Cato Networks Partner Summit returns this year

Cato Networks holds a partner summit every year, gathering domestic partners. This year, it was held at a hotel in Nihonbashi, in a larger venue than last year's Roppongi. CEO Shlomo Kramer, as well as channel sales and product representatives, visited Japan and provided Cato Networks' latest roadmap, new product information, partner awards, and networking opportunities.

This year's theme is "LEAD THE WAY"

The theme of this year's summit was "LEAD THE WAY," and the content conveyed Cato Networks' strong leadership in the industry as a leader in SASE. Of particular note was the fact that Cato Networks was recognized as one of the "Leaders" in the "Single Vendor SASE" Magic Quadrant by Gartner, a US research company. In addition, a new "MSASE" for partners was also announced.

Keynote speech by CEO Shlomo Kramer

First, on July 7, it was announced that the company had been recognized as a leader in the "Single-Vendor SASE" report released by Gartner, the U.S. research company that coined the term SASE.

The company has already become a recognized SASE vendor, with its name coming up in domestic business negotiations.

In his keynote speech, CEO Shlomo Kramer spoke about the evolution of security: "The first firewall was on a floppy disk and could be installed in five minutes. A few years later it became an appliance, and now customers want to 'use mobile devices,' 'use AWS,' and 'work from anywhere,' but traditional appliances can't monitor these issues, and it's becoming difficult to address them with point security solutions. There were no vendors that covered the network side, so in 2015 we launched a service that integrated networking and security, which was later advocated by Gartner as SASE." He explained the background to the original founding of the company, and talked about how Cato Networks was born as a result of this. Cato Networks is,

"Powerful," "affordable," and "simple."

We promise these three elements and aim to provide a fast, easy-to-use SASE that can be used by mid-sized companies to enterprise companies.

In 2024, we will focus on channel partners. Cato SASE has simple operations, so we aim to be an "Out Box of SASE" for mid-sized to enterprise companies. As a product, we will support "SASEify" by adopting AI, 10 times scalability, and expanding the SASE market.

Cato Networks partners and announces MSASE, a SASE environment for partners

"MSASE" was announced at short notice as a go-to-market tool to provide SASE that can be easily implemented in a short period of time without "Zero CAPEX" (capital investment) to make it easier for expanding partners to adopt true "single-vendor SASE" for their customers, and was announced as a solution to accelerate SASEify = SASEification for companies. MSASE supports each partner to effectively manage customers through a dedicated dashboard. Various explanatory documents about MSASE are also available on the portal site for partners. There was no talk of price, but I later learned that each partner can actually use it for free.

The venue also had a demo corner for MSASE by Cato Networks, where partners could easily view each customer's renewal schedule and license details on the dashboard, and dedicated documents were available on the partner-only website, enabling partners to provide their own branded NOC and SOC services through Cato SASE and increase revenue.

Reference information: Please tell me about MSASE.

Introduction of case studies

Why Cato SASE was introduced

The differences between Cato SASE and other companies' SASE services were introduced, as well as case studies of two domestic companies that chose Cato Networks.

One company, a manufacturing company with 30,000 employees in 20 locations around the world, evaluated Cato SASE and other SASE providers on a scale of up to 1,000 points. Cato SASE was selected because it improved user experience in terms of WAN performance. The actual evaluation results showed that Cato SASE performed better than traditional MPLS and other SASE providers, which was the reason for its adoption.

The other company has 50 locations in Japan and 100,000 employees, and after spinning off the parent company's infrastructure it was no longer possible to use it, and had to build a network from scratch, so they considered SASE for the migration. They also considered other companies' SASE, but Cato Networks was the easiest to migrate to, was the simplest, and in actual evaluation, it was the deciding factor that Cato Networks was chosen because of its easier-to-use management screen than other companies and its flexibility to be managed by a small team.

Cato Networks is a "single vendor SASE" and not a "SASE solution." There was a slide that said, "Imitated products cannot make customers happy," but a SASE solution that simply creates traditional security devices as virtual appliances on the cloud and connects them to a network places a burden on customers in terms of performance and management.

Reference: Cato Networks Case Study

Social gathering and partner awards ceremony

At the end of the summit, a social gathering and partner awards ceremony were held, and Macnica was awarded the "Cato Networks Japan Leading Distributor 2023" award.

Macnica hopes to use this opportunity to share Cato Networks' advanced technology and know-how to further support and expand the domestic SASE market.

We look forward to experiencing cutting-edge technology with our partners and Cato Networks employees at an even bigger venue next year. We hope to see you there!

Macnica
Networks Company 3rd Sales Division 2nd Sales Department 4th Section SASE EXPERT
Fujio Suzuki

In 1989, he was in charge of optical fiber products in the US. After that, he worked as Macnica webmaster in the information systems department, building and managing websites. In 2005, he started working in cloud service sales, and in 2010, he promoted CSIRT as a Splunk product manager. In 2019, he was in charge of product marketing at Cato Networks. He is certified as a SASE Expert Level 2 and SSE Expert, and his hobby is marine sports.