Max Clark: [00:00] Course I don’t have any water at my desk. Um, okay. Headset, things that beep. Um, the platform, progressive uploads in the background. So quality, like goes crazy. It looks horrible. Don’t worry about that. That’s just for us to like, be able to see and interact with each other. So, um, when we’re finished, like we’re gonna say goodbye basically. to, good to see you, yada, yada, yada. Whatever ends up being, it’s not scripted, so just kind of like wing it. Um, I’m gonna stop the recording and at that point just have to wait, like, at the top of your bar, it’s gonna have like a upload, upload thing. So we’re just gonna wait until it says a hundred percent.
Then you’re done. We,
Francisco Tello: Gotcha. Yeah, I see that, uh, counter up there right now, like live, so it looks like, yeah.
Max Clark: crashes, no worries. We’ll just come back in the session and it’ll, it’ll re-upload. so, uh, the most part, you know, like. Platform works pretty well. Um, I used to, I used to joke and make people do burpees or pushups before we started, just to kind of get like, [01:00] you know, like, know, some blood pumping, uh, get, you know, get a little endorphins going.
So, you know, that’s totally optional at this point. You can, you can do some pushups if you’d like, but, or, or not, like, I
Francisco Tello: Yeah, I, I, I took a walk around the, uh, around the neighborhood, uh, before this. So, um,
Max Clark: Where’s your,
Francisco Tello: yeah.
Max Clark: in town?
Francisco Tello: Uh, so I’m based out of, uh, the Health Health’s kitchen, uh, Hudson Yards area, uh, they call it. Yeah. They now call it The Hell’s Kitchen, Hudson Yards, uh, Alliance or something
Max Clark: I
Francisco Tello: like,
Max Clark: they’re rebranding it. Hudson
Francisco Tello: yeah.
Max Clark: We, uh, so let’s see here. We would’ve been there I 30th or 31st, and we walked, um, we ended up walking the line. Um. Where did we get, where did we start? Uh, all the way to south end of it, and then walked all the way up to Hudson Yard.
Francisco Tello: Uh, from the Highline you mean?
Max Clark: The Highline.
Yeah.
Francisco Tello: Nice. Yeah.
Max Clark: then did, [02:00] um, and then ended up, uh, going up to the observation deck, um, on the, you know, the Hudson Yards,
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: which my, my oldest son was, was really into, because you know, you could get like right on the glass and like look down a little
Francisco Tello: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. On the edge. Yeah.
Max Clark: And, uh, he got my wife really good because there’s that little like pad of glass where you can walk over it and look down.
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: And he didn’t tell her and he like, told her, he was like, oh my mom, come, I come here, come, I gotta check this out. And like,
Francisco Tello: And then look down.
Max Clark: over it. And so she’s like walking over it and then looked down and realized where she was. And I mean,
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: knew what he was doing ’cause I would’ve videotaped it, you
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Uh.
Max Clark: reaction was, was something.
Francisco Tello: Yeah, no, that, that area is pretty awesome actually. Um, well, we, um, my wife and I got married, uh, in, right in the middle of, uh, the pandemic when the city was like, completely empty. And then we did our photo shoot in the Highline. And you know, like if you’ve been to the Highline, you know that there’s always like hundreds of people there, like hanging out.
We had the highline pretty much for ourselves. [03:00] Um, yeah, some, some pretty beautiful shots. Um, but yeah, it’s a pretty cool area of the city.
Max Clark: yeah. We got, um, we ended up, um, splitting time, um, between Midtown. So we were on, uh, what, like 52nd and, um, 52nd and fifth, like, I think that’s where we were.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: And then, um, Washington Square.
Francisco Tello: Oh, Washington Square. Yeah.
Max Clark: to like, well, because like the second we, we, a trip in New York just flying to Europe.
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: so then coming back I was like, okay, well, you know, we need to do Statue of Liberty and Wall Street and One World Trade, and like all these things.
So I was like, okay, we’ll stay down, a little bit closer to it, you know? And then so we, we, so, you know. one of those, like, uh, my kids to see both. ’cause there’s like, you know, different personalities of the city depending where you’re in it. We
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Yeah,
Max Clark: you know, we didn’t, we didn’t go out to the Yankee stadium.
We didn’t do those things. But, you know, they, um, I, I still wanted them to kind of like, be like, oh look, [04:00] there’s a neighborhood here. You know, like,
Francisco Tello: yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s actual people living here. Yeah. It’s nice.
Max Clark: anything we should know or talk or, or know to stay away from or talk about or not talk about when we do this?
Francisco Tello: Um, I mean, if I, if, if we go into any topics that I, um, that I don’t know that I can disclose that information, I’ll just let you know. But, um, yeah, as long as we like, uh. We can go through anything of, uh, the case studies that we shared with you, anything that is public on our website, and I’ll try to give you my honest take, uh, on all of that.
Uh, but yeah, if there’s any, anything that I don’t feel at Liberty commenting on, I’ll, I’ll just let you know.
Max Clark: So I should start with you’re A-C-C-I-E and you’ve defected.
Francisco Tello: I have the fact. Yeah, so I, um, I actually spent seven years at Cisco and it was, uh, uh, one of the highlights of my career. Like I, I got started in networking by getting CCNA certified, like right at the end of my [05:00] undergrad. It was one, it was actually one of the options that for graduation. Um, and I, and I took it and I think it opened up, uh, the first few doors for me to get into, uh, networking and work for some local, uh, partners, mainly Cisco partners.
I’m originally from, uh, Panama, so I was working there back then, uh, working for regional partners in Latin America. And I think, uh. Outside of all the innovation with, uh, invent, literally inventing the, the router and, uh, and, and networking, uh, that Cisco did. Their education program is one of the highlights of what they’ve done.
Um, and, uh, I mean, yeah, we, we joke that, uh, I’ve, I’ve defected, but like that knowledge, uh, stays with you and it’s relevant. Uh, like if, if I, if I didn’t come to meet her and I had gone to, uh, HP or Juniper or, or even something like Microsoft, it would still have been relevant. So, um, it was very hard, but it was great.
But.
Max Clark: I, uh, I, I started my [06:00] career, um, as a field engineer working for var and ended up, I mean, I mean this will date me, but we were doing, uh, we were doing a token ring to 10 base t migrations for companies. Um, we had 60 4K lease line migration to frame relay. Um, I was taking, and at that point, you know, most of the, most of the land was threecom.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: you know, a lot of threecom switches is before, you know, and then, and then the rollout of Giggy. Um. And, uh, you know, Cisco, um, like the Cisco 1601 was like the hot, you know,
Francisco Tello: Oh
Max Clark: market back that point for like small enterprise
Francisco Tello: yeah.
Max Clark: you could get, uh, two, two integrated Wix on it.
And we were rolling out like, uh, dual hub and spoke, um, locate, you know, sites for companies. did a, um, I did a migration for, uh, a company, I think it was 14, [07:00] 15 remote sites with two hubs. And for some reason, I don’t remember the, I don’t remember what drove it. I don’t think they had a routing protocol in place originally.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: so we decided to go, um, E-I-G-R-P outnumbered, you
Francisco Tello: Oh
Max Clark: and,
Francisco Tello: yeah.
Max Clark: got all these remote sites and I’m like, reconfiguring live on these
Francisco Tello: Yep. Yep.
Max Clark: And you’re like, you know, type enter and you’re like, you know, of course lose connectivity and you’re
Francisco Tello: Lose connectivity. Yeah,
Max Clark: like waiting for it to come back up.
Um.
Francisco Tello: could, you could. But, uh, like the, the very first routers that I interacted with were like 17 hundreds and, and 27 hundreds. Could you do the reload in, uh, x uh, command back then in the 1600?
Max Clark: Didn’t, didn’t exist back then. No. I’m, I am, I’m old enough that like we, I have scar tissue, like I have, I have the scars to, to, to, you know, to show it. And then, um, you know, into the data center world, you know, the, uh, [08:00] uh, 65 oh nines with soup twos before the seven twenties were on the market, and then
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: came out and that was like, you know, just completely changed everything. But then you saw, I mean, like, you know, just the flow, um, found your big iron four thousands. You know, those, the price point of those for a
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: switch with A BGP Edge were like phenomenal. I haven’t done any network engineering for a while. Um, and so the last, my last hurrah was forklifting, um, a series of 76 hundreds over to the as SR nine K platform. and then you get all the stuff that, like all these other platforms have had for so long, like
Francisco Tello: Yep,
Max Clark: to stage and commit, you know, you’re like, this is the coolest thing ever. Or a protected control plane, right?
Francisco Tello: yep, yep.
Max Clark: and um, so, uh, ASSR nine K was definitely, definitely a, a, a very iOS XR was a needed upgrade for Cisco for a
Francisco Tello: Yeah, for [09:00] sure.
Max Clark: you know, but it’s, uh, I, you know, I tell people now, it’s like, um, Cisco has to cover like every edge case on the planet. You’re buying routers that are designed to cover every edge case
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: has an edge case that they
Francisco Tello: Somebody has it.
Max Clark: and, and so then you’re like, well, you know, if you don’t need all those edge cases, is it the best appliance for you to get, you know, you know, like it’s, you can get into that conversation, you know, argument really quickly.
But, and also so much has been bolted on
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: 25 0 4 controllers, you know, like cool tech with, um, what did they call their, um, air. It was AirWatch. Um, I forget what it was. But anyways, we don’t,
Francisco Tello: Yeah. But, but the, um,
Max Clark: too much here.
Francisco Tello: yeah, no, and the, the, the thing that, uh, a lot of that, uh, um, uh, puts you in is that if you’re supporting all of these edge cases as you release. [10:00] Net, uh, net new generations of hardware,
Max Clark: Mm-hmm.
Francisco Tello: you want to keep those customers happy. The new version of code needs to have some support for that.
And the moment you say, okay, I’m gonna deprecate this,
Max Clark: Oh
Francisco Tello: people are up in arms,
Max Clark: Oh yeah.
Francisco Tello: they’re like,
Max Clark: Oh
Francisco Tello: no way. Not happening. So you end up inheriting decades of, uh, technology that, um, which is, it’s, it’s tough.
Max Clark: Um, yeah, it’s, uh, like I said, we can, we can, we can probably get back into this topic later here, but I think let’s, uh, if, if, if it’s okay, we can get going, right?
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: um, how do I wanna start this out? Uh, I, let me, let me see. Usually I come a little bit more, um, I’ve got an idea of where I want to go with this one and, and I think I wanna go a little bit differently with you on this, so, um, um, I’ll, let me think here.
Lemme just do it this way. Okay. Ready. See, this is where the pushups come in handy. It’s like a brain [11:00] reset.
Francisco Tello: Ready
Max Clark: Alright. Um, Francisco, I have a ton of questions for you. I, I’ve really been looking forward to getting this scheduled and, and talking about meter for a while now. So thank you very much for joining. And, um, you know, as a network engineer in recovery, this
Francisco Tello: Aren Wheel, Aren Wheel.
Max Clark: well, I, I mean I, you know, I’m like, I’m, I’m like Cisco console cable, CLI only, you know, like, like it’s, I’ve got some issues, right? But as a, as a recovery network engineer, you know, when we talk with enterprises and we look at what’s been happening and the evolution of, of the, of the network stack, right?
You know, there’s, we had this period of time where, um. You know, you had, we had, uh, let’s just say the old, you know, like big logo OEMs that were in space and, and you were, you know, based on your skillset, you had different things available to you. And then we saw some entrants, right? And, um, [12:00] you know, really, I would say like Meraki and the ubiquitous of the world and then, you know, uh, Aruba and Aruba and Synanon.
And then we kinda had this like, uh, like this little revolution in, in the lan, right, of what was actually happening. And now the really exciting stuff is like the birth of SD wan, and depending on what you’re actually looking for, right? We can get into SD-WAN later. But, um, know, so there’s, there’s this kinda like this, it felt like this like iterative step.
And then for me it kind of felt like meter came out of like left field. Like, like all of a sudden it was like meter landed. um, know, I, I’d love for you to give like a quick intro to meter just to level set this conversation for me.
Francisco Tello: Awesome. Yeah, no, and, uh, that, that makes sense that, uh, coming out of left field, uh, um, uh, it comes up in our, in our conversations a lot because meter actually was. Started by the founders, uh, like 10 years ago in 2015. But, uh, nobody started hearing from us, uh, until the 2020s. Uh, and, and probably like closer to [13:00] 20, 23, 24 is when, uh, we started actually going to market, uh, a little bit more aggressively.
And that’s because when you’re trying to disrupt, uh, an industry that is as well established as networking, you have to do a lot of research. Right? And that’s what Anil and Sunil, the, the founders spent, uh, their time doing, uh, since 2015. They started researching, uh, who was, uh, out there, how to build a networking product from scratch that did something different from what the industry was doing.
Um, I think, uh, it’s, uh, it’s good that you mentioned vendors like, uh, Meraki and, and, and ubiquity, right? ’cause I think, uh, a lot of the work that, uh, Meraki did, um. Back in the late two, uh, two thousands and early, uh, 2000 tens was, uh, trying to democratize to an extent, uh, networking, uh, making it available for anyone.
Uh, even if, uh, you’re not, uh, an expert like a, like A-C-C-I-E, uh, not needing to have console cables to manage your equipment and introducing something like cloud management to the space. And, [14:00] uh, uh, I actually was, uh, uh, a Cisco Meraki for, for a while, and that drew me in for sure. But then, um, um. In the last year or so, which is, uh, when I’ve been at, at Meter, I saw that meter was trying to take that next step in making networking truly available to anyone, right?
The vision that the founders have is that they want networking to become something as ubiquitous and easy to consume as utilities in general. So that’s where the, the name comes from, right? Like meter is because of like a water meter or an electrical meter. Uh, today, if you’re a company and you’re, uh, moving to a new commercial space, um.
There are, there are a few things that you don’t give a lot of thought to. Like, power is not one of your concerns because you assume that there’s gonna be electricity and you’re gonna go in, you’re gonna flip on a switch, you’re gonna have, uh, electricity. You’re gonna plug in something to an outlet. You have, uh, a power for your appliances and the [15:00] equipment that you put on location.
There’s gonna be water when you go to the restroom, uh, that you’re gonna be able to use. Um. Those things you don’t worry about. Right. Um, uh, there was a time like, uh, at the end of the 19th century maybe when, whenever you wanted to electrify a building, you would actually design it from scratch and, and do everything, uh, from the ground up.
Uh, but nowadays we take that for granted. But that’s not what it is like with networking. Whenever you move to a net new space, unless you’re like very tiny and you literally just need one access point, you’re usually redesigning a network from, from scratch and picking components, uh, potentially from different vendors.
And you have to make them work together, either through your own, uh, internal teams, uh, that dedicate themselves to it, or you hire, uh, some form of integrator. Right. Uh, and media wants to kinda like, um, make all of that process much, uh, um. Much easier, right? So we have a vertically integrated stack that includes everything you need from [16:00] security appliances, switches, uh, access points, uh, pdu, uh, to deploy on location, uh, software that is purpose built for that hardware.
And then we give you an operational suite, uh, in, in the form of a subscription that includes design services, consultation services. It can include physical installation services, and it also includes proactive monitoring. And the other thing that it does is that the, um, customer, uh, has a predictable bill that they pay either on a monthly or yearly basis, right?
Hence meter, right? Uh, you know, what you’re getting into, you know what you’re paying for to get the outcome that you need, um, throughout some length of contract, right?
Max Clark: Uh, Meraki. Meraki really introduced, like you said, right? This, this web administered cloud portal, really easy deployment. You know, you, you plug in a box and it would, it would, it would launch and, you know, was successful. Hence why Cisco purchased them. Right? Like it really, it really brought [17:00] in a, um, a new approach.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: brought this idea of like, the, of the solve was, know, like access points. You know, why are you, you know, a thousand dollars AP down to, uh, you know, a hundred dollars ap? Not to say the thousand dollars aps aren’t better, it’s just like, you know, depending on your
Francisco Tello: It’s diminishing returns, right?
Max Clark: Well, it’s also like, what do you need?
Right? You know, again, like if you’re in a 2000 square foot space, you need one ap, you know, maybe you don’t need, you know, hardware antennas with band steering and like, you know, handoffs and all these different things. Right? So we can, we can, you know, there’s like this whole other conversation I’m gonna try to avoid getting into.
But what I’m, I’m curious is, is like. What was the problem that meter fundamentally was built to solve? Right? Because you’ve, you’ve talked about it a couple different things of like, you know, vertically integrated, you know, hardware and software stack all the way down to PDU and then also this, um, you know, the idea of deployment management and, and using an integrator and MSP in these different things.
And so that, that’s kind of like two different problems regards. But you know, when, you know from an inception point, [18:00] and now when you’re talking and, and when people are, are looking at meter, like what is the, like the fundamental base problem? You say that we solved this problem for you.
Mm-hmm.
Francisco Tello: I mean, ultimately what, uh, most companies want is that they want a network that lets them do the work, uh, that actually generates them revenue or that lets them, uh, uh, provide value for their customers or consumers. Uh, it could be, it could be a non-for-profit, so potentially that too. Um, but the network is, uh, to an extent, uh, a means, uh, to an end, right?
Uh, it should be as easy to, to do as electricity and water. You just want the lights on. You just want, um, uh, to consume water that is clean. You want a network that is secure and that is performant, and that it’s, uh, uh, highly available. Um, and then typically when you deal. Uh, the traditional, uh, networking vendors, uh, what, uh, you’re buying is not necessarily a network.
You’re buying pieces of a network that someone puts together, right? There’s no scenario where you come to meter and you say, Hey, I want one ap, or [19:00] I want one switch, or I want one security appliance. Uh, instead what you’re, what we’re giving you is basically a, um, um, white glove approach to networking where basically we take in an input from you in the form of what is the physical space that you want to cover?
And we design a network for you that will go live and that will remain performance, secure and operational a certain amount of time. We typically guarantee something like three nines of availability. Um, but you’re never putting together Lego pieces. You’re never worrying about, um. What is the refresh for this network gonna cost me in five years?
’cause you’re gonna have to do that likely. Um, all of that is bundled into that subscription based model. So you have predictable costs for the lifetime of that network. When it comes time to make it better in the future, you can now, uh, just move on to the next generation of hardware. That meter offers a next generation of software, uh, and you don’t have to go and make a big [20:00] capital expenditure again.
Um, and then if your needs change, that subscription is also covering, uh, those uh, uh, needs that are changing. For example, a very common example is that, uh, our customers might go live with our one gig security appliances, right? Because they have less than one gig total internet bandwidth. But then two years down the road, they upgrade their internet circuits, and now they have something like five gigs of combined, uh, internet, uh, bandwidth, typically with a traditional vendor.
What this means is that you have to go. Uh, open up your, uh, checkbook and buy a new bigger batter security appliance, uh, in meter. The subscription covers that, um, uh, upgrade to the higher capacity security appliance. Um, if in the same space where you have deployed meter, you’re now deploying some new system, like, uh, maybe new security cameras or new, uh, access control systems that require, I don’t know, 20 more ports in this space.
Normally you [21:00] need to go and buy some additional switches from your traditional networking vendor. In the case of meter, it’s as easy as plugging into an, uh, an available outlet. You get a new switch that will cover those extra reports. Um, so those kinds of things are all covered, right? You’re, you’re changing needs, your outcome that you’re trying to guarantee.
You’re never purchasing just boxes from, uh, meter, which is usually the traditional approach, and it’s what, uh, especially for IT teams that need to do more with less gives them a lot of headaches because, uh, uh, budgeting becomes a nightmare, right? Um, you need to worry about what is the licensing that is actually gonna get me the features that I want.
In the case of Meter, the base and only subscription includes all of the functionality that the box has today and in five years, right?
Max Clark: is interesting because, uh, what meter is, what meter has done is build the hardware, build the software stack, but then also [22:00] serve as the MSP, the integrator, the var, you know, like there’s, you know, depending on what you’re interacting with, right? You take that entire stack and you could collapse it into one entity.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: you are presenting it fundamentally different. Right. And,
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: and the, you know, uh, it’s, it’s interesting talking to network engineers now, right? Because the role of the network engineers changed a lot over the last 10, you know,
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: 15 years, right? And, nowadays, for the most part, know, like, um, you know, savvy, experienced network engineers are like, I have to have network at this location, not, I want to go out and configure the switch stack.
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: Y you know, like, it, it’s, it’s
Francisco Tello: Yeah,
Max Clark: that, that, know, and it’s, um, you know, ’cause again, like the value that they’re delivering to the organization is not like, you know, I’ve configured, you know, OSPF and you
Francisco Tello: exactly.
Max Clark: Zero and Area one
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: whatever redundancy, right?
It’s like, no, no, no. When you plug in or you go [23:00] there, the access points work. Like
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: that’s all the
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: cares about,
Francisco Tello: And that, and that’s precisely the, the model, right? Like we, we are selling you an outcome, a network, not, not switches, not OS pf not PGP, not vxlan, none of that. Right? We are, we’re offering you a secure, highly available performant network as part of that model, which is what most people care about.
Right? Um, yeah, no, good point. One, one small clarification that I will, uh, just make, uh, is that while we can offer the entirety of the, uh, installation and design processes in, in many of, in many instances, uh, a lot of our business is shifting toward working with integrators and, uh, technology services distributors.
And they are becoming our primary go-to, uh, market strategy. And we can also play with, uh, the services that they themselves offer, uh, to our, uh, and their customers. Uh, we just work hand in hand to make sure that the SLA and the outcome is met.
Max Clark: Yeah. What I like about this model is, uh, you guys, um. I, I think we should talk [24:00] about this a little bit. Um, what the actual, um, like pricing model is and,
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: when somebody’s actually talking with meter. ’cause you, you, you’ve talked, you mentioned this a little bit, you know, like going and buying boxes. Oh, I need a 48 port switch.
Oh, I need 5 48 port switches. Oh, I’ve got an IDF and an MDF you know, extensions and this many aps and we have to do a wifi survey. And that changes a lot. You know,
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: talking about, you know, either purchasing boxes or renting one Box, you know, Bo you know, other, other vendors and other other service providers that are providing, you know, uh, Network as a service.
I’ll just use that term. Even
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: three different things trying to own that term right now.
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: Um, you guys approach this very differently. Like it’s a very different engagement model in terms of like, you know, pre-sales, pricing, what the contract, how, you know, walk me through that a little bit in more detail.
Francisco Tello: Yeah, so the, the pricing model is probably the, the easiest part. Um, for, for an initial budgetary uh, approach. Uh, we, uh, have a pricing model based on the square footage that we are covering, [25:00] and we tweak that price per square foot a little bit, depending on the specific vertical and the type of space that the customer is gonna have.
Uh, so as a initial budgetary approach, what we take in from the customer is square footage. Maybe we will also take in floor plans, and then based on that square footage we give you a monthly or yearly, uh, fee that includes, uh, all of the above. There’s really just two. Real models that meter works with in terms of like SKUs, so to speak.
There’s a professional model which accommodates for an integrator to provide their own installation, uh, services. And there’s the premium model where meter is basically doing, uh, the whole shebang, uh, and it’s just slightly more expensive. Uh, but that’s all the input that we, uh, need for doing an initial quote.
Um, and then, uh, as the sales process moves forward, we fine tune it based on the input that we got for from floor pans, from conversations, uh, with the [26:00] customer doing some, uh, form of consultative, uh, design. Uh, and we fine tune it to the specific vertical, and then we arrive at a final pricing that is still based on square footage.
The only thing that has changed is the price per square foot, right? Which usually becomes, uh, more attractive the more we know about, uh, the customer. But, uh, it’s very easy to understand what a given location is gonna cost you for you as a customer or as an integrator, because very likely a lot of your locations are gonna be very similar to one another.
And the big change is gonna be how many people and what’s the square footage, uh, difference, uh, from those, or the physical size difference between those locations. So as you plan net new locations, uh, you already kind of know what to expect, and you don’t have to make these complex spreadsheets with, oh, a hundred switches cost this and, uh, 20, uh, and 2,500 aps cost this, and, uh, five security plans cost this.
And then, oh, but I need the license for this one and, and I don’t need it for this other one. Right? So it’s very predictable, very easy to kind of like understand [27:00] how to, um. Upsides and downsides, right? Because that also happens, right? We have customers that have many sites, but then they need to spin down locations.
Um, so they know what that’s gonna, uh, reflect, uh, on their bill as they spin down locations and then add new locations in different, uh, places, right? It’s a, it’s a very, very easy to consume type of input. Um, so that’s, that’s, uh, what happens on that, uh, front for, for initial pricing. Does that make sense?
Max Clark: Yeah.
Francisco Tello: And then, um, the consultative process itself? Well, there’s, there’s customers that are very low touch and they really just need a network to go live, uh, for 10 locations. They’re all pretty similar cookie cutter. Uh, but then, uh, even though the offering is quite well tailored to the lean it side of the spectrum, we also have some really large customers with, uh, uh, very fleshed out.
It staffs that also benefit from the predictability of our pricing model, [28:00] but with which we need to do a lot more consultative work just to make sure that everything is gonna work to what they expect. Um, this is the case for, for example, uh, we’re working with a pretty large hedge fund company, Bridgewater Associates.
They have one of the most sophisticated IT teams that I’ve worked with in my career, and I’ve covered the, the global enterprise space, uh, in the last, uh, five years of my career. Um, yet they see a lot of benefit for, uh, uh, using a model such as meters that covers most of their needs, and it’s very easy to consume as they, as a team start shifting a lot of their know-how into other areas of their business that drive more value to them, right?
Like, for example, managing their cloud environments like, uh, Azure and AWS, where a lot of their expertise is, uh, shifting towards, right? Um, uh, whereas as you say, right, if, if I’m standing up a, the office, what I want is that office to have network connectivity and be able to consume my applications, which, [29:00] uh, potentially doesn’t require a lot of their own involvement.
Um,
Max Clark: What I love about this, like conceptually and thinking it through, is. It really shifts the dynamic between it, the network and the business
Francisco Tello: mm-hmm.
Max Clark: And as an IT practitioner, what ends up happening to you always is like, you get a phone call or an email that says, oh, by the way, we signed a lease.
We’re moving in 30 days. Like, go figure it out, right?
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: And, and that turns into this big scramble always of, of, you know, we, we need, we need structured infrastructure, we need cabling, we need to do a site plan. We need now need to buy equipment, right? And so then you get into the situation where you’re like, okay, we need to buy all this gear. And depending on the organization and, and, and you know how many reps you have with this, then you’re like, fighting for budget. Oh, I need a new firewall. I need a switch, I need an access
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: And I love the floor space model and the plan because it really makes this very, very clean, like shift [30:00] of,
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: of, um. You know, perception inside the organization, it’s like, oh, business just signed 15,000 square foot of floor space.
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: the network is like a facilities charge, right? You know, really you’re talking about like, you wouldn’t, you know, you know, like maybe you’re getting janitorial from the building or you have your own service or you know, what all these different things are, but like, Hey, no, it’s 15,000 square feet.
Like this is just what it’s gonna cost us to have a network here.
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: not, know, um, a buddy of mine had the best line ever. Um, and he was, uh, he was a VP of global IT for a, for a company. So, so I mean, offices in multiple continents. he got into a conversation one day and, and he was telling me this later, and it was something like somebody, somebody complained to him that it was really expensive, like what they were spending for the company was spending on, it was really expensive. And he just kind of looked back at him and he is like, I don’t know what you’re, I don’t spend any money. It is really inexpensive. I spend $0. You have [31:00] laptops for your teams. That’s expensive. I don’t spend, that’s not my, my, like I’m not
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Yeah.
Max Clark: And, and it was, and it like, it, it opened up a new avenue for him with the, with the company because he really started this process at that point to really educate and, and push this idea of like, what was the actual budget line items.
Like it was responsible for acquiring it and deploying it and maintaining it, but it wasn’t like, it was like, oh no, no, no, like marketing and sales. You’ve got, you know, job recs out for 200 people. Like this is what it’s gonna cost in addition to the salary to bring them into the organization and, and made a much, much more interesting, I think like, place of be, you know, of state for it and the business and like, kind of like everybody working together.
Francisco Tello: Yep. Yep.
Max Clark: think back at that. Um, it’s, um, you know, the. There’s so many, there’s so many places I want to go with this one. You also, you, you, you said something really interesting to me, [32:00] which is like, it value shift and, and you started off by talking about a little bit about, you know, utility of the network.
You know, this expectation of like, Hey, it’s just gonna work. You know, power just works. You know, I I use this phrase of like, internet as the fourth utility for a long time. Like, you just expect it to be there,
Francisco Tello: To be there.
Max Clark: Um,
Francisco Tello: And the sad part is that you don’t, you don’t get praised. If it’s working great. Uh, you only get beat up if it’s not working.
Max Clark: nope. Nobody cares about the power
Francisco Tello: That’s a sad part. Yeah.
Max Clark: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a very, it’s a very similar thing, right? Where it’s just, it, you know, it’s, um, I think in a lot of cases for it, the, the, the perfect outcome is invisibility, right? Like, nobody notices that it’s there.
Francisco Tello: Yep. Exactly.
Max Clark: you notice that it’s there, then it’s because it’s a problem usually.
And then it’s like, you know, you have, you have to deal with that, and you have to, and you have to rectify it. and that’s why, know, this, this movement, I think with more [33:00] sophisticated enterprises, I mean, regardless of the size, but really this move from like, you know, it is just a pure support, support function to like a value generation, you know, for the business has been really, I think, exciting for a lot of it people as well that are leading the charge in these things.
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: Um, we, you had sent me a, an example here that I wanna dig into a little bit. And, um, and I think this was interesting also because it was a, uh, an, I think an atypical space for a lot of people. This was education and, um, and education. Uh, you know, I can’t think of a, I can’t think of an industry that’s probably more it constrained in terms of budget allocation than probably.
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: education segment. So, um, can you, can you like, just run me through this really quickly and let’s, let’s start from the beginning and, and, and talk about it.
Francisco Tello: Yeah, I mean, uh, I think the, the, the, um, use case that you’re referring to is, uh, what we did with [34:00] web school, which is, uh, a pre-K through 12, um, uh, school in, in Tennessee. Um, they’re serving something like, uh, a little bit of a thousand students in a relatively, uh, a large campus, 12 buildings, like a hundred acres or so.
Uh, they deal with the same constraints that everybody, uh, is dealing with in the industry in terms of, um, budgeting, but amplifying, right? Because if it’s hard for a financial services company to see the value of paying for, uh, uh, um. A network that has some set of specs. Like if you take that down to like, uh, like a school, like nobody’s gonna see the value of doing that, even though it’s critical for the work that gets done in the school, right?
Like, uh, there’s some work that is still done with pen and paper and books, uh, in schools, but a lot of it is now, uh, heavily dependent on, on having internet, uh, connectivity. Um, and then, uh, this, uh, school, well, uh, they hit the, the usual, [35:00] uh, uh, cycle that, uh, you often get trapped into, uh, when you’re dealing with technology purchases that are usually CapEx heavy, right?
Every five, seven years, you need to go in and refresh the equipment because. Many things might have happened. Uh, one thing could be that the needs of the, uh, school have changed. Maybe you need better, uh, performance, you need better internet speeds. Um, uh, but the other one is just age, right? Like, uh, manufacturers start facing out support for, uh, older gear, and they start, uh, hinting you toward moving to the next generation of devices.
Otherwise you risk, uh, falling, uh, behind. Right? And, um. There is never a guarantee that what you paid for back in 2020 is gonna be the same that you paid for in 2025 because of these sort of like CapEx heavy, uh, models where you’re doing a big expenditure on the switches and the aps and the security appliances.
And then maybe you have a somewhat predictable cost when it comes [36:00] to support and licensing. But the, the gear itself, uh, can be quite unpredictable. And, uh, uh, when, uh, the team at web school were starting crunching their numbers, they, they were on a, uh, uh, a Cisco traditional infrastructure and they wanted to refresh it to the next generation.
Uh, just the hardware upgrade was gonna cost them something like 250,000. Right. Uh, which was well beyond, uh, their capability, uh, budget wise. And you weren’t even considering things like support, um, uh, for that, uh, for that new environment. Right. Um, so that’s what led the, uh, the IT director, um, Jim, to start looking at other options.
And then he started evaluating, uh, meter. Um, and well, the first thing that was, uh, very attractive to him was, um, the, the purchasing model, right? No upfront cost for, uh, the school. You can do it on a yearly basis if needed or if, uh, if it’s better. Uh, you can also do it, uh, all, uh, uh, [37:00] in one go, uh, with some financial advantage.
And it’s all inclusive, right? You have all the gear that you’re gonna need. You’re, you don’t need to worry about, uh, fancy licenses. Uh, you’re gonna have support services integrated, uh, not just break fix support, uh, which, uh, like you, you call in when the wifi is down, but rather. Proactive monitoring. And this was also very important for, uh, Jim and the school because, um, he was retiring, uh, the next year and he was like the most network savvy person in the team.
There was, uh, uh, a second person in the staff who was inheriting a lot of this, and he wanted to make sure that when he left, he left a good legacy for the school and they wouldn’t be in trouble. Right. Uh, and coincidentally, that’s also another big issue that a lot of, uh, companies are dealing with in the relatively short term.
I think, uh, there’s a study out there that, uh, by 2030 there, there’s gonna be like 25% of network professionals retiring. And not a lot of people are going into networking because, um, [38:00] uh, they are, they’re going into more, quote unquote sexy fields like, uh, data science or, or AI and stuff like that. Uh, so there, there’s a significant, um, uh, tech, uh, debt, uh, in terms of, uh, personal there.
So he wanted to make sure that. As he left the school was gonna be in good hands. Um, and that is part of the promise that, uh, uh, meter was, uh, giving them, right? Like we are basically an extension of the customer’s team, the integrators team. And even if your resources are somewhat constrained, you’re gonna have them enhanced by a dedicated team of, uh, media support engineers are gonna be watching over your back.
Right. Um, so okay, we checked off the box of finances and we check off the box of, um, having amplifying the, the, um. The, um, technical capabilities of your staff, uh, to an extent, uh, and not having to worry about, uh, additional licensing fees and things like that. But then the next time, this happens in five, seven years, [39:00] uh, and they need to refresh.
Uh, again, this is all covered in the mirror subscription, so there’s not gonna be any surprise cost in, uh, 20 30, 20 32 when they need to, uh, again, uh, face out some of this gear because it’s, it’s aging, uh, it’s already baked into that subscription and they know what it’s gonna cost them, right? Um, so yeah, that’s where they saw a lot of benefit.
Things that surprise them in the process is that whenever you go into a space such as this and you have like an existing wifi network, uh, let’s say you have a hundred aps and you go out for a quote for a, maybe you’re switching vendors, right? You’re gonna, you’re with Cisco and then you’re moving to hp.
You tell hp, Hey, what, uh, a hundred aps of this, uh, category gonna cost me, right? And they will give you a quote. And most networking vendors out there, they’re not gonna bat, uh, or, uh, they’re, they’re not gonna, uh, like stop you there and say like, oh, are you sure it’s, uh, uh, a hundred a piece that you need?
Uh, many of them might be more [40:00] consultative and might try to give you a better outcome, et cetera, et cetera. But most of them will be content to sell you the a hundred access points, right? Uh, in the case of Meter, since we’re gonna be on the hook for supporting that network, we. Basically have or incentivized to make sure that the existing design works, because otherwise we’re gonna have to be compensating you.
Right? So we did an assessment of the existing network. We sent people on site, they did the side walkthrough and all that. And we, uh, ended up designing the network for 30%, uh, more access points total to provide better, uh, connectivity in the space. But not just better connectivity, but also redundancy.
Right? Um, ’cause, uh, we usually design our networks with built-in redundancy so that you can tolerate, uh, individual component failures. Uh, if we go down to the wifi level, for example, this means that, uh, we are first designing for. The maximum occupancy of people who could fit in that space, uh, by law. And then, [41:00] uh, we take the number of access points that we’re gonna deploy there, and we salt and pepper them across at least a pair of access layer switches so that even if you lose an entire access layer switch with all of the aps associated with it, that space is still working from a wifi perspective.
Why? It’s not because we’re super kind and we love all of our customers and they’re awesome and we need to be good to them or anything like that. It’s just because we are incentivized to that. Uh, due to the SLA based model,
Max Clark: Mm-hmm.
Francisco Tello: very few companies make money when they’re paying their customers. So we don’t want to be in the situation of, uh, constantly compensating them.
Uh, and then we design the network to be resilient because of that. Um, and this actually comes up, uh, all the time in the case of web school. Um, one of the things that they also surprised them as they moved on, uh, to work with us was that. We were opening support tickets for them and we would be telling them, Hey, you have one access point that is down.
And they would, would, they wouldn’t know, uh, first because, um, uh, we are [42:00] proactively monitoring the network 24 7, which is something that most it people are not doing. Not because they don’t want to, but because they have other stuff to do. Um, and second. They also didn’t notice because the network was redundant, right?
Losing one AP didn’t mean losing, uh, network connectivity in this space. It would just mean that, uh, we would need to go in and replace that and make sure that it’s, uh, working again. Um, uh, but it wouldn’t impact their operations, right? So both of those things also surprise them because normally, uh, traditional vendors, like they, they will collect a lot of telemetry on devices, especially the ones that are cloud managed, like, like Meraki, like Juniper Mist.
Um, but they’re, what they’re watching out for, for the most part, is things like, uh, software crashes, device crashes, uh, bugs that they haven’t caught, uh, in, uh, in initial, uh, testing, but they’re not really watching out for the performance of your network. Not because they’re evil, it’s just because they’re not incentivized to do so.
Max Clark: Yeah, you said a few things. I wanna circle [43:00] back to the first one is you said like IT director and network team, right? Like, this isn’t a, an argument that there were no IT people and it was all like. There was no skillset around networking. They were maintaining a network. They had a network, they just, they needed to upgrade the network, right?
So there’s, there’s people and skillset, you know, already in place that decided to go a very different way towards the future, right? And
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: that’s, um, I think this goes back to what we were talking about a little bit ago of, you know, this changing role of a network engineer and, and it practitioner around like outcome delivery as opposed to like, I’m actually typing and configuring, like, I
Francisco Tello: commence.
Max Clark: now, you know, like, listen, I, I still enjoy configuring routers, but like, it’s a drag, you know, like, you know, like it’s, you know, like, it sucks. the, the
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: to, I’m gonna back into some numbers here because this, this always stands out to me because you, you, you, you gave me some, some, some breadcrumbs here. A thousand users [44:00] with a $250,000 CapEx. Uh, so $250 per user in CapEx. Now, CapEx is only the first part of the story, right? Because, you know, like depending on what you’re negotiating, you can just start off at usually a 20% per year per annum support load, right? So at a $250,000 CapEx, you somewhere between 25 and $50,000 a year on support and licensing and maintenance going forward. So years on this isn’t $250,000
Francisco Tello: Now it’s more
Max Clark: in expense. Like,
Francisco Tello: Yeah,
Max Clark: for anybody who’s gonna send me hate mail, these are very generic numbers, okay? Like, don’t,
Francisco Tello: they are. They are.
Max Clark: too hung up on this. I’ll get to the point. Um, so you still have design deployment, professional services, implementation, cut over, ma, you know, like all these things above and beyond number now. School is gonna be more dense than the average enterprise, but in an average enterprise with a thousand users, I’m just gonna switch to enterprise. You know, depending on the floor plan, you’re allocating [45:00] 250 to 500 square feet per person in a standard office kind of build out, right?
Francisco Tello: Yep. Yep.
Max Clark: So, you know, for, for, um, a thousand users, you’re talking about 250,000 square feet to 500,000 square feet. You know, again, depending on what you’re doing, you know, if you’re, if you’re open floor plan, touchdown workstation, you’re gonna be on the lower end. If you’re, you know, traditional legal offices with everybody with wood paneling, you’re gonna be, you know, on the higher end. Right. Um, at a, at a high level, you know, not what, not, not in the case of like we, but like at a high level for somebody saying, got 250,000 square feet with a thousand employees and I’m thinking about spending $250,000 to buy hardware, where does meter fit into that?
Like, how, like what’s the contrast?
Francisco Tello: Uh, so you, you start off with a very similar metric, and then again, we, we can, uh, provide you budgetary pricing. It’s, it’s usually like, and, [46:00] and again, I’m, I’m not quoting any Yeah,
Max Clark: know, the point here is, is like you have to have a conversation to figure out your specifics and what your floor plan is
Francisco Tello: exactly.
Max Clark: do you have, you know, um, a know, I had a client that for some reason put Mylar, you know, had these, uh, had windows in their offices and they ended up, um, somebody came in and tin the windows and they would look really pretty except the
Francisco Tello: Yeah. But they attenuated RF
Max Clark: Oh, it was crazy.
Francisco Tello: classic.
Max Clark: You know, so the CEO is like, why doesn’t my wifi work in my office anymore? And you’re like,
Francisco Tello: That’s crazy. Yeah,
Max Clark: this stuff we get to deal with.
Francisco Tello: yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, so one of the things that we do with the square footage based model for computing is that that assumes. Like the most dense, uh, scenarios, right? Uh, ’cause it’s very d like 250,000 square feet, uh, in a warehouse versus 250,000 square feet in a school or in a corporate campus are very different, right?
So we are leaning toward the [47:00] more dense environments for the back of the napkin nap, uh, back of, back of the app came, uh, math calculation. Uh, so we’re skewing toward like the enterprise environment and not so much toward the, the warehouse, uh, environment. Uh, but then we go in and we fine tune based on the vertical that you’re in and any input that we get from you.
But we’re never gonna design a network for like, bare bones coverage, right? Like, things that we look at in, in your floor plans are things like maximum occupancy, right? What, what, like if you were to hold an event in this space. Um, what is the maximum amount of people that the fire marshal would not go in and break down your door for and tell you that you’re doing illegal occupancy of this space?
And then we typically design for that to accommodate for future, uh, growth. Um. Depending on the specific vertical, we will make some concessions. And then we use corrective factors on the maximum number of people. Uh, so usually the corrective factor, um, is, uh, under one. So it’s a, [48:00] it’s a fraction of, of one per person in, in like three PL spaces where the density of devices is low, but the physical space is very large.
And then when we go into the school, the corporate environment, we’re gonna have factors that are above one. Right. Typically skewing toward two to two, 2.5 devices per person in that physical space. Uh, and that’s kinda like, uh, how we orient the, the number of devices that we’re gonna end up doing. But then we also do, uh, an actual survey process.
We build out, uh, floor plans. We usually use Hamina for this, and we share, uh, that is like one of the deliverables from any interaction with meter. You’re gonna have like, kinda like the simulation of what you actually get, uh, when you sign up with us. Uh, and then the other thing that we do that is commonly not done, unfortunately, especially when you’re dealing with.
Vendors that have made things so easy that you can often set and forget them, and you, uh, is that, uh, very often, like someone will do a site survey, they will, uh, design the very minute [49:00] details of the wireless network, uh, configurations that need to go in place when they’re dealing with like Meraki or with Miss or something like that.
Amazing. It’s gonna work perfect, but then you put it in and you leave it to defaults. Happens all the time. It was the bane of my existence as a, as a Cisco Meraki sales engineer because it was not the fault of the, of the devices. It was just, it was just that. It, it didn’t like the thing that you designed for, you didn’t actually implement.
Right? Um, so we go in and. Set the, the, uh, actual, uh, required settings on all the devices. Of course, there’s RRM and stuff going on behind the scenes to compensate for variations and stuff like that. But we will set your network to run under some specific constraints that we know are gonna be good for you.
Right. Uh, so it’s a little bit of the, the process that goes, uh, into all of it. Um, so hopefully that helps.
Max Clark: I mean, I’m laughing when you say like two and a half devices per, per person. I, uh, I had a, we had a, had a client move into a, I think it was 15,000 square foot floor plate,[50:00]
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: they decided that they didn’t wanna have any wires, everything was gonna be wireless. And at the time when they factored in, like test equipment in different things, it was like, you know, we, we were like, we were like five devices per person on average.
And then
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: like, the multiple up and you’re like, well, and, and, and you’re like. I don’t think you, it was like, you know, trying to be like, this isn’t gonna work the way you think it’s gonna
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: You know, like, because you don’t have wires at your house
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: and there’s
Francisco Tello: And there’s too
Max Clark: there, and you’ve got all your whatever TVs and everything in your Xbox and PlayStation, whatever, you know, and, and stuff.
And you’ve got like, you know, 25 devices on your home wireless. Like, you, you, you really haven’t really thought this through, that you’re gonna have, you know, a hundred people with four devices each in this,
Francisco Tello: Yeah.
Max Clark: this space. And then be like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, that’s, that’s, that works great. Oh, by the way, we also wanna do real time voice and video, you know, like, and you,
Francisco Tello: On top of all of that. Yeah, yeah. No, that’s the other thing that goes into the design process, right? We generally [51:00] assume that you’re gonna run, uh, zoom or Microsoft teams on your, on your network. So we usually design for like, uh, minus 65 DBM primary signal strength and minus 67, which, uh, for secondary signal strength.
So, so that even like first. It facilitates roaming to always have two good options, uh, close to you. Uh, but then second, uh, it also makes sure that even if you lose the access window that you’re connected to because there’s a failure, power outage, whatever, uh, or a cable gets cut, um, you can always associate to another AP in the same area without you moving and still have voice quality.
Right? So those are some of the kinda like, uh, cookie cutter stuff that go into our designs, even if the customer is not asking for it, right? They’re. Oftentimes you as a sales engineer working for whoever you wanna work, you’ll always run into a customer who underestimates their own needs because they think that that’s gonna, uh, be a little bit better for them budget wise.
And, and I get it. Yeah. [52:00] And, and I get it why they think that, right? Because it, it’s a big expenditure. Right. And again, I think that’s why what meter is trying to do is transformative for those types of scenarios. I have, every time I have a conversation with a customer today, I have to tell you, Hey, don’t worry.
Like. We don’t really mind if we give you more aps or if we give you more switches than what you’re requesting. It, it won’t change your, your subscription cost. Like your subscription cost is based on the physical space that we’re covering. And that’s basically it. Uh, so yeah, you, we don’t have to piecemeal this, right?
If you need a hundred aps, it’s fine. If you need 120, it’s fine. It’s gonna cost you that. And people find it very hard to believe. But yeah, the, the, the. I think especially for the lay person or people who work in it but have never worked on the vendor side, one of the most expensive things for a vendor to deal with, um, it’s not really the number of boxes that they give you.
It’s supporting the super old ones, right? Like usually you’re, uh, usually [53:00] any, any one vendor has like, um, n plus two generations of hardware, uh, in the field, right? So the, the current one, the, the one that is like bleeding edge and the one before that. So we’re supporting like three. Likely different code basis, uh, through that process.
And you stretch that for a very long number of years. So the life cycle of a given product in the market is something like, uh, 12 years total from when you released it to when you actually take it out, uh, in the case of meter. What we’re trying to do to reduce costs on that front is that we are aiming for n plus one, so the current generation and the previous one right after that.
And we don’t ambition any of our customers running any one of our, uh, generations of hardware for much more than five years, which makes things. Exceptionally easy for us in terms of maintaining code bases because as we roll out a net new generation of, of software, we could rearchitect the, uh, uh, code base for that new generation of, of hardware and not [54:00] have to worry about, uh, what the previous generation, the, the previous two generations were doing, right.
Uh, and that cuts on support costs by a lot. Um, and then we can transfer those, uh, into being a little bit more efficient for our customers. Right? Which again, in the case of web school, they were blown away by the price difference be between what they were getting, uh, before, uh, with what they were getting with meter.
Max Clark: Uh, really common now is a, uh, we talked, we talked about this earlier, like, um, you know, multiple different manufacturers being deployed on a network. a lot of times that shows up as there’s a, uh, manufacturer providing the layer two and access point. So the physical layer, even though access point’s, not physical, but um, providing the switching layer,
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: the wireless layer, and then another manufacturer that’s been deployed for the firewall, for the SD wan. You know, and then you get into [55:00] whether or not the enterprise is moving into, you know, a SASS e deployment, zt and A is coming in. Um, how, um, in those cases where we start talking about enterprises that have already made a significant investment in their security edge, right? Pick a manufacturer who cares.
Right? Or maybe it’s SSE, maybe they’ve already gone. Ss e
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: what’s, what’s the meter like, um,
Francisco Tello: Now.
Max Clark: this and, and deployment and support.
Francisco Tello: So all of that is very fair, right? Um, and it happens, uh, especially with, with companies that have, um, less constraints on budget and on personal, they very often try to go for what they call best of breed, right? And then you choose like the best vendor that you find in the industry. Usually the ones in the top right of the, uh, garner quadrant or whatever, uh, for wireless.
And then the same for switching, and then the same for, uh, SD one or, or security. Um, and they build these more sort of complex [56:00] architectures. Sometimes they can afford it because they have, um. Small armies of people who can automate stuff, uh, at scale. But, uh, at the end of the day, it does, uh, result in unseen costs for them.
’cause supporting that whole thing, even if the individual vendors are amazing, um, it, it’s gonna introduce more complexity, right? So we are sort of opinionated on that front and we try to steer, uh, customers in general into the direction of the full stack and seeing the benefits of having a vertically, uh, integrated approach.
That said, um, we have some ways to work, uh, around that or with that. So the first way, uh, and, uh. To, to try to, uh, make it a financial discussion. And this is something that also played, uh, out in, in the case of web school and, and with many of our other customers. We have a buyback program in which we will recognize the existing investment that you have in other vendors and we will pay fair market value for that.
And, um. Uh, treat it at as a credit to your subscription. So it ends up reducing the cost of, uh, what you’re [57:00] paying us, uh, in general. And then we, um, uh, recycle that year and all that. Um, so that’s one approach and for many customers that’s good enough, right? Because, uh, a lot of times it’s, uh, mainly a discussion around some cost, right?
I already invested myself in this vendor, or I refreshed my switches last year. I’m just looking for new security appliances and access points. Uh, uh, so that helps a lot in those conversations and a lot of customers see a lot of value in that, right? Because they, uh, are able to recoup some of those investments that they already made while maintaining vertical integration across their stack.
So that’s one scenario. The other scenario is, uh, okay, the customer has some security or SD one solution that they really love, or that they are on the hook for a contract that they cannot or do not want to walk away from, right? And those instances, uh, we. Uh, can accommodate that. And we have done it. And what we typically do is that we put, uh, our meter stack, including the security appliance behind what they already [58:00] have, and we set our security appliance in transparent mode just to provide monitoring services for our gear.
Um, but it’s not in the, uh, actual, uh, data plane path of, uh, uh, what’s going out of their network. And we disable security functionality, so there’s no funky stuff going on. Uh, and they go out through their existing SD one slash uh, um, security stacks. Very common for customers that might be on managed services contracts with, uh, Fortinet or Palo Alto.
Um. It’s not our go-to. It’s not ideal for us because it introduces complexity when it comes to the SLA. Uh, ’cause if there’s an outage in a given location, uh, whose fault is it? Is it, uh, Fortinets or, or is it, uh, meters right? Or, or Palo Altos or meters. Uh, so it makes things harder, uh, for us on that front, but we will accommodate that when needed.
Um, uh, especially, um, if, if it’s the right thing for that particular customer. Um, but generally speaking, we’ll try to be opinionated and try to steer them into the full stack and try to [59:00] leverage things like buybacks to help them, uh, uh, do what they want to achieve. There are also some other scenarios where maybe there’s a feature that we haven.
Deployed, uh, into our, uh, switches or into our security appliances, and we will work around those or try to accommodate those. And if absolutely needed, we will incorporate third party equipment in there. Now, when it comes to things that meter doesn’t provide at all, right, like, uh, uh, right now, the, the security services that we provide are, uh, on the network itself.
We don’t offer a cloud security solution, for example, or an endpoint security solution. We actually encourage you to have that, right? So if you, if you’re working with CrowdStrike on your, uh, endpoint security or you’re using, uh, know Prisma or Zscaler or something like that for your cloud security. If that’s fair game, we will extend your network into those environments, uh, using, uh, traditional networking solutions like IPSec and, and BGP, uh, and we will, uh, send you telemetry from our devices.
So if you [01:00:00] have like an XDR solution, you can use that, uh, into your decision making process. We can stream telemetry using things like, uh, Kinesis, uh, data streams, or we can also use webhooks, uh, for any, any, uh, of the common security platforms out there. And we’ll work with them. That’s fine. That’s not something that, um, um, works, uh, against our vertical integration in any, in any way.
And we, you as a, as a customer and as an integrator, you should, uh, make sure that your customer has some form of defense in depth approach, especially when it comes to security solutions. Um.
Max Clark: The sophistication of the network, you know, um, size of the enterprise is a proxy for sophistication a lot of times, right? Just as companies get larger, they require more sophistication.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: It’s usually driven also by compliance. Um, you know, the hype cycle around, uh, SSE and then SS e or you know, SSE sd-wan, SASS e know, [01:01:00] cracks
Francisco Tello: All of the acronyms.
Max Clark: well, SD-WAN cracks me up because it’s like, you know, like what percentage of deployed SD WAN is just people that are just looking for a VPN solution, like an automatically configured VPN and I, I know it’s a, it’s a really high number because I’ve configured Cisco VPN on, you know, Pix five oh ones.
Right? Like, you know, like, you know, even having the expertise in that, it’s like, you’re like, oh, it’s working, but I don’t know why. Right? Like, don’t, don’t breathe on it too hard. but when you get into the security space and you start looking at it and you say, okay, you know, um, a big driver that I see in Sassy, right?
So Sassy is this like. Omni umbrella of everything, but usually it’s remote work, remote access, um, zt a so the real zero trust, but it’s, but a lot of that also becomes driven around like, uh, access control, resource control and audit. You know, do we have an audit path and can we take data outta this platform and then put it into a sim and then use that as [01:02:00] a control, you know, for CMMC or SOC two or whatever other compliance we have to maintain.
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: And, you know, and you talk about streaming data to Kinesis, that’s great because, know, um, people are gonna need, you know, it’s like network access control. Like, can you plug a, a new device into a network port? You know, the average small SMB small mid-market company probably isn’t thinking about that,
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: cross a certain line, you’re like, no, no, we have a, we have an IT security policy that says you can’t just come in and like plug somebody into the network on the
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: Like a bank probably doesn’t want that to happen, you know, like,
Francisco Tello: Not at all.
Max Clark: um.
Francisco Tello: I.
Max Clark: So there’s, so then, you know, I can, I mean, I’m not gonna go down the list of this, but like, you know, event log, you say XDR, you know, so in my head that immediately tick, you know, triggers off like, oh, you know, you can integrate and send data to somebody’s sim platform and then they can see it and maybe, maybe not, know, take and do, uh, corrective actions against it, but at least see it and alert on it and, and, and come back and say, there’s something going on here we need to look [01:03:00] at. I’m going through my notes here.
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, and we support a lot of those use cases. Again, sending telemetry to seams is, is something that happens very often whenever we’re dealing with, um, uh, larger enterprise companies. Um, and then behind the scenes, everything that happens. And the meter dashboard and to meter devices is controlled by, uh, GraphQL, API, uh, and we are flushing out a lot of those integrations so that you can actually have some level of closed loop automation from external sources, right?
So if we send you an event and then your platform wants to turn down a switchboard or something like that, or, or try to enable a firewall rule, those are things that we’re going that direction as well. So, so as to play better with a lot of the security ecosystems, uh, out there.
Max Clark: Um, how, how can you scale a single site? You know, like what’s the, you know, there is a limit to how far you can stack an access switch,
Francisco Tello: Yep. Yep.
Max Clark: is what pushes most people into chassis based infrastructure, just because they have port [01:04:00] density. So
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: like, like gimme, gimme the, like book in the sizes, you know?
And like, know, a company that’s a retail organization that’s got 2000 locations, you know, with small, you know, 2000 square foot, you know, uh, look, you know, sites an aggregate’s, probably interesting to meter, but, you know, a single, you know, how small will you go on a single location? And, and on the other side, you know, what’s, what’s the, what’s the upward
Francisco Tello: Yeah, I mean, yeah, smallest. I mean, we, we have like for, for distributed enterprise, for customers that have like literally, uh, little stands in, in a, in a shopping mall or whatever, we can have something like a security appliance, a switch and a meter access point, and you’re, you’re done. And that’s it. Um, it, it is not.
To cost effective is that if that’s all you want to do, it becomes cost effective if you have hundreds of those. And then, okay, we’ll, we’ll do something for the aggregate square footage that you’re doing, and we’ll, we’ll give, we’re gonna give you some, uh, pretty attractive pricing there. But if it’s literally just one side that needs one [01:05:00] ap, it’s very likely that meter is not gonna be a good fit in and of itself, unless there’s others in terms of scaling up.
Uh, so we’ve done well, uh, in, um, uh, medium, uh, size campuses where you might have, uh, uh, beyond 500 access points. Um, that is not a limit for us. Like, like, it’s not like oh, 500 aps. That’s, that’s the more, most that mirror can do. Not really, but that’s, uh, around the largest that we have deployed so far. Uh, I think at.
Max Clark: footage.
Francisco Tello: That’s pretty big, right? Uh, like, um, I think, uh, in the specific case for, for web school, like a hundred acres, uh, they have something like 400 ish, uh, access points or so and so, and, uh, over a hundred switches. So it’s, it’s large-ish. Uh, and we are starting to make inroads and to really big physical spaces like higher ed.
Um, uh, so we’re not too concerned about scale on that front. One thing that, uh, right now, um, we, we don’t advertise ourselves to be something that you can truly [01:06:00] scale out in massive environments. Uh, like, uh, the data center space, right? Like data center space is not something that we’re tackling today. Uh, but we are planning to enter that market.
Um, I mean, if, if, if you’ve seen anything around like the last, uh, funding round that we did with General Catalyst, there’s some mentions of what we’re, uh, trying to build, uh, in the data center space, uh, likely, uh, starting next year. Uh, but that’s not something that we go into today. Um. Uh, for the most part.
So yeah, the ED enterprise fine mid-size campuses, it’s, uh, it’s pretty good. Uh, we’re doing great with, um, third party logistics companies that have huge warehouse spaces. Um, because again, a lot of what makes that business stick is have as many, uh, revenue driving people on site and not so many like it personal on site, and they want an always on network with robots zipping around the entirety of the footprint of the space.
For example, we’re working with a, with a pretty high [01:07:00] tech three PL provider called Gobot that, uh, really liked that, uh, about us. Uh, and we, we we’re doing pretty well with, uh, a lot of, uh, really large three PL providers that right now I cannot, uh, mention, but, um, yeah,
Max Clark: a warehouse and you’re shipping product and you’ve got a barcode scanner that needs to be on wifi in
Francisco Tello: it needs wifi.
Max Clark: in order to pull, pull, you know, network really matters to you. And, and maybe you don’t realize a network really matters to you until the first time the network goes down.
And then you realize how much network really matters to you. Like
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: um, that, that remedies, um, remedies really quickly. Uh. I wanna, let’s, I wanna go backwards for a second. ’cause you talk
Francisco Tello: yep.
Max Clark: to get everything, you know, like really pushing for vertically integrated stacks within the security appliance.
What are the options for redundancy, you know, ’cause you, we start talking about like data center that, that opens up like a whole nother like
Francisco Tello: Yeah, no, they’re can of worms.
Max Clark: need to support and you know, and it’s not common, but like some enterprises need BGP
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: of, of what the redundancy strategy is.
Some enterprises are just [01:08:00] using sd-wan, some enterprises are using, some sort of cloud gateway with the SD-WAN or with the sass e appliance in order, you know, like there’s a, there’s a pretty good amount of variety there, but in general, um, you know, what are the like go to market approaches or, or you know, preferred cases for, know, internet resiliency.
Francisco Tello: Yep. Let, let’s start perhaps at the local level, right? Let, let, let’s think about the security appliance itself. Uh, we can have multiple internet uplinks in our security appliance and use all of them together. So if you have 2, 3, 4 ISPs in a given location, that’s fair game. Uh, you can fire off, uh, out of all of them.
Uh, at the same time, do load balancing. Uh, you can do, uh, policy-based routing and point certain applications or certain types of user traffic out of certain uplinks, uh, with certain, uh, shaping characteristics. Uh, so on that front, uh, there, there’s very few constraints. Um, the, the secure appliance that we go to market with out of [01:09:00] box have two, uh, dedicated, uh, um, ISP quote unquote ports.
And then you can turn any of the other land ports into additional ports, right? Just literally, uh, a toggle in the gui. And there’s no real difference in the performance of the land ports versus the one ports. At that point, they just become. Another routed port in the security appliance. Uh, and then, uh, for local high availability.
In the case of that security appliance failing, we can cluster them in, uh, pairs right now, but we’re looking to expand that further, uh, in the, in the short term right now, you can deploy them in pairs of highly available security appliances. Uh, that is like for any, we basically operate, uh, with like t-shirt sizes for locations, so to speak, where you have like extra small, small, medium large x large for anything that is medium and higher.
We include redundancy of the secure appliance by default. You don’t have to pay extra for it. Um, if you want that kind of redundancy on smaller deployments, like s or or excess. [01:10:00] Maybe you have a literally like a little, uh, shop in a, in a mall where you, for whatever reason want to have high avail availability.
We can include that into the contract, but that drives up the pricing just a little bit because it doesn’t, it’s not cost effective at that point in time. Um, and then when it comes to resiliency across locations, uh, you can extend your network. Uh, if you have. All meter deployment. We have basically a VPN orchestration technology like many other vendors that creates, uh, an SD one overlay.
Um, and you can bunch up, uh, thousands of meter security appliances, uh, in that process. Uh, I don’t know that we are deployed in any space in any one customer that is doing that for multiple thousands, but we have stress tested it in, in our lab, and we, we’ve scaled, uh, to, uh, over 10,000 tunnels in a single security appliance.
And it does pretty well, which I think fits a lot of the use cases out there. And then over the tunnels you can have active standby or active active and all those kinds of flavors. [01:11:00] Uh, and right now we are in the process of incorporating that with BGP in IPSec for third party tunnels. Um, so that, uh, that likely will get released during the fall, uh, this year.
Um, but yeah, so quite a few options when it comes to redundancy. Um, anywhere we wanna take that.
Max Clark: Um, yeah. You know, let’s, so, um, let’s just, let’s just beat the SD WAN horse to death here. Um, you know, in my world, like real SD wan, like there was, there was like the pseudo SD wan, which was internet resiliency, right? Multiple uplink. You’re, you’re doing, uh, double net n traversal kind of, you know, load sharing between multiple things, right?
Outbound, not inbound. Um, you know, but then for me, like real SD WAN starts, which was NPS replacement of this, you know, a creation of a private network, you know, underlay overlay where you, where is the appliance in line? I mean, there’s all these other network decisions that could play into place, right? And then, [01:12:00] and then from there you get into, um, like inbound resiliency, right? So you’ve got, you know, typically voice, you’ve got some kind of application where you can’t have a now boundary change and you want to be able to have protect qs coming back inbound, so that way you could say, this application is gonna work and this application is gonna work less.
Right? Or the extreme examples, uh, you know, we have a gas station in the middle of the desert and if the primary internet goes down, we fail over to the, you know, link. You know, make sure the point of sale terminal works and nothing else, right?
Francisco Tello: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: Um, and this, these, you know, again, like this is all like really specific to that enterprise deployment.
You know,
Francisco Tello: Yep. Yep.
Max Clark: have something on place? Do they want to keep it? You know, not like a, um, there’s no one size fits all, like, approaches with this stuff,
Francisco Tello: No.
Max Clark: you know, like, you know, there’s, there’s, I could ask, you know, we could, we could probably spend an hour talking about each one.
And I don’t think that really serves a purpose of what I’m trying to get to here. Um. A lot of motion right now in the network world. [01:13:00] Um, we’ve got this HP Juniper thing going on, right? Which, which still hasn’t played out. We don’t know comes outta that, you know, are they gonna maintain multiple product lines?
Are they not? You know, Cisco’s got multiple product lines. you know, we’ve got residential, we’ve got residential gear that’s starting to come up, stack. You’ve got ubiquity. That’s, that’s done phenomenally well in penetrating the enterprise, you
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: cost, know, you know, value performance for an engineer, an IT director who’s, you know, looking and staring down an ultimate network refresh or a new project.
Right? Like, like you’ve, you’ve been on all different sides of this. You’ve seen this with, you know, from different places. What would you tell them to like really stop and think about and, and like, you know, before they like, dive back into, or, or just continue forward with a refresh with the existing vendor? You know, like what’s the, what’s the 32nd like, Hey, take a, take a [01:14:00] take a heartbeat and look, you know, come talk to me her.
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Um, one thing that, um. Uh, I did learn from my Cisco years was the qualification process using med pick, and the more important thing to do to drive a sale is implicating pain. So yeah, I, I would, I would try to translate, um, some of the common pain points that I think that person has. Um, unpredictable budgeting, reducing, uh, uh, or, or shrinking, uh, resources when it comes to like it, personal and expertise.
Um, and the ability to have someone watching over, uh, your network 24 7, all included in a single subscription that covers the majority of your, um, site to site and campus location needs. And that would likely open the door to a conversation, right? Because the [01:15:00] unpredictability of budgeting is something that most vendors.
Have not been able to solve. Not because they don’t want to, but because they’re the fact that they’re publicly traded enterprises that have to meet certain, um, uh, forecasting expectations and all that, doesn’t let them move, uh, too fast on that front. And then, uh, most of them are not bundling in proactive support because it’s hard for them because of the size of their infrastructure and the.
Number of generations of devices that they need to support. And they lack vertical integration because of a lot of the things that you mentioned, right? Like, uh, okay, Sy uh, Cisco Meraki great. Um, they have full stack, uh, networking products, but then as they get acquired into Cisco, they need to start integrating into the rest of the Cisco ecosystem.
Now you have things like incorporating Catalyst such as into the Meraki dashboard, which is a process, right? And it wasn’t an easy process for them. And I think, uh, HP and Juniper are gonna run into the same thing unless someone from the top [01:16:00] says like, we’re gonna do this and you’re gonna eat it. So, uh, yeah.
Max Clark: that’s kinda the best case of scenario outcome in some regards for, you know, HP Juniper is just somebody deciding like, this is our product line going forward, and the other product line is dead right
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: the chances of that happening are very low.
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: Cisco’s maintaining how many different SD wan appliance, you know, like technologies at this point, right?
Like
Francisco Tello: Uh, yeah, a few.
Max Clark: it’s, um, I mean this will, this will date the recording for, you know, the future. But like, um, you know, to your point, um, Fortinet on their earnings call, you know, got slammed afterwards because, and, and the key item there was the refresh cycle for their firewalls. You
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: these companies are forecasting what, what percentage of deployed equipment is getting refreshed at what pace and where they are through that cohort of replacement and,
Francisco Tello: Exactly.
Max Clark: the replacement rate you know, the, um. Uh, it, it wasn’t a rosy picture for them in this earnings call. Like it,
Francisco Tello: Yep.[01:17:00]
Max Clark: um, and that’s, that’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot of friction also with manufacturers because if you’re, if you’re, if you’re used to the revenue of selling a CapEx with support and then a refresh model, now you’ve got pressure coming from, you know, SSE and ss e where you have to figure out how to migrate your on-premise firewalls to a ss e platform without cannibalizing y you know, it’s, it’s a big mess for a lot of these
Francisco Tello: Yeah, it, it’s tough, right? Because you have, uh, especially as you scale out, uh, to those sizes, you end up having business entities that, uh, basically become their own small companies and they all have their own expectations of what needs to be done. It’s hard, it’s not easy. It’s a, it’s a very hard prone to have.
Uh, I think it’s probably a kind of good problem to have, right? Like if we, if I, if I get,
Max Clark: we’re
Francisco Tello: if you talk,
Max Clark: dollar problems here.
Francisco Tello: if you, if you talk to me in 10 years and Meter has gone to a fraction of that, uh, problem, I will probably be very happy at that point. But, um, yeah.
Max Clark: Yeah, it’s, uh, well, I [01:18:00] mean, you, you know, not, not allowing, I mean, controlling the refresh cycle is gonna help you guys a lot,
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: like,
Francisco Tello: Yeah, because we, we don’t have to, we don’t have to work. Like what we are expecting to get from the customer is not a PO for a bunch of new, uh, boxes. It’s, Hey, let’s continue the service or not. And that’s it.
Max Clark: Well, I mean, what’s, what’s the penetration of wifi seven clients at this point in the enterprise? I mean, very small. I mean, we’re
Francisco Tello: Yeah. Small.
Max Clark: about, we’re probably talking about like the next major, you know, like, um, uh, phone tablets, you know, laptop refresh before wifi seven is really even that prevalent.
Francisco Tello: Yep.
Max Clark: you know, we’re gonna have five years before wifi eight is prevalent, right? Like, it’s not, you know, so like there’s, you know, I
Francisco Tello: Yeah. That, that’s another area where we are, where we are somewhat conservative, right? Like, um, uh, jumping into new, uh, trends, uh, like, like. We, we weren’t the first to go to market with wifi seven [01:19:00] access points. Um, and we’re gonna start offering them, uh, before the end of this year. Um, uh, because again, as you as you’re saying it, it’s not necessarily a need that is out there for every single device that exists, but it’s something that is going to be, become a problem.
But to that point, one thing that our customers don’t necessarily have to worry about is, uh, about their changing needs not being met by what they have right now. ’cause if we have a customer today with, uh, our wifi six aps, and then they hit critical mass of six gigahertz devices, um, uh, in between the refresh cycles, right in the, like in the next year or two and that maybe the refresh cycle, quote unquote, happens in five years, the meter subscription adapts to their needs and we.
Upgrade their existing aps to wifi seven. Uh, we don’t really, that is not something that we are too concerned with because that’s not how we make money with the boxes. It’s by having you pay for this, uh, [01:20:00] service, uh, that gives you all inclusive network support and the full stack of, uh, devices that will support your needs, right?
So that, that is, that is one thing that I think, uh, several of our customers are finding valuable. Because oftentimes when you do a net new technology purchase with, um, with a traditional vendor, um, beyond thinking about the next refresh cycle, you are also thinking, all right, if I don’t buy this m gig switch today that I don’t actually need today, if I need it in three years, and I tell my boss that I need money to buy it,
Max Clark: Hmm
Francisco Tello: whose head’s gonna roll?
Right? So you end up buying something that you are not sure that you’re gonna need, and you over provision. Then you end up spending more money, uh, there. Um, and um, yeah, we, we want to give customers an out from that. So, hey, you get the network that you need today, but it’s future proofed. And then if you end up changing needs in, in two [01:21:00] years, we have you covered, right?
You, you get the M gig switch, you get the wifi seven ap you get the, uh, 50 gig secure appliance, uh, if needed and so on and so forth. So don’t, don’t make your purchasing decisions necessarily thinking about what about the unpredictability we are gonna have you covered? Um, uh, regardless of how those needs change.
Max Clark: Awesome, Thank you very much. I could on and on and on in the network world, but I really appreciate the time. This has been fantastic.
Francisco Tello: Yeah. No, great. Uh, great having this conversation. It was pretty awesome.
