Brex is the first unified corporate spend platform, offering corporate cards, travel, bill pay, expense management, all in one platform. With a remote-first approach to work, a few scattered offices, and around 1,200 employees globally, maintaining a reliable network infrastructure is crucial for enabling employee productivity and business growth.
Problem:
Matt Thorne, the Head of IT at Brex, spent the last two decades building networks across companies big and small. Prior to COVID, Matt’s focus was scaling in-office companies globally, requiring heavyweight networking needs. At Brex, Matt’s challenge was in providing top-tier network services for productive in-office experiences while simultaneously embracing remote work. He needed a networking solution that ensured high productivity within physical office spaces without necessitating complex and resource-intensive network setups, requiring additional personnel.
“Meter knew exactly what to do to light up an office, to work with a construction team, to follow along with the team that was actually building out the office, and really made the IT team, and the workplace team very happy throughout that construction process.”
Solution:
Meter’s Network as a Service offered a unique solution to Matt's networking challenges. The platform's scalability, simplicity, and pay-as-you-go model aligned perfectly with Brex's remote-first philosophy. While Matt was initially skeptical of outsourcing a critical business need like networking, he quickly recognized Meter's expertise and dedication to addressing Brex's specific needs through Meter’s partnership approach.
“Meter handles every detail to the quality level that I would handle it. Meter keeps me updated on the network status at any given time. They proactively reach out to me if there are issues. My engineering team actually never has to touch Meter at all. They get the alerts if there's a problem that Meter needs to fix, they keep us updated on what's happening and they quickly postmortem the issue at the end. But that said, we rarely encounter issues with Meter service.”
Meter’s proactive engagement includes:
- Collaboration during the construction phase for new offices
- Smooth network implementation at existing offices
- Consistent network monitoring, support, and rapid issue resolution
Customer value:
- Efficient network management: Brex’s corporate engineering team can focus on other critical areas instead of being tied up in network management
- Reduced cost: Meter's pay-as-you-go model eliminated the need for large capital expenditures on networking hardware, replacing them with a predictable operational cost structure
- Increased employee productivity: Productive in-office experiences without being hindered by networking concerns
- Enterprise features: DNS security and client VPN capabilities, which align well with Brex's evolving security and infrastructure needs