Meet Fred Mercer: Turning Customer Challenges Into Working Demos

Meet Fred Mercer, our Senior Sales Engineer, based in southeast Washington State. Fred works with prospects to understand their technical challenges and prove how the NetBox Labs platform can solve them through customized demos and proof of concepts (POCs).

“My main focus in my role is proving NetBox actually solves the problem the prospects are having,” Fred shares. From juggling enterprise POCs and troubleshooting technical issues to answering the questions that can stand in the way of a deal, Fred likes to test things for himself. “My homelab is basically a full-scale demo environment because I validate what I’m telling customers actually works before they hear it.”

Before joining NetBox Labs, Fred spent years in the DDI world of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM. While the work was important, he was ready for a broader challenge. “NetBox represented something I was genuinely excited about: the depth of what you can actually model and build with a true network system of record,” Fred explains. “I wanted to work on something that could move the needle for customers instead of just keeping the lights on in one corner of their network.”

That variety is a big part of what keeps Fred engaged. One day might involve modeling a complex network, while the next could mean working through a secure deployment, identity integration, or automation workflow. “Every POC is a puzzle and I get to build the specific evidence that NetBox can handle it,” Fred says. “I get to think broadly, architect solutions across different technologies, and often build and test those ideas in my lab before taking them to a customer.”

That hands-on approach showed up when Fred needed to demonstrate a complex fiber topology and cable tracing to prospects. Rather than wait for someone else to build it, he created the demo himself, including two data centers, three floors, patch panels, inter-site dark fiber, and around 800 lines of Python to generate a realistic network that could actually be traced through.

AI is also helping Fred turn ideas into working demos faster. When he wanted to demonstrate customer power-monitoring scenarios without physical hardware, he built a mock Raritan PDU and used Claude to help with the API calls, authentication, and data mapping. “It let me turn the idea into a working demo in an afternoon instead of spending days on API details,” Fred shares. “The result is a much more compelling customer demo because they can see live power data flowing into NetBox.”

What has stood out most to Fred is how closely customer feedback connects back to the product. “I’ll come back from a customer call with something like, ‘we would like to see this change in the product’ or ‘this integration keeps coming up.’ Product actually listens,” Fred says. “Us SEs have a genuine voice, and you can see the connection between what we’re hearing from customers and what actually gets built.”

Find Fred on LinkedIn to connect. Read more about our culture and check out our open roles here: netboxlabs.com/careers.