Having the right products stack, Versa is ready to take the market by storm. The company is investing in market acquisition and technology innovation while at the same time focussing on brand building. With VersaONE Universal SASE, Versa appears to be unstoppable.
As we are moving more and more to a connected world, we are moving into the VUCA world. In the words of Janet Truncale, EY Global Chair and CEO-elect, “The world’s organizations face issues that are more complex and inter-connected than ever before.” This situation is amplified by the geo-political developments. This can only be negated by stronger strategies, meticulous planning, and monitoring of organizations’ culture along with strong collaboration with the stakeholders. However, technology plays a big role in solving these issues. But as more technology advancement happens, the more we are propelled into complexity and therefore create places of uncertainty. They say every organization is becoming an IT-led, AI-led and Cloud-led technology organization and the CXOs – especially the CIOs and CISOs – are becoming more powerful and a major axis of decision-making in terms of propelling organizations into a progression with the right corporate governance and right technology strategy.
Among all the challenges, their biggest challenge is cybersecurity. Their work force is based out of multiple islands – some are working from remote offices, some are in a branch office, and some are in the central office in on-premises mode. There is a consistent barrage of cyber-attacks coming on their way. For some, they can dodge nicely but some penetrate the firewall to create tremors. The CXOs are baffled as to what to do. This situation is aggravated with the advent of AI and GenAI supported by the geopolitical scale-out. Even the best-of-breed technology is not able to deflect the attacks one hundred percent.
Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa.
“We believe that consolidating networking and security into a unified platform is the way to streamline and simplify operations to reduce complexity, which improves performance along with reducing cost.”
Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa, believes that CXOs are challenged by their current infrastructure as it is spread across various islands including multi-cloud, remote office, branch office, campus office and on-premises. They use multiple panes of glass to monitor. They have remote workers who use various cloud-based security mechanisms and VPNs. Their campus and branch office employees are using SD-WAN with cloud security and on-premises workers are using some different mechanism. So, they are trying to figure out how to fix all the issues. There is a lot of complexity. On top of it, each of these isles have their bespoke products, and as a result there are multiple point products to manage for enterprise CIOs and CISOs.
Kelly says, “Many CISOs have told us that there are over 70 different point products that they manage and have to navigate through their entire IT infrastructure across all these islands, which creates complexity and cost.”
The second challenge is that every time they have to make a change or meet line-of-business needs, it takes them a lot longer time. So, the business agility slows down. The enterprises have realised that cloud is a good thing, but also it creates an attack surface which is outside their traditional perimeter. As data is core to their business, they’re trying to protect their data. Today data and cloud sovereignty are becoming top topics for every enterprise. And AI is creating a lot more sophisticated threats. For a hacker with AI or GenAI, exploiting a vulnerability takes only a few minutes and the IT organization might take 60 days to find the vulnerability and another 60 days to find the right technology and remediation strategy to address the vulnerability.
Therefore, for a CIO or CISO the challenge is how to protect everything including devices, users and infrastructure. They’re perplexed about the speed and agility of their adversaries. They spend a maximum amount of their energy in securing every edge. At the same time, they are cognizant about the data sovereignty requirements. They are challenged figuring out how to build out the network connectivity using the best available paths and deliver the best user app experiences no matter where. They also want to simplify and streamline operations by automating the policy and processes.
Given this situation, Versa envisions to become the one-stop solution provider which can secure any device, anywhere and anytime; but tailored to meet the customer’s needs. They want to build security into the network. To accomplish this, Versa recently launched their biggest platform, VersaONE Universal SASE, which encompasses WAN, LAN, data centers and cloud. Kelly says: “By converging networking and security, VersaONE Universal SASE streamlines and simplifies operations, reducing complexity and cost while at the same time improving security and network performance.”
Versa is not a one-trick pony, the organization addresses everything – from Branch Routers to IDS, IPS, NAC, Network Firewalls, SD-WAN, WLAN, Switch, DLP, etc., with their point products. And now with Universal SASE, the company is able to address every workspace, every kind of traffic on every kind of network.
What is Versa trying to solve? Earlier, the traditional architecture had different islands including IoT, remote users, on-premises users, corporate office, branch office and data centers. And each island had an architecture. The common architecture used MPLS, and firewalls both for internal and external access, along with routers and switches. That is when SD-WAN first came about as workloads started moving to the cloud and SD-WAN became the way using MPLS and multiple hybrid WAN to access the applications on cloud. The architecture was same as old MPLS – traffic would come through a data center and exit through a firewall. Some organizations decided to do breakout at the branches and go to the cloud directly. This made the things complex as instead of using a VPN now they started using ZTNA and SWG for remote users. Versa then came about with the concept of security, SD-WAN and routing all combined at the branch edge. Kelly said, “We advocated for not buying a separate firewall, SD-WAN and router, we offered an SSE service at the branch itself. So, we developed a Unified SASE platform which offered both Secure SD-WAN and SSE with the same software stack.”
With Unified SASE, one can cover the remote offices, remote users and on-premises users.
But VersaONE Versa Universal SASE not only converges the traditional LAN environment but also the SD-LAN portfolio. As opposed to traditional SASE, which covers only Internet access, VersaONE Universal SASE covers any transport service including cellular, Wi-Fi, Satellite, MPLS, etc. The software stack can address cloud as well as on-prem over any network. The Universal SASE uses the same follow-the-user policies and network administration for on-premises users and remote workers. Regarding VersaONE Universal SASE, Kelly says, “Our vision is about securing anywhere, anytime access to anything tailored to meet the customer’s needs. We protect, we connect and we simplify.”
Kelly added, “We converged and unified SASE and extended the SASE definition to cover two aspects that the traditional SASE did not. We extended it to LAN with our SD-LAN portfolio and secondly we cover any WAN services over cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite connectivity, etc., covering the cloud, on-prem and any network.”
The reason behind bringing in the revolutionary product is that the company understands the plight of the CISOs.
The product also brings complete automation. Today AI is able to generate sophisticated attacks very quickly. Network conditions change very quickly as well. Now with Unified SASE, the customers can automate threat detection and data protection and optimise networking on a single platform, which results in offering the best performance and best experience and best protection as well for the users. In a nutshell, the VersaONE Universal SASE platform can provide universal connectivity, for any user, any device, any office, any location, any workforce, and any application workload over any network.
Kelly maintains, “We can do it all with the same platform, which has security built in as opposed to security being bolted on. And, the security has zero-trust built in for on-prem users and devices and also off-premises users and devices. Because we have security built in, it offers all kinds of security threat protection, including data security and network security as well AI security.”
Lastly, the platform is completely AI-powered for everything including threat protection, data protection, anomaly detection, prediction, prioritization and real-time response to changing network conditions. And it also has AIOps and copilots built in to help customers navigate this with the natural language processing.
So, the foundation of the platform is VersaONE, which is built on an AI foundation with a Zero Trust framework and has a scalable multi-plane architecture including the data plane, control plane and management plane – all separated. And each one can be multi-tenant, which is fundamental. It’s a platform because it integrates both East and West and North and South traffic with other players – including competitors, partners, other solutions, MDM platforms, EDR, identity providers, threat intelligence feeds, and integration partners like ServiceNow or Splunk, etc. It offers a simple, unified console, unified policy, unified data link and unified operating system. The solution can connect and protect any user, device, workload or location. All of this has an AI layer built into it. Since the product and solution offerings are in multiple categories, including advanced security solutions, SSE, SD-LAN, SD-WAN and unified Universal SASE, the analysts even struggle to put Versa into one bucket. After announcing VersaONE Universal SASE, the company has also amplified the awareness through a series of digital campaigns.
From the market positioning point of view, the advantage is that the incumbent players do not have this kind of platform approach. Therefore, they do not have a single platform with so many functionalities. They have some platforms, but those are not a complete offering. Dan Maier, CMO, Versa Networks, maintains, “The reality is our software-defined platform puts us in a unique position compared to other competitors in the industry. From the cost of ownership point-of-view, VersaONE Universal SASE is also highly competitive. For many customers, the acquisition cost is 30-50 % cheaper than acquiring individual products built into it.”
Started in 2012, Versa is today a category leader in SASE, SD-WAN and SSE. Analysts rate Versa very highly compared to the competition and the customer retention is higher also. The company’s growth has been more than 40% and growing in very region. The company has over 20,000 customers with over 150 service providers and 1000+ VAR partners in 100 plus countries. Per Kelly, more than 16 airline companies are using the Versa platform and 40 banks, multiple technology companies, and leading telcos are also their customers. The company is growing in every vertical with a high double-digit percentage, and especially in the public sector where it is gaining share at 351% YoY growth. The company is a dominant player in North America and EMEA, and growing aggressively in APJC and other regions.
Now with capability and capacity in place, Versa wants to expand the business profitably. The company is willing to invest in the market and technology. Kelly maintains, “We can be a successful and viable standalone company for the long haul and we’re doing everything that we can to build the company around that.”
“ We’ve been a product-led company but now we’re a product and market-led company.” He maintained, “Our goal is to take away share from these disruptions that are going on the market from prior architectures to these new approaches. We’ve shown how we do that with our win of DoD contracts away from incumbents. We win in different types of enterprises, retail, industrial, energy, banking, etc.”
The company’s strategy is to go after the existing customers who have embraced one or two platforms and pursue them to expand their capabilities with Versa. For the new customers, the company is showing them the capability and getting them on-boarded. To the service providers, the company is giving them the ability to build their own services that they can go sell into the market. Kelly said, “We’re doing that with Tata Communications, Reliance in India, with du and Etisalat in the Middle East, and with many service providers in North America and Europe. But they do not talk about Versa as they offer those services under their brand, but the underpinning of what they’re using to deliver those services in many cases is Versa.”
At the same time Kelly accepts that he and his team will work around brand visibility and brand recall in the next few quarters to make it stand abreast with many of the incumbent players.
For next few years, Versa wants to spend more energy and focus in North America as a key market followed by EMEA and APJI (Asia Pacific Japan and India).
As a fast-growing economy, India has been a great market for Versa, too. “We are deployed in a lot of banks, energy companies, retail, oil and gas, aviation, etc. Our customer list features names like IOCL, AIR India, etc. 10, 000 petrol stations of IOCL are using Versa Networks and Digiyatra uses Versa too,” Kelly adds. “The biggest growth area for us in India right now is the public sector.
The company’s rout to market includes using partners in every market. The company is focussing and investing in MSSPs/MSPs to make inroads into the SME market. Kelly added, “Our biggest growth area in terms of hiring and sales has been in the MSSP/MSP space, primarily because what we’re finding is that mid-size enterprises buy from MSSPs/MSPs. The mid-market customers want simplicity and unified capability of SASE, SD-WAN and SSE – all in one stack. So, we’re finding that the MSSP/MSP channel is easily able to convince their customers to use the products stack.”
Finally…
Versa will keep on innovating. The company looks to the industry and analysts for guidance, but many of the innovative approaches the company has adopted are based on customer’s guidance. Giving an example, Kelly said, “LAN is not something that we added without talking to customers and understanding their problem. In LAN, the issue was more around not necessarily the users, but the traffic profile of the users. Because with most enterprises during COVID, video usage became pervasive inside the enterprises and then location became very noncritical. People were dialing from anywhere and doing video calls. So, a video call went out by a factor of 10 to 20X inside any enterprise. What that meant was traffic flows changed inside the campus. So, enterprises wanted East-West traffic flow again and not only North-South traffic flow. That was the reason why the LAN architecture had to change. The second thing is IoT coming into the LAN, you want to have devices to protect yourself down to the switches. So, we took that path because our customers asked for it.”
“The second thing is that we came up with a model which is SIM-based SASE. We innovated a new approach, which basically does SASE-based SIM where SASE services can apply to cellular connected devices which can’t run a client, whether they’re phones or even IoT devices,” he added. So, Versa leadership is listening to customers and focusing on innovation. In fact, customers are guiding the company to differentiate and be better than the others.
