The Juniper spinoff previously had separate box-by-box management for the broad range of capabilities it offered, and being able to do everything now through one pane of glass becomes a competitive advantage.
Doug Erickson, VP of Partner Sales at Pulse Secure
Pulse Secure, which was spun out of Juniper Networks last fall, and which makes VPN, network access control (NAC) and mobile security products for the mobility market, has announced Pulse One, a new central policy manager that permits secure access of endpoints both on-prem and in the cloud.
For Pulse Secure, this announcement is a very big deal, because it transforms their mobile management from what had been a relative weakness compared to its competition to an area of strength, which not only levels the playing field, but gives them a competitive advantage.
“Previous we did not have a central policy manager for everything,” said Doug Erickson, VP of Partner Sales at Pulse Secure. “It was box-by-box management in the past, which is prone to human error and other such problems.”
Erickson acknowledged that was an issue for Pulse Secure in its brief history before this, but stressed that the broad range of technologies they cover, and Pulse One’s ability to manage all of them, vaults Pulse Secure into an exceptionally strong position in the market.
“There are companies that do SSL very well, and NAC very well, and MDM (mobile device management) very well, but there are none that do all of them, with the exception of us,” he said. “Users have to get to their data, and that access needs to be as seamless and as simple as possible. IT admins want to have maximum visibility and control, and they want to control the data not the device. We have a container that sits on the device, and it’s a little different from MDM because we are not managing the device, but the virtual workspace on the device, and also doing VPN and NAC compliance as one. Before we had it as three pods, and now we have it as a single pane of glass. Having the most complete end to end mobile security solution gives us an advantage.”
The Pulse One dashboard
Pulse One simplifies management of EMM, NAC and VPN, enabling rapid problem solving with a dashboard of system health, security alerts and endpoint compliance that permits drilling down on individual appliance capacity, performance and status.
“You can manage NAC, VPN and EMM separately – it can be done – but having a single pane of glass gives a better result,” Erickson said. “It takes out the risks of doing multi box management, which is both error prone and time consuming.”
Erickson said that the unified management provides other benefits as well.
“It also gives greater visibility and compliance reporting, including much more reporting capability,” he said. “You can also be more proactive in policies – before it was very reactive.”
Unlike Juniper, Pulse Secure aspires to a 100 per cent channel go-to-market model, and Erickson said Pulse One will be very significant for partners.
“The benefits for the customer are obvious, but the benefits for partners here are strong,” Erickson said. “Because this is cloud-based and multi-tenant, the partner can manage it on behalf of the customer, which lets them turn it into a service. Future versions will allow them to rebadge this with their own logo.”
Erickson said that this is something that many partners want, as they modify their traditional business models.
“A lot of partners who have relied on break-fix and a box resale model are trying to offer more managed services,” he said. “That’s where we think Pulse One will help there. It’s something they can monetize today as a service.”
Pulse One will be available in July 2015.
