Has the pandemic influence Aryaka’s product development?  

Carter: It honestly did help accelerate our product development efforts. We made sure we were offering the types and features and functionalities our customers needed to be able to have the kind of secure access for their employees who are working from home. Last year was one of the best years in Aryaka’s history and we continue to see tremendous growth going forward as companies are coming to a place where they realize we are living in a bifurcated world. They are going to need to work from home and that fits perfectly well for us because our architecture is flexible enough to accommodate both ends of that spectrum.

Kiran: We introduced a new private access offering which allows our customers to have a hybrid workplace environment, which means they can provide flexibility for their employees, while giving consistency of application performance. That was a key announcement we made, and even ahead of the announcement, we had 20,000 users license sold. Two quarters prior to that, we announced managed firewall and security offerings with the likes of Check Point and Palo Alto Networks. We virtualized those firewalls and brought them onboard with our own service edge boxes. Customers were already starting to get interested in that. They see this converged footprint on the edge where they don’t need two different appliances and it can be delivered as a service. Then, we tacked on a private access offering on top of that, [which] really opened up this gateway for the hybrid workplace environment on the client side with a branch office location and then in the cloud as well. We are seeing a lot of traction here.