Technology Reseller v41

Leading from the front ways: by expanding and extending its platform, its global footprint of gateways, cloud infrastructure and services, as well as its offering for customers who prefer to have an on-prem solution; and, secondly, by investing in new go-to-market strategies and new sales and partner enablement initiatives to ensure that Versa is involved in as many market opportunities as possible in existing and new territories. In light of a recent survey, which found that 69% of organisations couldn’t correctly define SASE (see box), this includes dispelling confusion about the solution that still exists amongst end users and channel partners. “Many years ago, cloud came as a category and cloud meant anything and everything to everyone,” explained Ahuja. “In the same way, SASE is a category in which every vendor is saying I am a SASE vendor. Because a CASB vendor is coming in and saying I am a SASE vendor, and a network vendor is coming in and saying I am a SASE vendor and someone that has a firewall is coming in and saying I am a SASE vendor, there is a lot of confusion in the customer’s mind. Fundamentally, what’s important is to focus on the customer and the problem that they want to solve, which is really about connecting their users, whether they are on-prem or off-prem, to applications in any cloud.” SASE pedigree Versa Networks has already done a great deal to educate the market on SASE, from its channel certification programme to the publication of SASE for Dummies , and it plans to do more in this area, which is perhaps a reflection of the confidence it has in its own SASE pedigree. Indeed, Ahuja claims that unlike many of its competitors that might have started as a security company or a firewall company or a routing company, Versa has always focused on the integration of the network and security and, from the start, has been built for the cloud. “If you look at how we built our solution and our product, it is perfectly aligned with what the new SASE category is. It is multi-tenant by design; our solution has routing; it has all the SD-WAN that is required; all the other networking functions that will be needed, as well as firewall as a service, and CASB and Zero Trust. All of those are there and have been there for many years, and have been used by customers for many years, so it is not something new for us. We are already doing it,” he said. “Customers talk to us about others in the market that claim to be SASE vendors, but when they look deeper into them, they turn out to be a network company that is bolting on security or a security company that is bolting on a network solution that has a different operating system, different management system, different ways of defining policy across security and network. Having a unified operating system that handles all networking security At the end of June, following a record year, Versa Networks announced that it had secured an additional $84 million to cement its leadership position in the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market, bringing the total amount of funding raised by the company to $196 million. Versa provides a fully integrated software-only SASE solution combining extensive security, advanced networking, industry leading SD-WAN, genuine multitenancy and sophisticated analytics via the cloud, on-premises or as a blended combination of both. Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa Networks, told Technology Reseller that the company is planning to use the investment to accelerate its already impressive subscriber growth and to cement its position as a leader in SASE, broadly defined as ‘the convergence of networking and security services like CASB, FWaaS and Zero Trust into a single cloud-native service model’. “SASE is currently the hottest category in networking and security,” he said, “and it turns out we are the leader in that category. We are already well established in secure SD-WAN and if you look at what SASE is defined as – a combination of SD-WAN and security provided both on- prem and in the cloud – we check many of the boxes that Gartner has laid out as requirements for SASE. “We are the fastest growing company in this category and have been doubling our business year over year. Last year, even with the pandemic, we doubled our subscription business compared to the year before. So, we are on a good trajectory; we have lots of customers – 5,000 enterprise customers and 2,000 partners – and globally we are making a name for ourselves across every vertical, whether it is financial, insurance, oil and gas, retail or technology. We are involved in many large projects around the world and service provider partners are helping us, too, because we are involved with them in building out their managed services to take to market.” Ahuja said that the new funding would enable Versa to accelerate growth in two CONNECTIVITY technologyreseller.co.uk 41 Continued... Versa Networks is investing in its platform and channel to accelerate take-up of its SASE solution in existing and new territories Kelly Ahuja