Aryaka’s SASE Strategy And Why Gartner’s Wan Edge Infrastructure Report Is ‘Old School’

Why didn’t Aryaka make this year’s Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure? 

Kiran: Their criteria of the Magic Quadrant, [The WAN Edge Infrastructure report]; they have focused on box vendors only, and then they have a Magic Quadrant for telecom and service providers -- the Network as a Service Magic Quadrant. We, incidentally, do work across both because we integrate those two motions. We have our own box, but we deliver it as part of a service. We don’t sell our boxes, but Gartner wanted box sales.

We also have a different, cloud-centric architecture than those that focus on the box. The criteria of the Magic Quadrant were different than our own vision and architecture. That caused confusion with customers because they expected us to have box pricing features in the way that traditional box vendors do. We had this discussion with Gartner and we put forth our arguments. It wasn’t that we didn’t meet the criteria, it’s more that the criteria [from Gartner] was not aligned with our vision. We see more of that happening [as more] vendors in this category align more with a cloud-centric approach as networking and security comes together, so hopefully we’ll intersect with something like that down the line, but the way it’s defined right now is old school, and Aryaka’s architecture isn’t based on a box.