think we covered. You know all the questions I had and then some. I think what Meter has is compelling. It solves a lot of problems for a lot of different use cases. Anything before we close this out.

Speaker 3: 55:30

Yeah, I think three things that I'll mention. One we really care about networking. There should be great hardware and software. Hardware should not be commoditized. Software should not be ugly. Two, we do everything from ISP, routing, switching, wireless DNS security, sd-wan, vpn, all integrated. That's the way it's supposed to be. And three, I love networking. So if anybody wants to reach out, my email is anil at metercom M-E-T-E-Rcom. I'll respond pretty fast.

Speaker 1: 56:07

Awesome. Thank you so much, anil. This has been a great session. Chris, thanks so much for joining. If you want to check out Meter, you have Anil's email address, which is pretty cool. I don't have many email addresses of CEOs. You're going right in my contacts. I'm going to bug the heck out of you. You can also find them at metercom. They have that awesome free resource which I'm trying to find here. It's metercom.

Speaker 3: 56:31

Where is it? Slash connect.

Speaker 1: 56:33

Slash connect, you can check out their marketplace of all kinds of ISP connectivity. I love it. And to check out everything Art of Network Engineering, you can check out our link tree at linktreecom. Forward slash, art of NetEng. Great conversation. Thanks so much, anil Chris, and we'll see you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Engineering Podcast. Hey everyone, this is Andy. If you like what you heard today, then please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. Click that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We are at Art of NetEng, that's Art of N-E-T-E-N-G. You can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineeringcom, where we post all of our show notes, blog articles and general networking nerdery. You can also see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering. Thanks for listening.