Evernote is a global software company that builds digital personal productivity products for more than 225 million people around the world.
The challenge
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Evernote to rethink its workplace and real estate strategy, the company decided to adopt a hybrid working model and downsize their offices. Providing employees with multiple workplace options was important to Evernote. They decided to keep physical offices open for team collaboration, and for those who preferred not to work from home.
Gabe Raffaelli, Evernote’s IT Director, was tasked with updating the organization’s technology to support this new work environment. In the process, Gabe and his team decided to transition most of Evernote’s tech to cloud infrastructure, and to eliminate on-prem dependencies wherever possible, which included their network.
“We're a cloud-first company. We have SAML, SSO, and all of our storage is in the cloud. Our product is even hosted in the cloud,” Gabe says. “It made sense to treat our on-prem equipment the same way. Our security team follows a zero-trust architecture, and we wanted something that fit well.”
The switch to Meter
Gabe has 16 years of experience in IT, and has set up dozens of networks over the span of his career. Initially, he planned to design Evernote’s network architecture and deploy the new network himself. “I was going to buy all of the equipment, figure out licensing, find my own subcontractors, and supervise getting all the cable laid,” Gabe explains. “Then I was introduced to Meter, which opened my eyes to the idea of offloading the work of deploying, designing, and implementing. Treating network infrastructure as a service made sense. I simplified my plans, offloaded all of the network to Meter, and we were off to the races.”
Meanwhile, Evernote’s previous networking equipment was aging, and Meter’s solution also opened the door to an easy negotiation process with Gabe’s finance team.
“I really appreciate how Meter’s model helps avoid up-front capex costs when setting up new spaces. It was simpler for me to tell my finance team that with Meter, we’d amortize costs over time,” Gabe says. “The math showed that the up-front costs were worth about five-years of Meter coverage. In the end, we saved about $50,000 in up-front costs.”
Meter provides peace of mind
Meter handled the network deployment for Evernote’s new Austin, Redwood City, and San Diego offices. This included building out the IT closet (with a Meter Controller, Meter Switches, and a UPS), project managing ISPs and cabling vendors, and installing Meter Access Points.
Meter continued to manage and support Evernote’s network after it went live. “I have a lot of other things to do, and Meter gives me peace of mind,” Gabe shares. “Based on my experience, I know there are a lot of things that can go wrong with a network, and it’s a stressful scramble to deal with an outage or some issue. It’s nice to have all network-related issues automatically triaged by a single point of contact, like Meter.”