Yesterday's network just doesn't serve the AI needs of tomorrow. We're building a digital platform to make it super easy, quick, secure, effortless to consume network services and nobody else is doing that. AI needs data. Data needs data centers and data centers need to be connected.
Welcome to the stage, Kate Johnson.
Kate's promised me this is the best talk of the day.
All right, good luck. Let's do it. So, we announced our partnership this morning and then at lunch and other times when I ran into people, they're super excited about it.
Nobody's as excited as...
I know. I'll get to that.
But you know, I think like you got to Lumen a couple years ago. Why does this partnership make sense for both of us now?
Because it's the essence of the vision of our turnaround. It's at the very heart of it. For those of you that don't know the Lumen story, we're talking big legacy telecom company, great assets, uniquely able to solve really complex problems in the world of AI right now, but needed a lot of love, a lot of attention, and a new vision. We decided to build a digital network services company to make it quick, secure, and effortless to connect your people, data, and applications no matter where they are. So when you think about it, your capabilities at Meter and your intelligent LAN platform integrated with our intelligent WAN platform making it simple for customers to solve really complex problems with a click of a button from procurement to deployment to support, single pane of glass for performance management. That's the essence of who we want to be. And to do it in partnership makes it even better because it extends our reach and brings our full vision of a connected ecosystem to life. But that's why I'm excited. Why are you excited? You know, I love ISPs. That's always good.
Yeah. Tell me more. You know, ISPs get blamed a lot and I feel your pain a lot of times.
Yeah. For sure. But I have also blamed you guys and other ISPs a lot.
I just don't think it's appreciated how difficult it is to lay that much fiber, actually get it all connected and get it working. And I'm a little bit of a romantic about this stuff. I sort of think it's amazing that it even works. That TCP IP works, all this works. We had Bob early on. That this whole thing actually works is crazy to me. So when we were first thinking about how to actually do this properly and who are the right set of partners that have this fiber and ISPs to do it, and then I ended up meeting you, it just made sense. But I think that combination of you can't have a great network without a great ISP and a great ISP needs a great network made a lot of sense to me.
Great. Well, thank you. And by the way, Satia is the one that connected us.
He does. We'll blame him.
It was good to hear from him today.
Yeah. And when you think about what we want to do together and all, what's the best buying experience like? Because at the end of the day, that's where a lot of the challenge is. It's not easy to buy. It's not easy to procure. It's ambiguous. What's the best buying experience?
The best buying experience is where there's no effort involved and then it's available anywhere. I think for us when we start to think about that, Microsoft marketplace for example, this is again sort of the next click up because for networking and for legacy telco being a part of a technology ecosystem is an aspiration but it has never actually come to fruition. So for us to be powering your offering in that marketplace extends our commercial reach, but it also makes us relevant because all of those sellers begin to retire their Microsoft Azure credits and commitments with their customers, which means that there'll be commercial intensity around it. I know Meter wants to grow, I know Lumen wants to grow, and to use the engines of one of the biggest companies on the planet makes it really cool. That's the commercial reach part of the story and why that's important. But the ease of one-click, Meter being the customer-facing for quoting, contracting, everything, then just powered by us, I think is a great combination for everybody.
Shall we show it?
All right. We're going to have our colleague Chad up here. He's going to be the brave soul to do a live demo. I'm told that's the best time to do it is the end of the day and live demos always go really well. So, we're gonna have Chad come up on this.
Chad runs our connect and ISP products. And I'm not joking. He actually does love ISPs.
Thank you, Anil. Hello everyone. I do love ISPs. I have my fiber connected socks on today. So, I might love ISPs a little more than Anil. But the goal of Meter Connect is really to simplify the process of buying and managing ISPs for them: finding providers, getting quotes, billing, and support. I'm incredibly excited about our partnership here with Lumen today to be able to announce a unified WAN/LAN platform. Many of you are familiar with the current process of buying internet connectivity, one that looked like the images that just went across the screen: countless emails, emails for quotes, contracts, order confirmations, static IPs, circuit activations, what have you. But let's jump into a live demo to show you what we've built with Lumen and how these enhancements are designed for faster deployments, unified visibility, and simplified operations, really enabling you and your customers to focus on outcomes and not infrastructure. All right, so here we have the Meter Connect website. You can just go to connect.meter.com. And today we're going to look at a building across the Embarcadero, 1160 Battery Street. So we go ahead and input 1160 Battery. You can select a suite if you know it. Go ahead and do the whole building and click get free quotes. From here, we just ask for a little bit of contact information: email, name, company. And when I hit generate quotes, Meter Connect will run real-time serviceability and pricing for this specific location to find the most relevant results with the most cost-effective pricing. So, let's go ahead and hit generate quotes. Within seconds, you have results tailored for this specific location. It does showcase our direct integration with Lumen serviceability and quotation data. And it also outlines some of the benefits of our preferred partnership with Lumen. Here you can see we have preferred pricing which really drives lower pricing across multi-year agreements as well as multiple locations. We also have priority installation so your install is a high priority. The Lumen and Meter team will work together to ensure that we're meeting your delivery dates. So from here let's go ahead and pick the one gig dedicated fiber option. You can review the pricing. You see the discount straight on the page. You can also see if there's any installation charges. And if you'd like, you can add a secondary connection from the same procurement workflow. Let's go ahead and go to setup contract details. From here, we just ask for some information about the business that's going to be purchasing this connection. And if you would like more information about Meter's network hardware offering that you heard a lot about today, you can go ahead and hit contact me and go ahead and submit order request. From there, the Meter and Lumen teams will work together to generate the necessary agreement and you'll have that in your inbox within 24 hours. So once the order is submitted, the Meter Connect team will take that order ID. We will put it within the Meter network dashboard. And behind the scenes, this creates a real-time connection to Lumen that provides visibility into all the stages of your WAN circuit installation. No more digging through your email inbox trying to find the latest status, figuring out what milestone you're at. All that information is now within the Meter network dashboard, updated in real time from Lumen. When your static IPs become available, those are actually automatically placed within the dashboard as well. Again, not digging through emails trying to find a static IP so that you can configure the WAN port, automatically placed in the dashboard and we can automatically then configure your WAN connection. Once the circuit is activated, the Meter team is notified and we will work with you or your customers to schedule the physical connection. After the activation is complete, I feel like this is where the partnership really shines with Lumen in the unified visibility. Meter has always monitored your WAN connection in real time, provided alerting for any connectivity issues and engaged proactively with the internet service providers to resolve those issues. But our visibility has been a bit limited to understand exactly what the ISP has been seeing, required phone calls, trouble tickets or navigating complex portals. All of that information is now live in real time in the Meter network dashboard. You can see directly how Meter is monitoring your connection and we're pulling real-time diagnostic information from Lumen straight into the dashboard as well where you can see service alarms, interface status, service utilization, any network events that may be going on as well as planned maintenance. This unified visibility dramatically improves our ability to monitor and resolve issues on your network quickly. As you can see here, the partnership with Lumen really helps Connect deliver on its mission to simplify internet connectivity. We're incredibly excited to be partners in Lumen's connected ecosystem. And all this is available today and you can see it for yourself at meter.com/connect and coming soon to the Microsoft marketplace for Azure customers. Please come find us downstairs at the Connect booth to talk about how Connect and Lumen can help solve some of your connectivity challenges. Thank you.
