Leading the Secure SD-WAN and SASE Charge
CEO, Versa Networks
October 14, 2020
It has been a ground-breaking year for Versa Networks as we have proven our business execution, technology leadership, and product maturity which has been reflected in Versa’s position as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge. In the 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge, Versa scored the highest for the Large Global Enterprise Use Case, SD-WAN + Security, and SD-WAN. We have been recognized with several numerous awards for our product and technology innovation. Versa Networks, steeped in a long history of engineering and research brilliance, needed to take a highly technical and precocious product and prove to the market that we have the business chops too.
We have executed and delivered. I am proud to be part of this incredible team of talented and diverse industry professionals who continue to drive the company forward.
Building a Scalable, Repeatable Sales Model
One of the key initiatives we have focused on over the past couple of years has been to build a scalable and repeatable Go-To-Market model. We increased our investment and expanded our marketing, sales, and partner channels. This year alone, we have doubled our sales and marketing teams with the company now consisting of over 120 enterprise sales and sales engineering professionals across both direct sales and the channel ecosystem that support our partners.
These investments have exceeded our expectations and yielded better than anticipated results. We have added many impressive global blue-chip logos to our valued customer roster. In addition, we have added new Service Provider partners. Just this past month, Deutsche Telekom and MCM Telecom chose Versa over other SD-WAN providers as their preferred partner “after a lengthy evaluation due to its security, performance, and analytics capabilities”. What makes customer’s fall in love with Versa is the power of the product.
Disrupting the Market with Product Innovation
Time and time again, we see our product outperform the market. This comes to no surprise as our founders, Apurva and Kumar Mehta, are networking luminaries who predicted the future for networking with security. Since the early stages of the company, they have remained focused on building a top-notch engineering team that has delivered this market-leading platform.
With nearly 500 employees and growing, we are continuing to innovate, execute, and deliver solutions that combine routing, security, cloud, analytics, and SD-WAN. This year alone, we have added significant updates to Versa Titan, our cloud-managed solution for lean IT. We broke ground with Versa Concerto, our automation and orchestration platform. Versa Secure Access, our “work-from-anywhere” Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution, was the first-ever on the market to deliver remote and private connectivity to employees with the full suite of Secure SD-WAN capabilities directly onto their device.
Strategically Aligning on Industry Thought Leadership
A core philosophy that we hold dear is to always build the products of tomorrow. We believe that to do so, we have to continually listen, anticipate, and execute to stay ahead of industry trends and outpace the market. When our Secure SD-WAN product first came into conception, our founders stressed the importance of integrating security as there is no network worth having without security embedded. We built best-of-breed security directly into the fabric of our Secure SD-WAN flagship product.
As a result of this philosophy, we find ourselves in the envious position to be a leader in where the industry is finally headed. Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, was a term coined by Gartner in 2019, is the convergence of SD-WAN, networking, and network security capabilities such as next generation firewall delivered through a single cloud service. While we did not invent this term or category, we have been developing against the fundamental elements of SASE since the company was founded in 2012. Today, with 90 globally distributed Versa Cloud Gateways, Versa delivers the most intuitive and robust solution for secure client-to-cloud connectivity for users to connect to applications anywhere, anytime.
Looking Towards the Future
The Versa team is a passionate, spirited, competitive, and determined group that operates and executes as a family. Every new customer, key milestone, new product or release creates a flurry of enthusiastic chants from our team. The excitement is palpable, and the momentum is building. Being named a leader and scoring the highest in multiple categories in Gartner’s 2020 WAN edge reports is only a small testament to the ground-breaking work that we are achieving here at Versa. I am confident that we will continue to make great strides and grow to be an incredibly successful company.
