Networking startup Meter takes a page from the Steve Jobs playbook

"We love moving packets," declared Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter, on a stage overlooking San Francisco Bay at the networking startup's annual networking event. He continued, "This crowd probably knows this intimately, but everything in the world is packets. Regardless of what type of work you do, it is just packets all the way down."

It would only be a few minutes before a container ship traveled by, heading beneath the Bay Bridge. Docker wouldn't call those containers packets, but there's room for abstraction here. Packets, containers, they are all metaphors for moving data.

Networking is a matter of some concern for Varanasi, who warned that the number of networking engineers is declining even as the number of networks, devices, and the amount of data is rising. Meter aims to compensate ...