BranchSDO becomes Netsurion’s new flagship product, although the company emphasizes that it won’t lose focus on its managed firewall business and larger customers.
Managed network and security service provider Netsurion has announced BranchSDO, a network management and security orchestration solution for multi-location businesses. It combines SD-WAN, next-gen security, cellular, Wi-Fi, and PCI DSS compliance tools and support, and is aimed at the more downmarket part of Netsurion’s traditional addressable market.
“It’s an exciting time for us,” said John Ayers, VP of Product Management. “We have carved out our own niche in the market with this.”
Netsurion has always served midmarket customers, but Ayers said that BranchSDO is purpose-built for this market, something their traditional offerings were really not, and something that competitor offerings do not do at all.
“We have always managed firewalls and UTM and Juniper-type devices and we have over 15000 customers in managed security – but there was a lot missing,” he stated. “We were taking Fortinet or Juniper-style enterprise grade boxes downmarket. That wasn’t what they were built for.”
BranchSDO [the acronym stands for software-defined orchestration] combines SD-WAN, Wi-Fi and cellular all in a service that is easily managed and supported in a single pane of glass of one integrated appliance, instead of multiple devices at the premise.
“It has four elements to it,” Ayers said. “It has resiliency, which is built in to deliver an embedded 4G LTE service. It has agility, with the Internet of Things driving us to be more agile. It is simple, because there are three million jobs open for cybersecurity and no one to fill them, so we designed this to be remotely managed and easily deployed in minutes. Security is also embedded, because that’s the core of who we are. It has deep packet inspection, and application fingerprinting, and with compliance built in around PCI and with analytics and reporting capability.”
The offering combines cloud orchestration, a secure gateway that delivers a next-gen firewall, application control, web filtering and intrusion prevention system, a secure VPN, 4G cellular failover, managed Wi-Fi and Advanced Threat Protection Powered by Netsurion EventTracker SIEM.
The target audience is the midmarket.
“Our sweet spot is branch locations with 150 seats or less, although in terms of scale, we have customers with over 400 branch locations, as well as ones with as few as 12 locations,” Ayers noted.
The customers exist because BranchSDO is a rebranding and updating of a product that Netsurion originally released last year.
“Our messaging here has evolved with the market,” said Aaron Branson, VP of Marketing at Netsurion. “We originally launched it last March as Netsurion Connect SD-WAN, but we learned that SD-WAN puts us in a frame we didn’t intend to be in. We use the SD-WAN architecture, but this was an SD Branch solution.”
Branson said that the semantics here are meaningful.
“SD-WAN is a means to an end, and SD Branch is the end,” he stated. “The architecture is SD-WAN-like, but we are delivering the routing and segmentation of the network, with PCI compliance support and guest WiFi, so it’s more appropriate to label it SD Branch. It’s close to a complete branch network in a box.”
“It’s not just a rebranding,” Ayers said. “Fortinet, Palo Alto and Cisco haven’t gotten down into this space because of a price point issue. We did what our competitors failed to do. We realized what our market is and what we can deliver, and that’s what we focused on doing. We have a niche with this, and are focused on delivering the right experience for it.”
At the same time. Ayers stressed that Netsurion won’t lose focus on the other part of the market it serves, which is further upmarket
“This is now our flagship product,” he said. “At the same time, we know where this starts and where it ends. It’s not suited for upper enterprises. We won’t fit a square peg in a round hole. We won’t abandon our managed firewall business.”
BranchSDO is available now.
