VMware SD WAN Gartner Magic Quadrant Placement
Transcript
>> Hey, it's Keith Townsend, Principal of The CTO Advisor. You're watching a sponsored video, or a sponsored interview, by our friends at VMware again. Specifically the SD-WAN and SASE organization. SASE, a new term you haven't heard yet here on The CTO Advisor, CTO Dose, where we're going to get into it a little bit. We have a familiar guest, an alum so to speak, Craig Connors, CTO of SD-WAN and SASE at VMware. Craig, welcome back to the show. >> Hey, thanks Keith.
It's great to be back. >> You know what, and this is an international show. If you look in the background, my friend Craig is all the way in Mexico. Craig, I hope the weather is better than it is here in Chicago. >> Well, we had a hurricane the other day, but now that the hurricane is past the weather's back to sunny Mexico weather. >> Well, hopefully you make it home safely, or home in the US safely. Let's start off this conversation.
This is being sparked by a Gartner MQ report. Gartner does these comparisons of the markets at large and one of the questions that I've had, as Gartner kind of defines and redefines the market, I wanted to make sure we're talking apples to apples. Can you talk about this Edge Infrastructure category that they define? What is the Edge Infrastructure? >> Yeah, so the category is actually WAN Edge Infrastructure and it's kind of a broader term than just SD-WAN. I think one of the challenges we've seen throughout the evolution of our product and our industry even is that the term SD-WAN has gotten a little nebulous itself, right?
We've got 65 vendors claiming to be SD-WAN vendors everybody does things a little bit differently but at our core, what we're all doing whether we're router vendors whether that we're firewall vendors whether we're SD-WAN vendors is we're trying to connect companies together at the WAN and so that's where the term WAN Edge Infrastructure comes in. It's all about how are you connecting my sites? How are you connecting me to the cloud? How are you connecting me to other things that I need to reach across the WAN?
>> So I think that's pretty self explanatory. I get that. So anything that provides connectivity, not necessarily in a data center but from one site to another site or whatever I consider the WAN that connectivity infrastructure is called WAN Edge Infrastructure. Okay so I get that that's self explanatory but what I don't know if I get is this other term that I've seen kicked around, which is SASE. And that's in your title now, how does SASE differ from WAN Edge Infrastructure?
>> Yeah so you know, SASE it's about the convergence of network and security. And I think, you know what we've seen recently is the advent of a lot of security mechanisms that require a lot more compute than traditional security used to. We used to think of security as the firewall that sits in the branch and does IDS, IPS and does antivirus. And now we've got a lot more modern security techniques where we have Sandboxing, where we have network threat analytics using machine learning where we have remote browser isolation that are very CPU intensive, require a lot of compute infrastructure.
And cloud computing really plays a key role there in how we deliver that. But at the same time, we've got to make sure that those security components are close to the users. So we've got to take that cloud computing infrastructure and distribute it closer to where users are in what we call points of presence distributed around the network. And the last piece is well WAN Edge Infrastructure is really focused on that traditional branch or office environment. You know, that router that we're used to talking about.
We also have, and this is more true in 2020 than it ever was before people connecting from all over the place. So people at home, people on the go connecting from their laptop or their phone. And so you bring in that work from any ware piece you bring in the SD-WAN piece for the office access and you bring in those distributed security services and that gives you that secure access services at your SASE. >> So as I think of that broad space, especially since you mentioned the term work from home, I think in some VMware solutions frankly like the VMware EUC portfolio, how does that play in the SASE portfolio or solution in general?
>> Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely touching on various parts of the VMware portfolio to deliver this solution. In June of this year, we announced VMware Secure Access which is actually just what you talked about. It's Workspace ONE tunnel app running on your end point device connecting directly to our SASE pops. So you can get access to your SD-WAN network and the other services we deliver from your Workspace ONE enabled device. We've also got a cloud web security solution that we've built through a partnership with Menlo Security we're taking their security stack and deploying it in our pops alongside our other components.
And then we've got the NSX firewall. So NSX, distributed firewall and a data center with the last line acquisition that we made recently for network threat analytics and Sandboxing building a cloud-scale firewall as a service based on NSX firewall and putting that in the pops. So you've got Workspace ONE, you've got SD-WAN, you've got the cloud web security with Menlo partnership, you've got NSX firewall, all of that coming together to deliver this SASE solution. >> So those are all very separate solutions.
Can I look forward to having kind of a single control plane across all of them one day? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's part of the promise of SASE. One of the reasons why we want to do this in addition to the networking challenges is to make it simpler to run the network, right? Pat Gelsinger has a slide that he likes to throw up where he talks about security and in the thousands of vendors we have in the security market and all of these different logos.
And I talked to so many administrators like I'm sure you do where it can be a big challenge if I've got one solution for on-prem firewalling and one solution for cloud web security and one solution for remote access. And I'm trying to make sure that I'm delivering a consistent security posture across my enterprise with all of these different you know, modules I have to monitor. And so as part of this transformation we're bringing all of this together under our orchestrator and configuring everything from a single pane of glass giving you one place to manage this entire SASE network.
>> So I guess SASE is the big picture let's zoom in specifically to this Gartner report the MQ around the Magic Quadrant around when the WAN Edge Infrastructure, what key areas of interest do you think VMware customers should really focus in when it comes to this report? >> Yeah that's a great point. I think, one of the things is we're super fortunate to have been named a leader three years in a row in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. That really represents our continued strength as a vendor.
So you want to look at how your vendors not just performing right now but how they performed over time. Being able to continue to deliver that quality solution. I think Gartner delivers alongside the Magic Quadrant something they call the critical capabilities report which maps directly to different types of verticals. So you can look at small and medium business, large enterprise WAN, Cloud-First WAN, maybe map the use cases a little bit more specifically to what you're trying to build for your specific business requirements.
And also look at that and how that augments the Magic Quadrant to help you make an informed decision about the vendors you should be evaluating. >> So let's get away from this, Let's call it analyst speak a little bit and talk some practicals because I get the big picture vision of SASE this is really great goal. VMware's orchestrator will help bring that all together. SD-WAN solution by VMware has been a leader in this space. Even if you look past the MQ is just being a leader in the space recognized.
Best in class solution VeloCloud by VMware. But what if I'm an existing customer and I see the SASE offering but I'm just not in the EUC portfolio for VMware. I need this SASE portfolio. How do you meet me where I'm at as a customer with a SASE vision but not all of the individual components provided by VMware? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean SASE is, you know it's great to talk about consolidating under a single vendor. And of course I hope that everyone comes in, consumes everything from VMware as a one-stop shop but in reality, that's not going to happen.
And customers have vendors they're comfortable with, customers have vendors out there who have contracts with, they don't want to buy it all at once. They want to be able to consume it piece by piece, right. And this is something that's been in our DNA from the early days of VeloCloud through VMware's acquisition, through VMware SD-WAN we call it our network of cloud services. We talk about integrations we've done in the branch with Palo Alto and Fortinet and Checkpoint in the cloud right with vendors like Zscaler, like Netskope.
So I don't think that's going away. And one of the things we'll continue to deliver on is this idea of this network of clouds connectivity platform where VMware SD-WAN is not just a way to get an on-ramp of VMware stats and services, but it's an on-ramp to any set of services we want to consume from any vendor. And you know, we went so far as to at the same time at the end of this year that we announced our SASE solution. We announced a deeper partnership with Zscaler where we're doing a strategic co-development initiative to connect our clouds in a high performance automated way to make it easier for customers to use VMware SD-WAN and Zscaler web security together, right?
And that's really a testament to the fact that we're committed to continuing to do this not just as a VMware SASE solution but also to support this agnostic world where in the cloud you get to pick and choose the different vendors that you want to purchase these sub-components from. >> So Craig, I love that VMware is embracing customers where they're at. We see this even on the other end of it with the VMware cloud solution spread across every major cloud provider that VMware is basically, you know you can take this as you want, whether it's a slant or the reality of it that VMware meets the CIO where they're at whether you're an existing customer of competing products from the EUC space, you're in competing clouds and you're using frankly public cloud to displace your existing data center solution VeloCloud is pretty much where you want to be from a WAN Edge Infrastructure as Gartner defines the segment where you want to be.
You want to find out more about VMware's VeloCloud solution. com to find out more. You want to find out more about the CTO Advisor. com. Follow me on Twitter @CTOAdvisor. Craig thanks a lot. >> Thanks Keith. Thanks for having me always a pleasure.
