Meter’s CEO on the component crisis, profitability, and building a business with his brother

CRN’s EMEA editorial director sat down with Anil Varanasi on the future of networking and the sibling competitiveness that's helped build his business

Meter, a California-based Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) vendor, has officially launched its channel expansion into EMEA.

I was at its launch at the Ned in London and met with co-founder and CEO Anil Varanasi to ask him what his top messages to channel are, and how his team are meeting some of the main channel challenges eroding partner profitability right now.

Here are four key takeaways with comments from Westcon-Comstor, Meter’s first EMEA distributor, and Nebula Global Services, its first services partner in the UK.

Network-as-a-service as an answer to partners surviving the hardware crisis

Partners are experiencing price hikes that are destroying partner deals in a matter of hours.

The pressure on profitability for resellers is acute, and many have told us this year that price volatility is even worse than during the height of covid.

Hardware economics in the channel have broken down, it seems and shows little sign of abating.

Into this environment steps Meter.

Founded in 2015, Meter CEO Anil Varanasi has previously told CRN US that he “entirely disagrees” with the legacy approach to networking.

As he looks to land and expand in the channel in the UK and EMEA, he shares more of why he thinks his company is a solution at the right place at the right time to the channel’s current hardware woes.

“We don’t sell hardware at all – and that’s never happened in networking,” he says.

If Meter’s business design philosophy challenges convention, its commercial model breaks with it entirely.

Instead, Meter absorbs the capital cost, deployment risk, maintenance burden and future upgrade cycle. There is no upfront hardware cost, no installation charge and no refresh bill when standards change.

“There are four big costs in networking,” he adds. “Upfront hardware, installation, ongoing maintenance, and then doing it all again when you upgrade.

“With us, those risks sit entirely with Meter.”

Varanasi contrasted that with his view of his competitive landscape.

“The three biggest networking companies are Cisco, Arista Networks and Palo Alto. Palo Alto is doing what Cisco did in the 90s, which is they are acquiring so many companies all the time, and these products are not together at all.

“They just package the sales and marketing, which ends up hurting the bottom line for a partner, because if Palo Alto is just buying some random company and just selling it, they have to be the ones managing it, and it takes more to manage. That means less margin.

“In the last five or seven years, Cisco, one of the most legendary businesses, decided they want to go and be an application company, and bought Splunk and AppDynamics for tens of billions of dollars. But, when they saw that Arista was selling more switches than them, started to come back to networking, but most of it is just focused on datacentre switching.

“So, when you look across the landscape on who is actually investing in networking, it's a pretty bleak outlook for one of the most fundamental things in all of infrastructure and maybe all of technology.

“In contrast, we’re a networking company that's built, not bought. With everything happening – shortages, skills, incentives – networking is changing now.

“Other vendors themselves are signalling a major refresh cycle, with tens of billions of pounds of networking spend due in the next five years. The real question is who is going to capture that? The old model – or something fundamentally different?”

The go-to-market channel plan: Westcon-Comstor is Meter’s first distributor in EMEA

Speaking at the EMEA launch event, Daniel Hurel, SVP of go-to-market at Westcon-Comstor, says Meter’s proposition is already resonating with the distie’s reseller base.

“The most important thing for me when I decided to onboard Meter is about the innovation, and how to address the networking world for the future.

“What’s attractive with Meter is that it’s a unique proposition - it’s one platform, one OS, one subscription and completely different from other vendor positions. And it’s not just about networking; it’s about security as well as they also have a firewall.”

He adds: “I think that talking to some of the resellers - it’s a compelling opportunity to them. It’s a fully integrated utility style network-as-a-service. And in the networking market, there are currently not that many players that are true NaaS solutions. I am impressed by the number of resellers who are intrigued already by the potential of the simplicity of what could be brought to complex networking. It’s simple in the design and deployment and management of sites, it’s very flexible, and agile to manage changing technologies over future years without overheads – they want to know more.”

Hurel says the distributer has around 50 resellers in the UK interested after two months – at least ten of which are already onboarded.

The go-to-market channel expansion plan in EMEA is in three phases, Hurel shares.

The UK is part of the first wave of nine countries including the UK&I, Benelux and the Nordics.

Phase two will be Germany, France and Southern Europe.

Phase three will be Middle East and Africa.

The classic IT channel billing desire - recurring revenues and simplicity

Nebula Global Services is Meter’s first UK services partner.

CMO Richard Eglon tells CRN UK the partner has deployed with Meter from earlier this year, and already has a project in the education sector in the north of the UK.

A couple of months in he says Meter is a clever alternative for the channel in a world where time to revenue is affecting business, making managing cash and simple sales forecasting ever more challenging.

“The supply chain issues have accelerated a number of systemic issues in the channel. That has made Meter just that much more relevant in today’s market.

“From our perspective we’re looking at a full stack of products that are subscription-based. No CAPEX outlay makes for a much more efficient business model. End users are only consuming what they need at any one time, and Meter’s command backend AI-driven platform is built around proactive configuration and issue remediation, so it’s much more flexible than more traditional product stacks. The way they can price certain products like access points is by per square meter pricing, so building billing materials to deployment is a very simple process, and a very transparent process we’ve found.”

Eglon adds that he appreciates Meter’s approach of starting with what the end user client wants.

“I think NaaS is something we will see more of. Some of the legacy network incumbents will try to move that way, but they will find that harder than an emerging vendor. Meter are not interested in the full-service stack - they know the nuances and pain points of the channel and end users. They are more interested in innovation on the front end and a secure quality product. Meter understands the optimum route to market is through Westcon as a leading distributor, and pure services play partners like us.

“That is where they’ve been able to identify a much more agile business model rather than being dependent on product play – that’s not the usual vendor approach. In fact, I’d say, starting with the outcome of client demand is unusual for a vendor overall!”

Westcon-Comstor’s Hurel adds: “At Westcon-Comstor we are always trying to increase recurring revenue, and our resellers want this also.

“In the cybersecurity world that is easier, but the traditional networking vendors have not been as quick to make this possible until now. With their end user customers our resellers can say ‘You don’t have any upfront costs, you don’t have to use your CAPEX and for the duration of your contract you don’t have to worry about any upgrades.’ It’s compelling.”

The man behind the business: “I built this with my brother, which has been a luxury”

The IT channel has always been about people not product.

And for Anil, building a business with his co-founder brother – and competitor – Sunil, is part of the fabric of how he experiences competing and growing in the technology market.

“It's such a tough business, building hardware, operating systems, software, distributed systems, deploying in the world, maintaining it, working with ISPs, installers, partners, security - this is not for the faint hearted! These are many different companies in one combined. So, I think it's been a real luxury and a real pleasure building a business with my brother because it’s like we have one brain, but two bodies. That's what my life is like. That's beautiful. It is hard for other people to understand, because it's such a singular experience. And yet when we’re competing I will go as far as possible to win against him!

“I've always had my brother, and we're incredibly close. I can look at him as I'm looking at you now, and we can have an entire conversation without saying a word. And you can ask anybody that works with us, he’s probably one of the smartest people in the entire world. And one of the kindest people.”

He adds: “Other than two prisoners that have shared a cell, there aren't two people that have spent as much time together as me and him!”

Meter has reported exceptionally fast growth, saying it had 300 per cent year-over-year growth in 2025.

Beyond the sibling competition and the long hours building and expanding, Varanasi shares he continues to recruit for culture despite the rapid growth rate.

“When we look to hire folks at Meter, the two traits we look for most is people that are incredibly kind and incredibly ambitious. Somehow, the world has told us those are dichotomous ideas, that if you're kind, you can be ambitious. If you're ambitious, you have to be a prick. We have found that not to be true at all. And most of that actually comes from my pattern matching and trying to find more people like my brother in the world - kind and ambitious.

“And incredibly competitive!

“Because networking is important. It's growing really fast, and Meter is the vendor that's trying to make it easy for channel partners to grow and make a lot of money.”