Will networking as a service be “the next stronghold” in your managed services portfolio?
If Meter co-founder Anil Varanasi (pictured above) has his way, the answer is yes.
And today, the company rolled out a new solution for its networking-as-a-service platform designed to make network management easier.
Called Command, the generative UI product enables MSPs to use natural language to query a customer’s network, take action, and create custom software fit to their specific needs—and work in a shared space with other team members. The UI blends the features of a command line interface with modern dashboards, Varanasi says.
“We’ve been really thinking about how can we take the best of what command lines do, and the best of what dashboards do, and bring those together [in a way] that makes partners lives, and ultimately their customers lives, much, much simpler and easier. With Command, partners can use it to manage their routine operations or execute complex tasks.”
MSPs can ask Command to create a variety of dashboards to share with team members or customers. For example, a QBR dashboard could include full uptime charts, tables with all the most active clients, data usage topologies of the network devices on it, and more, Varanasi says.
Command’s small language models “are only trained on our architecture and our software,” Varanasi explains. “This is all real-time data, but we’re not making any API calls to anybody else. This is Meter.”
Command is in beta now, with availability expected later in September.
“With Command, what we’re seeing unequivocally, we’ve given it to partners and customers [in beta testing], is that they can have much higher quality and secure networks because it’s so much faster and easier to do things without the complexity, which will help them in turn increase their business—without having to be worried about, ‘If I take on another 30 customers, is the quality of my work going to drop?’ What we hope to do is reduce the amount of time it takes for each customer.”
Recent Foray Into The Channel
Founded in 2015, Meter provides a full stack that combines hardware, software, and operations. “So instead of buying and purchasing a lot of appliances, switches, wireless access points, then having to purchase something for security, and having to purchase something for DNS security, and having to purchase something for SD-WAN, VPN—all of that is a single platform and product that we provide. We design our hardware, manufacture it, write software, and then we help deploy and maintain it all as a service,” Varanasi explains.
Meter originally sold direct to enterprises but launched a partner program in March of this year. They tapped former Cisco Meraki executive Adam Ulfers to be the new VP of sales, overseeing the partner program.
Varanasi says selling through the channel was always on their roadmap.
“We always knew that we wanted to sell to partners,” he says. “What we wanted to do is two things. One, have a really mature sales team that can help the channel be more successful; and [two] also have programs in place where we are a great partner for the channel.”
Varanasi believes the traditional way of managing networks is broken. “Vendors are relying on partners to package networking as a service, which is really expensive for partners to be able to do. The approach we’re trying to take is that, with Meter, partners can provide a robust, scalable solution to their customers, because we do the full stack. It improves efficiencies for them, reducing both operational costs and support costs. But the other thing is, it allows partners to focus on business expansion” with zero capital cost for hardware and upgrades.
Meter is currently partnering with more than 300 MSPs, according to the company. The platform’s subscription pricing is based on square footage, and partners can choose to bill their customers directly or have Meter do the billing.
What’s Next
Meter in February received $35 million in funding, which Varanasi says will be used to push “the boundaries of the industry and hardware.” That includes expanding beyond North America and building new products for the platform, particularly around security. “Today, our security appliance is already part of the platform. DNS securities are already part of the platform. Our VPN is already part of the platform. We want to provide more products and services to even strengthen our offering further, so that with better integrated products, [partners] spend less time having to configure their customers and pricing gets better.”
He adds, “When partners are out there selling Meter, we want them to be both objectively and subjectively confident that it is the best product in networking, period. And that’s across the hardware. That’s across the software. That’s across services and pricing.”
