The project was successful 'because the engineers had the time to focus on doing that and doing it right,' Grider said. One of those changes included deploying an SD-WAN. Outdoor connectivity had been on Grider's roadmap for some time, but letting someone else handle that task helped him spin it up quickly without dropping the ball on other pandemic-related changes to the network. Aruba deployed new access points and adjusted the strength of outdoor antennas. When demand for curbside pickup exploded at the start of the pandemic, Home Depot leaned on Aruba to quickly extend the company's indoor Wi-Fi, said Daniel Grider, vice president of technology at Home Depot. But Meter frees him from getting into the weeds of RAID architectures or power redundancy. Starting at $0.15 per square foot of coverage, per month, Meter costs the same as buying and maintaining a Wi-Fi network for a new office over five years, Raffaelli said. Then, it layers on services like software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), VPN and device encryption. Meter begins by partnering with internet service providers for connectivity, and installing its switching and routing hardware in the customer's offices. Outsourcing its in-house Wi-Fi to Meter made sense for Evernote's 500-employee SaaS business.

but we expect this to be a significant part of the networking market in the years to come,' Butler said. 'We're not quite at the point where we have mainstream adoption of NaaS. Also, Aruba and Meter were faster at modifying the networks to meet changing business operations.Īccording to Brandon Butler, analyst at IDC, most enterprises are not ready to follow Evernote's and Home Depot's lead, but 27% of those surveyed by IDC are considering some form of a network as a service ( NaaS) model. Home Depot and Evernote found that a subscription-based consumption model for hardware, software, maintenance and network management was cheaper than doing it themselves.

'I can essentially get the same services from a vendor for less without the headache, and I can reallocate my people to work on other projects,' said Gabe Raffaelli, IT director at Evernote.

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