Networking News

Versa Networks CEO On Shaking Up The SD-WAN Market

Versa Networks CEO Kelly Ahuja tells CRN, “If you’re not talking about Versa, somebody else is.”

The SD-WAN market had a problem, said Versa Networks CEO Kelly Ahuja.

“Our product addresses a great need today, where every enterprise that’s trying to shift over to multi-cloud or a SaaS environment requires the on-ramps to the internet and they want that internet on-ramp to be at all locations of their offices. To do that, SD-WAN had been considered a good technology but lack of security in most of those products has kind of made that a hindrance.”

Versa Networks, which began selling products in 2015, solved that by combining security and networking into a single stack of software.

“That’s been a key differentiator for us,” said Ahuja. “What that allows us to do is to have visibility down to the user, device or application level and then knowing all that information we have a policy engine that allows you to have both network and security policies be defined in one construct. So, we can say, hey it’s Kelly using his iPhone listening to Spotify - this is what you should do with this traffic.”

The approach is turning heads: NSS Labs recently gave Versa Networks product a recommended rating. It all comes as Versa Networks expands its offerings for its channel partners. In April, Versa launched Versa Titan, a cloud-managed security/SD-WAN solution.

“Versa Titan is essentially all the Versa technology delivered as-a-service,” said Ahuja. The partner doesn’t need to have a lot of technical expertise and resources to do that implementation or they can depending upon the customer environment. But, for the mass market, the channel partner can go out and have that conversation and we will take the burden of configuration, deployment and even monitoring the service.”

Ahuja also discussed the top market challenges standing in the way of wider SD-WAN deployment, along with success stories in CRN’s video.