technologyreseller.co.uk 29 MANAGED SERVICES at three in the morning when there’s a problem and thinking well it’s down to me to sort it out. With growing security threats, managed services are very attractive, certainly to midsize companies.” Going upmarket Cato Networks’ main priority with the launch of the Cato Managed SASE Partner Platform is to increase the proportion of partners offering managed services, rather than to increase partner numbers per se. However, Duffy does foresee a slight Overcoming challenges Feedback Cato Networks has gleaned from partners over the years highlights a number of complexities and obstacles that make it difficult for partners to provide managed services, notably the fact that SASE, although marketed as a single solution, is often made up of multiple point products, which creates a significant management overhead. “When customers buy SASE they expect to see this single networking and security service but what's underneath is often still a stack of individual point products and that is a problem for partners that offer managed SASE services,” explains Duffy. “If a partner uses or tries to create a managed SASE service on top of a vendor who's using point products, then the complete management load for all those point products still lies with the partner. Each one might require a separate installation or config or maintenance and certainly monitoring and software upgrades. They might need identities for the users and policies to be defined in multiple places, perhaps in multiple consoles because they are still ultimately multiple products. The effort and the complexity of doing that leaves much less mental bandwidth to focus on delivering a great customer experience with the managed service, making it harder for a partner who's chosen a vendor with legacy point products to build and integrate a managed service.” From the start Cato has tackled this issue by delivering enterprise security and networking in a single cloud platform with a single piece of code that runs all the way through the whole embedded cloud-native security stack. “With Cato, you have a genuinely single vendor, but much more importantly, a single platform SASE offering that's cloud native and lets you deliver on the true vision of converged networking and security,” says Duffy. The new Cato MSASE Partner Platform addresses other issues identified by partners including the difficulty of offering a seamless integrated customer experience with visibility across all customers and all SASE services; the challenge for partners that might have come to SASE from a specific background (e.g. networking or security) of quickly gaining knowledge and expertise in a new area; the need to win deals and deploy managed services quickly; and finally the need to maximise the profitability of running a managed service. New features that help overcome these difficulties include: n Multi-tenant partner dashboard. Cato’s new centralised multi-tenant partner dashboard enables channel partners to manage the complete customer lifecycle, from planning through deployment and into production. At a glance, partners can see details of the customer account status (e.g. licence utilisation and expiration, security risk exposure and networking problems) and immediately take action. APIs enable channel partners to continue to use their own tools, with data from Cato, instead of managing everything through Cato’s multi-tenant interface. n Support tools. Cato MSASE gives channel partners full access to Cato’s first-line support tools and playbooks that can help partners resolve customer problems by simplifying troubleshooting and improving incident response. n Tools and insights. Cato MSASE helps channel partners develop in-house skills by providing free access to Cato tools and insights based on nearly 10 years of SASE experience. An optimised go-to-market engine helps partners quickly build out new managed SASE services or incorporate SASE into their existing managed services, while pre-sales and sales enablement tools, co-brandable collateral and ready-to-use marketing campaigns enable them to get to market faster. Channel partners also have access to a proven sales methodology that has a 70% win rate using a market-tested proof-of-concept process, plus a dedicated quoting tool, free trial accounts and rapid deployment playbooks, configuration and staging tools. n AI tools. Finally, channel partners can increase profitability by leveraging AI tools to make NOC and SOC operations more efficient. With deeper visibility into a customer’s licence usage, they can also identify new upsell opportunities. Summing up, Duffy said: “I came from an MSP that built its own operational and monitoring platforms, with nothing like this sophistication, but it still took us nearly 10 years to build and it costs millions of dollars. So I know it's not trivial for partners to build a highly functional support environment for their customers. We don't want them to have to do that if they don't want to, so we've given the whole thing to our partners for free. It helps you to have a more differentiated service, to get it to market faster, to sell and deploy SASE faster and ultimately to manage your profitability.” change in the mix of partner profile as Cato develops and strengthens relationships with GSIs, consultancies and telcos. “We have demonstrably been moving upmarket in terms of the size of end customers we provide solutions for. When we started 10 years ago, we weren’t a 100-year-old business that had lots of well-established large clients, so we had to start with medium-sized businesses. However, we’re now encroaching on the space where consultancies and GSIs and telcos have been operating and are winning very, very, very large deals with global multinational companies. As we look to get larger and larger customers, we are opening our arms to partners that deal with larger scale customers which will modify the mix of partners that we have. That said, we are not in any way dismissing the importance of medium-sized and smaller customers that are likely to make the biggest impact in the shortest time because their sales cycles tend to be shorter.” www.catonetworks.com
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