A major goal for Netskope in 2023 will be to deliver the industry’s “most complete unified SASE platform possible,” but the company will still support customers using third-party SD-WAN, according to Netskope VP Naveen Palavalli.

Gartner’s recent Market Guide for “single-vendor SASE” (or unified SASE) initiated a wave of hype and marketing around the term, which defines a vendor with both network edge capabilities and the set of cloud-centric security services edge (SSE) capabilities that make up secure access service edge (SASE) in a unified management plane.

But even vendors listed in Gartner’s Market Guide like VMware and Netskope realize that they need to leave options open for their customers. VMware, for instance, predicts customers will continue to look for companies to support an open architecture, allowing for either a single or dual-vendor approach to SASE.

Similarly, Palavalli said Netskope will support both single-vendor and multi-vendor SASE solutions.

“Having already established itself as a leading SSE provider, Netskope will be capable of supporting single-vendor and multi-vendor solutions, with the latter comprised of Netskope SSE tightly integrated with a partner SD-WAN solution,” he told SDxCentral. “This will make it easier for Netskope to meet customers where they are, and enable them to make the journey from point security solutions to converged platforms that offer superior performance, security, and efficiency.”

Over the past year, a number of companies sought to establish themselves in the crowded SASE market. “Some of these were loose amalgamations of acquisitions or separate in-house products,” Palavalli noted.

Others were “rudimentary platforms that were lacking major SASE components or functionality,” and going forward, “basic SASE bundles will no longer be sufficient, even if they are creatively marketed,” he added.

Backing this up, Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner indicated that, going into 2023, “a lot of the vendor offerings are incomplete or immature, but they market themselves as SASE anyways. There are several vendors who don’t have SD-WAN that prominently market SASE. There are vendors that don’t connect their SD-WAN to their cloud security but prominently market SASE.”

But there are vendors that are now “getting their act together,” Lerner added, with more mature capabilities and true SASE offerings, not just SASE marketing.

To achieve the efficiency, performance, and end-to-end security promised by SASE, Palavalli indicated vendors will need to offer Enterprise customers a complete platform featuring a converged policy, agent, and management console, as well as consistent security functionality across vectors.

Netskope early this month scored a $401 million investment round led by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value, which “will help fuel and fund our continued leadership in the rapidly growing SASE market.” The vendor has now raised nearly $1 billion, including a $300 million investment round in mid-2021, which pushed its valuation to $7.5 billion.