The NaaS specialist is adding two former Cisco Meraki sales executives to its ranks, one leading global channels and one driving strategic enterprise accounts.
“The data points to a need for us to continue to accelerate, to meet an exponentially growing demand,” Adam Ulfers, Meter’s vice president of sales, told CRN on the team’s new additions.
The first of the strategic new hires include Pete Atkin, who is joining Meter to lead global channels and partnerships. Atkin joins Meter from Mashgin, where he served as the software development company’s chief revenue officer. Prior to that, he spent more than three years at industrial IoT player Samsara as vice president and general manager of Samsara Industrial. He also led the company’s partner organization, where he focused on scaling strategic relationships with resellers and service providers. Before that, Atkin spent a collective seven years at Meraki and later Cisco, where he built the partner program and at Cisco, where he led the Meraki global sales organization.
Related: NaaS Specialist Meter CEO On Getting Hardware, Software ‘Right’ For The Future Of Networking]
Meter launched its official partner program in March 2024 and at the time, brought in Ulfers, who also hailed from Cisco Meraki, to lead the charge. Since then, the company has expanded globally into Europe and Asia and the partner program has become more “sophisticated,” Ulfers said.
“[Atkin] will be taking on that global channel chief role to streamline systems and programs and help us strategically drive towards the highest revenue opportunities amongst all of our partners in each of those regions,” Ulfers said.
Atkin, for his part, is bringing his experiences at high-growth companies with good outcomes to Meter, he told CRN.
“At Meraki, when I started in early 2012 I was running the partner organization, and we did $10 million in bookings that first quarter. And then seven years later, I was running a full sales organization. We did $2 billion in bookings,” he said. “It was an incredible experience. But for me, one of the most fulfilling parts was seeing Meraki partners build these highly successful businesses around our products and our team. At the time, I had no idea how big an impact that was going to have on the industry, but that was also nearly 15 years ago, and a lot has changed. The industry needs someone else now to provide the next step function in the networking world, both for customers and for partners. And I think Meter is pretty uniquely positioned to do that.”
Meter, which offers a distinctive NaaS business model in which channel partners generate high-value recurring revenue without having to shoulder upfront capex expenses associated with traditional networking, allows partners to build profitable, high growth practices alongside Meter, Atkin said.
“There’s a real moment of opportunity for partners right now, and I’m excited about bringing some of my past experience and working with the team at Meter to really coalesce around that and make this just an incredible opportunity for partners,” he said.
At the same time, Meter has tripled the size of its sales team to meet the demand it’s seeing in the market for NaaS. Coming in to lead Meter’s strategic enterprise accounts is TJ Michie, an industry professional who’s no stranger to the networking and cloud space. He spent nearly two years as senior vice president of sales for edge cloud company Fastly and before that, more than two years at videoconferencing provider Neat. Like Atkin, Michie spent more than eight years as a director of commercial sales for Cisco Meraki and seven years as a commercial and then federal account manager for Cisco Systems at the start of his career.
At Meter, TJ and team will focus on meeting the growing demand we’re seeing from large enterprises in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and education as they look for a more streamlined way to design, deploy, and operate their networks across distributed footprints.
Ulfers said that above all, Meter will continue to build AI-ready networks, deploying proactive support and remediation through Meter Command, aiming for autonomous networks by 2027. The company, he said, is committed to being easy and fun to do business with, while offering strong margins and support to partners so they can deliver long-term outcomes for their clients, not just transactions.
“My goal is going to be to ensure that Meter isn’t missing any opportunity alongside our partners to capture market where customers are looking for that value proposition that Meter is bringing to market: The all-in-one, hardware, software and operational play,” Ulfers said.
