Cato Networks, a provider of a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) service, has appointed Anthony D’Angelo to be its first channel chief.
At the same time, the company has added Distinguished Support Provider accreditation as part of an effort to reward partners capable of providing support for the Cato SD-WAN service.
Prior to joining Cato Networks, D’Angelo served as the director of global SD-WAN Partner Sales at Cisco after being the vice president of worldwide channel sales and distribution at Viptela, which Cisco acquired.
D’Angelo has also held executive sales positions at Westcon, Net Optics, Hewlett-Packard, TippingPoint, and RSA.
The bulk of the existing Cato Networks channel program is made up of agents. The immediate goal is to increase the number of partners reselling the company’s SD-WAN service, says D’Angelo
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Cato Networks is trying to position itself as the first provider of a secure access service edge (SASE) offering, a term coined by Gartner to describe an SD-WAN service that has built in security. It’s not clear, however, to what degree end customers and the rest of the SD-WAN vendor community is adopting that nomenclature.
There is general agreement that SD-WANs will increasingly be consumed as a service versus employing a set of appliances that need to be managed by an internal IT team. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are now looking for alternatives to virtual private networks (VPNs) that don’t scale as well as an SD-WAN service. Managed service providers (MSPs) that want to tap into that opportunity can either deploy their own appliances or opt to resell SD-WAN services provided by either a vendor such as Cato Networks or a cloud services provider.
Cato Networks via 50 points of presence of presence (PoPs) will make it simpler for partners to manage distributed applications via a global network based on a zero-trust architecture in collaboration with Cato Networks rather than having to construct their own network using appliances they have to acquire and manage, says D’Angelo.
A services approach allows partners to benefit from a recurring revenue model without having to be concerned about margins on appliances or whether they or the vendor provide support.
“They don’t have to fight for the table scraps,” says D’Angelo.
Regardless of the path chosen, there’s no doubt SD-WANs represent a massive opportunity for channel partners. The only thing to determine now is how best to tap into it.
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