Cloudbrink’s ongoing fight to disrupt the rapidly maturing secure access service edge (SASE) market gained an important ally as Japan’s NEC Network and Systems Integration (NESIC) added the vendor to its list of managed offering it’s providing to enterprise clients.

The agreement will see Cloudbrink’s personal SASE platform serve as the basis for NESIC’s Virtual Trusted Overlay Network offering. That managed offering will take advantage of Cloudbrink’s global edge mesh network that taps into virtual points of presence (PoPs) that use artificial intelligence (AI) to locate the closest access point to reduce latency.

Cloudbrink had previously touted the security angle of its platform, noting that customer trials and independent testing showed its connectivity service outperformed that of rivals such as Cisco and Zscaler. SASE testing has become an increasingly hot topic among the market’s players.

Ram Menghani, president of NEC Enterprise Communication Technologies, explained that the security component was a critical aspect of the firm adding Cloudbrink to its service portfolio, which combined with Cloudbrink’s deployment flexibility made it an easy addition.

Menghani said that NESIC already worked with a handful of established players in the SASE space like Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, and Cisco, but was hearing that some customers wanted a bit more flexibility in their deployment plans.

“We have lots of our customers who have these products in their infrastructures,” Menghani said. “We, as NESIC, we're managing it. The cost of management was going up as we continued to bring more and more vendors. They were independent. They were kind of being managed separately. We were looking at, can we bring in somebody who can help us simplify, reduce the cost, and all that stuff.”

Cloudbrink’s software-based platform also offered NESIC greater flexibility in deployment models that would allow it to take advantage of NEC’s hardware.

“It was very important for us to find a product, which can be hardware or software. When I say hardware, it means we want to locally install it on-premises,” Menghani said. “There are customers in Japan who will not let us go into the cloud, so either that or installing a web server at the on-premises so that we have the server as a gateway to the inside of the company. That was another great advantage, which we couldn’t find with companies to offer both in an integrated way: cloud based, but also sometimes on-premises based depending on the complexity of the customer.”

These capabilities then went through a six-month testing process, where Menghani said NESIC tested Cloudbrink alongside other vendors. Those results showed Cloudbrink was able to meet NESIC’s performance needs.

“Not only the product was simple, which was very critical, the product was cost effective,” Menghani said. “We negotiated a good deal with them, not only from the negotiation viewpoint, but their price and other things were very cost effective.”

Cloudbrink not among SASE heavyweights Cloudbrink’s deal with NECIS is a significant win for the vendor as the overall SASE space continues to coagulate around a handful of large players.

Dell’Oro Group recently reported that six SASE vendors collectively controlled 72% of $2.4 billion in segment revenues collected during the third quarter of 2024. Those six vendors include Zscaler, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom-VMware, Fortinet, and Netskope.

Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, explained that the top-heavy nature of the SASE market is due to growing segment maturity.

“The SASE market is entering a new maturity phase,” Sanchez wrote. “As enterprises focus on trusted, integrated solutions during economic uncertainty, the largest vendors are capturing a growing share of investments, setting the stage for continued leadership and innovation.”

Other firms are seeing similar names dominating the space.

Gartner’s most recent SASE ranking placed Palo Alto Networks, Cato Networks, and Netskope in its “leaders” quadrant. Fortinet and Versa Networks were labeled as “challengers,” while Cisco was placed in the “visionaries” box.

Cloudbrink was notably absent from those comparisons but garnered an interesting support angle from NESIC’s Menghani, who said his firm’s adoption of Cloudbrink’s SASE is now flowing upstream as it’s phasing in the platform to replace NEC’s Zscaler-based system.

“They pushed back,” Menghani said of this move. “This is not NEC pushing back on NEC, saying, no, no. This is very complex to take things out. We really don't want to touch anything, even though it's costing us a lot of money. We are managing it, we are good. Security is an important factor; we don't want to touch it. We said, no, no, you don't have to worry about it. You leave everything as is. This is a virtual overlay network, which will further create security and then gradually you can start moving things once you're comfortable. So that's what we have done with lot of our customers.”