Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) firm Cato Networks saw rapid growth last year. Its sequential booking growth grew to 100%, quarter-over-quarter across 2017. Its average size of deals increased by 400%.
In its January 30th press release, CEO and co-founder, Shlomo Kramer, said, “This past year was an incredible success for the Cato team. We built an amazing, networking and security platform that’s been endorsed by customers across the globe. Our expanded executive team and channel relationships set the stage for an even stronger 2018.”
Kramer accredits a lot of that growth to SD-WAN. Analysts are projecting big growth numbers in the surging area. IDC estimates that the worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenue will hit $8B in 2021 – that’s a CAGR of almost 70%. Kramer says the growth isn’t over-hyped; the reason there is a need for this new technology is because companies have failed to take action on improving the WAN in over 15 years.
Kramer told SDX Central that Cato Networks differs from its rivals because it offers security embedded into a cloud-based SD-WAN. “This really allows organizations to gradually migrate from an MPLS architecture to a cloud-based architecture,” he said.
Over 2017, Cato enhanced its cloud offerings by adding the following features:
- Secure Global SD-WAN
- IPS as a Service
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
- Comprehensive Cloud Connectivity
Cato Network also added three new executive positions: Alon Alter as VP of Worldwide Sales, Nick Fan as VP of Sales in the Americas, and Tomer Wald as CFO. Previously, Wald was the CFO of Juno Inc., which was acquired by Gett; and CFO at Vizrt Ltd, which was acquired by Nordic Capital.
One of its primary customers, Pet Lovers Centre Pte Ltd, a leading Asian pet products and services retailer, has more than 100 sites on Cato Cloud. In a recent case study, Cato Networks outlined how the retailer built an SD-WAN over 100+ international stores. When PetLovers came to Cato, it already had a VPN, which connected and secured traffic between stores, and routers at each store directed POS traffic across the VPN to firewalls in the company’s data center in Singapore. However, asides from the data center and four stores, none of the other locations had firewalls to protect themselves against malware and other cybersecurity attacks.
The PetLovers CEO and Executive Director, David Whye Tye Ng, said that adding firewall or unified threat management (UTM) appliances at every store would have taken too long and been too costly as they would need to be implemented by each local service provider. He also discounted connecting the sites via an MPLS service. Instead, he opted for Cato Cloud and its in-built Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). It allowed him to simplify implementation, and aggregate traffic from across every store, its data center and potentially in the future, also from mobile users and cloud infrastructure into a shared SD-WAN in the cloud.
Ng said “I liked the complete visibility of our security on the fantastic dashboard”. He added that security had also improved. “Before we were vulnerable and web access was wide open. Now we have tight control.”
Cato Cloud has a larger network footprint worldwide than any other similar cloud-based SD-WAN with 39 PoP globally, including twice the number of PoPs in North America as its closest rival and two locations in China – in Beijing and Shanghai.