Girish Gopalan of Meter: 5 Questions

In March, connectivity services company Meter announced that it acquired WiredScore, the pre-eminent global standard for measuring such technology.

In acquiring WiredScore — which works with more than 1,000 landlords and developers across 42 countries, having certified over 1 billion square feet of real estate — Meter added to its platform as a leading provider of internet infrastructure for enterprises and commercial buildings.

Last week, Commercial Observer spoke with Girish Gopalan, head of real estate partnerships at Meter, about the acquisition of WiredScore, its integration into Meter’s platform, and how it is expected to open new opportunities for Meter, particularly in the commercial real estate sector.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: What led to Meter acquiring WiredScore?

Girish Gopalan: At Meter, we’ve always thought that connectivity, networking and wireless is really important to how businesses operate and experience their tenancy when they’re occupying a space. We have long held the view that connectivity is critical to building infrastructure, and believe that it should be a default that buildings have great connectivity, both for their own management as well as for hazards.

What’s interesting about WiredScore is they have a standard that they’ve created to maximize connectivity and make sure it’s robust at the building level. They created the standard. Where Meter comes in is we have the infrastructure and the products to actually deploy connectivity for tenants. We believe this is about connecting the standard that WiredScore set to actually deploying and delivering great connectivity for tenants.

Will Meter continue to offer the certifications that WiredScore provided?

We will continue to offer certifications for landlords as well as for tenants who own their own building. The WiredScore brand is very strong in the real estate community, so it’s going to remain under their branding. William Newton, the current CEO, is going to stay as the CEO. They will be operating more or less as an independent subsidiary of Meter.

Back to Meter overall — what does the company do to create connectivity infrastructure in buildings?

We do the hardware and software, but we also handle operations and support for a building owner or a tenant. You can come to Meter, give us your address, your floor plans, and we will co-manage an end-to-end network for you that has Meter software, operations and support.

This is done on site or remotely, or a combination of both. 

We also have our hardware. We have strong partnerships in the major metros in the U.S. to deploy those networks. 

And then a lot of our system is managed remotely by a combination of actual physical support staff that are in-house at Meter. Also, we have software and technology to automate much of these reactive responses, as well as productive monitoring of how networks function.

How strong is the demand for such connectivity services?

We focus on commercial buildings, and within commercial — it can be office, industrial, data center — we are going to keep expanding within that space. We don’t do multifamily or residential today, but I’m sure at some point we will see a path there.

We’re seeing really strong demand across a variety of enterprises. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. Imagine you have a startup moving out that was previously in a WeWork or an industrial space. They’ve signed their first office lease. Oftentimes, those young technology companies don’t have an IT team or a networking team to manage Wi-Fi and wired networking in their office. So, for that type of customer, they can come to us and say, “We just need to be secure and reliable all the time. Can you do that for us?” And we’re very happy to say yes. 

By the way, we have a simplified model that’s vertically integrated and is going to actually save you costs relative to doing it yourself. The same is also true for large enterprises, where companies will come to us and say, “I actually have a networking team of 20 people, but I think that team could be doing higher-leverage work. Can you manage some aspects of our networking, so that the team can focus on higher-leverage work?” 

There’s really high demand across the spectrum.

These days, all roads lead to my final question: How are you dealing with the proliferation of AI within the built world? Is it part of your tech stack? Is it something you integrate with?

It affects us in a couple of different ways. One is that, as more and more of our customers use AI — and these can be any company using AI, as we actually serve many of the AI and robotics companies out there today — we’re seeing increased demand on bandwidth, a requirement for lower latency in their networks, and a general desire to have more secure and reliable connectivity. That causes us to fine-tune our networks and optimize them for format performance. That’s what we’re seeing on the customer side of it.

And, then, from our own perspective, one of the goals of building a fully vertically integrated stack across hardware, software and operations is to be able to ultimately offer AI as part of the Meter product experience. And we have a couple products that are already in our kit.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.