Netskope is growing its capabilities with the acquisition of digital experience monitoring (DEM) startup Kadiska. The acquisition is a bid for Netskope to boost its capabilities on the monitoring side of its secure access service edge (SASE) platform initiatives.

Financial terms of the acquisition are not being publicly disclosed. Kadiska is a smaller private startup that was founded in 2020 and is based in France. It combines real user DEM with end-to-end visibility of network and application performance.

The Kadiska capabilities will complement Netskope's existing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven proactive experience optimization across the stack — from SD-WAN to SSE and the cloud. The acquisition follows Netskope's recent introduction of Netskope Proactive DEM for proactively monitoring and improving performance across its SASE architecture.

"Enterprises want to create the best, secure experiences for their hybrid work environments," Naveen Palavalli, VP of product strategy, Netskope, told SDxCentral. "Delivering a consistent and good digital experience has become a key talent acquisition and retention objective."

SASE converges networking and security. Monitoring user experiences and proactively optimizing them are key for digital transformation projects like supporting hybrid work. Monitoring digitized customer experiences is also an increasingly critical component.

According to Gartner data cited by Netskope in its press release on the acquisition, the SASE market opportunity is growing at a 36% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Gartner also expects 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will use DEM by 2026, up from less than 20% in 2021.

Palavalli said Netskope is aiming to enable user experience monitoring with its Netskope Proactive DEM platform. He noted that the addition of Kadiska will enhance and accelerate Netskope's capabilities.

"Kadiska’s approach of leveraging real user-experience monitoring (RUM) with end-to-end network and application performance visibility from user devices to hybrid, SaaS [software-as-a-service] and cloud applications has proven to be a game changer for enterprises around the globe," Palavalli said.

Netskope isn’t wasting any time getting Kadiska's technology integrated.

Palavalli said that integration efforts are currently underway, but exact timing is to be determined. Overall, he commented that the Kadiska technology will augment the existing Netskope Proactive DEM offering, providing complementary monitoring capabilities and enabling richer insights that will be deeply integrated into Netskope’s existing DEM solution set.

Palavalli emphasized that Netskope is taking an "evolved vision" to proactively manage the digital experience of users and remediate a bad experience if necessary. He explained Netskope does this by leveraging a range of capabilities including SMART (synthetic monitoring augmentation for real traffic) monitoring, which combines RUM and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) to provide organizations a full 360-degree view of users’ digital experiences.

The purpose of SMART monitoring is ultimately to reduce both mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) with the correct level of predictive insights and actionable intelligence.

The evolved vision will benefit from a series of enhanced features following the Kadiska acquisition. Key complementary capabilities include real-user experience and end-to-end connectivity monitoring from browsers and mobile devices to modern SaaS, cloud and web applications, including connectivity across public and cloud networks.

"This new set of capabilities is a major differentiator for us," Palavalli said. "The SASE marketplace and provider landscape is vast, but very few vendors are making deep investments in the end-to-end experience for the enterprise user, and that includes digital experience management, which has become a key component of a SASE architecture."