If you’ve ever connected with our team, there’s a high likelihood we’ve asked you for honest, unfiltered feedback about our products and services. We seek feedback early and often from our internal team, customers, partners, and peers to ensure we’re building products that delight our customers, and if we’re not, quickly course correct.
To get great feedback, we were excited to present at our first Tech Field Day (TFD) event, Networking Field Day 36 — a forum specifically geared towards giving networking vendors constructive feedback on their work. Meter founders Sunil and Anil Varanasi gave the TFD delegates a deeper look into our core company ambitions, our full stack architecture, and delivered live demonstrations of bringing up a Meter network from 0 to 1 and Meter Command.
We used our time to break down common misconceptions about Meter, and showcase what we’ve built to date and where we’re heading. Read on for key highlights from the day.
Why Meter?
To kick things off, Anil spent time outlining why he and Sunil started Meter in the first place, and our relentless focus on delivering a modern networking solution that’s consistent, accessible, and interconnected across the entire stack. Building with network engineers like ourselves in mind, Anil shared how we’re working to streamline the disparate systems and product complexities associated with networking today, and deliver powerful and intuitive products.
“As engineers, we didn't feel like great products were being built in networking anymore,” said Anil. “We wanted to have really great high-performing hardware, software, and combine them with operations to deliver a great product and a great service for IT and networking teams.”
These teams are tasked with the increasingly difficult job of keeping every system and team online and productive, and we didn’t feel that the networking products of the last decade were conducive to this growing responsibility. The full-stack architecture that we deliver—from our ISP procurement, routing, switching, Wi-Fi, Cellular, and the applications and software layered on top—is purpose-built to give them ultimate control over their networks.
“We believe to build great networking, you have to do it all together. Doing it separately is not something that we found leads to incredibly great outcomes for customers,” said Anil. “That's predominantly what we've spent a decade doing… delivering great products that are fully integrated now across the entire stack.”
Hardware + Software + Operations = Great outcomes
Sunil shared how our vertical integration requires consistent and tightly integrated feedback loops across our hardware, software, and operations. This enables us to deliver great outcomes to our customers.
“We improve our hardware and because of that, we have to make our software excellent. Once we make our software excellent, we have to make our operations great. And once we make our operations great, we take that back into our software and hardware,” said Sunil. “It's a complete loop that we maintain constantly throughout the company... it's tightly tightly integrated.”
Across our entire stack, we’re building around four core tenants: performance, reliability, scalability, and security. Sunil took the delegates through a comprehensive overview of our technical architecture, giving insight into our data plane, control plane, virtualization layer, management plane, and application layer. At the heart of it all lies our Network Operating System (NOS), which unifies our entire technical architecture across hardware, software, firmware, APIs, and security.
“When I talk about operational efficiency and rapid innovation, how do we achieve that?” posed Sunil. “We do that with our network operating system. It's a unified image that's built for all of our platforms, and we designed it to make sure the network is up and running at all times.”
Our NOS is not just firmware for individual devices and hardware, it’s firmware for your networks, and it’s managed through a single pane of glass. Sunil showed how NOS allows us to continuously deliver new software and purpose-built hardware, gain fast and effective feedback, deploy advanced automation, depreciate older technology, and finally, build powerful new tools like Meter Command.
Incentives matter
When setting out to build Meter, one thing was abundantly clear: the industry didn’t need another point solution. Instead, we wanted to build an incredibly performant, reliable, and secure networking solution that’s delivered as-a-service, with zero upfront costs or licensing fees. Sunil and Anil showcased how this structure ensures our incentives are tightly aligned with our customers’ — because we’re taking on the capital risk, we’re on the hook for providing great products and services that continue to delight our customers and earn their business. We’re not looking to sell a box of hardware at a steep margin. We want to sell great networks that enable networking and IT professionals to uplevel their own workflows, and in turn, the operating capacity of their entire organization.
“You're never going to hear us say ‘world's first’ for anything. We don't intend to be at all. We just want to build great products,” said Anil. “The incentives here matter on vertical integration. Our customers are happy and continue to be with us and pay us if our products and services work really well. We are not selling a bunch of hardware and then washing our hands.”
We’re certainly not the first networking company, but with continued feedback and alignment from our customers, partners, internal teams, and community, we hope to be the last ever built.
If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you at hello@meter.com.