I had the opportunity to attend Meter Up 2025, and sit down with CEO and Co-Founder Anil Varanasi at Meter’s headquarters. He outlined the company’s evolving strategy, new product innovations, and broader ambitions for enterprise networking. Across the discussion, several themes emerged: the value of convening a community focused solely on networking, Meter’s philosophy of building and owning the entire technology stack, the introduction of nine new hardware platforms, significant enhancements to its Command automation platform, and an expanded partnership with Lumen to unify LAN and WAN workflows. Varanasi also emphasized what he sees as a critical industry moment, one in which a shrinking pool of networking specialists, increasing complexity, and rising performance expectations require a fundamentally different approach to network design, operations, and autonomy. To watch the full video, click below
Re-establishing a Community for Networking Professionals
A central point of the discussion was the role of Meter Up as more than a product showcase; it is a gathering place for practitioners who still care deeply about networking fundamentals. Varanasi noted that while many legacy conferences have shifted toward multi-product portfolios, communications platforms, or cloud services, few events remain dedicated to networking as a discipline. Meter sees an opportunity to fill that gap and, in doing so, strengthen its relationships with partners and customers who influence product direction.
This focus on community building is notable because it reflects broader market sentiment. Enterprise networking today is both more critical and more complex than at any point in the last decade. theCUBE Research data shows 93% of organizations view the network as more important to business outcomes than two years ago, yet many are struggling with the operational burden required to support modern distributed environments. A forum focused on real-world challenges, not just products, aligns well with enterprise needs.
Full-Stack Ownership as a Strategic Differentiator
One of Meter’s most distinctive attributes is its insistence on owning the entire networking stack, hardware, software, and cloud management. Varanasi made a strong case for why that matters: most of the industry’s largest platforms have been stitched together through acquisition, resulting in uneven integration, configuration drift, and higher failure rates across multi-vendor or multi-component environments.
Meter’s model mirrors what we’ve seen in other autonomy-driven industries. In automotive, for example, companies like Tesla and Waymo achieved rapid innovation by tightly coupling hardware, software, and data. According to Varanasi, networking requires the same approach. Full-stack ownership allows Meter to:
- Control data flows across all layers
- Improve reliability by reducing cross-vendor incompatibilities
- Build autonomy into design, configuration, and operations
- Deliver predictable performance aligned with customer-defined outcomes
For enterprises, the value proposition is straightforward: fewer outages, simpler troubleshooting, more consistent security enforcement, and more time available for strategic initiatives.
Customer-Centric Product Development: Nine New Platforms
Meter announced nine new hardware platforms across firewalls, switches, wireless access points, and a cellular gateway. Rather than positioning them as broad-market releases, Varanasi highlighted that each product was designed around specific customer requirements. This approach resembles a “design partner” model, where enterprise needs guide the roadmap and influence the engineering process.
In practice, this means the platforms are purpose-built and optimized for specific performance profiles, security requirements, or deployment environments. For organizations undergoing modernization initiatives, this customer-informed approach can reduce the risk of overprovisioning or deploying solutions that do not align with operational realities.
Combined with enhancements to Command, Meter’s AI and automation engine introduced last year, the company’s portfolio is expanding beyond traditional networking hardware into intelligent operations. The new capabilities focus on simplifying support workflows and automating repetitive tasks, two areas where networking teams consistently cite challenges due to rising complexity and staffing shortages.
Advancing Toward Autonomous Networks
The concept of autonomy, designing, configuring, and managing networks with minimal human intervention, is gaining traction across the industry. Meter’s position on this topic is clear: true autonomy is only achievable through full-stack control.
Varanasi framed network autonomy in three dimensions:
- Design – Automatically creating architectures and topologies
- Configuration – Ensuring correct, secure, and optimized settings
- Management – Observing, troubleshooting, and fixing issues
Reducing manual effort across these domains is increasingly important as enterprises face a looming talent gap. As discussed during the interview, a quarter of all network engineers are expected to retire by the end of the decade, and replacement rates are unlikely to keep pace with accelerating demand for connectivity. Automation and autonomy are no longer optional, they are essential to sustaining operational models as networks scale and become more distributed.
Extending Full-Stack Control to the WAN
One of the most impactful announcements was Meter’s expansion from the LAN into the WAN through a partnership with Lumen. Traditionally, provisioning Internet connectivity requires days of emails and manual configuration. Meter and Lumen have reduced this process to a few clicks by integrating procurement, deployment, and visibility directly into Meter’s dashboard.
For enterprises, this delivers several tangible outcomes:
- Lower connectivity costs, due to partner-negotiated pricing
- Faster deployments, particularly across distributed sites
- Unified visibility, eliminating the longstanding “black box” between the enterprise edge and the service provider
As organizations expand multi-cloud, remote work, and global operations, simplified WAN onboarding and troubleshooting can significantly improve agility and reduce operational overhead.
The Road Ahead: A Critical Moment for Networking
Varanasi closed with a broader industry perspective: with so few pure-play networking companies remaining, the market is at an inflection point. The next several years will likely determine which architectures, and which vendors, set the foundation for the next decade of enterprise networking.
Meter’s strategy centers on doing the fundamentals exceptionally well: building robust hardware, implementing protocols correctly, automating repetitive tasks, and partnering to simplify WAN connectivity. Customer interviews during the event reinforced that this approach resonates. Many emphasized that they are not “buying networks” but buying outcomes, speed, reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
OurANGLE
Meter Up 2025 showcased a company pushing to redefine what enterprise networking can look like when hardware, software, and operations are engineered as a unified whole. The introduction of new platforms, advances in Command, and expansion into the WAN mark meaningful steps toward autonomous networks, an increasingly important direction as enterprises seek simplicity, resilience, and performance at scale.
For IT and business leaders, the message is clear: as networking becomes more strategic and more complex, solutions that streamline design, deployment, and operations will play a central role in determining which organizations can move fastest and operate most efficiently in a distributed digital world
For more information on Meter, please visit their website
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