Masergy leapt headlong into the secure access service edge (SASE) market today with a revamped SD-WAN strategy designed to expand the company's market share and provide greater flexibility to customers.

Unlike many SASE vendors, such as Palo Alto Networks and Cato Network, which are coming from either the security or SD-WAN markets, Masergy is among the first to enter the fray as a managed service provider.

Coined by Gartner a little less than a year ago, SASE combines elements of edge computing, security, and wide-area networking (WAN) into a single cloud-native package.

Masergy's offering stitches together edge hardware and SD-WAN functionality from Fortinet with an in-house security stack that includes several of the key SASE capabilities like a cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway, zero trust network access, and cloud-based firewalls.

Alongside these capabilities, Masergy also includes unified threat management and response as well as the company's artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) platform announced last year.

In an exclusive interview with SDxCentral, Masergy CEO Chris MacFarland explained that his company's pivot from high-performance networking to managed services and security has been unfolding for years. "What we've been able to do is integrate different tenants and components and frameworks," he said, adding that because of this "we're incredibly well positioned to drive traction in the marketplace as more enterprises adopt SASE solutions."

Masergy's entrance into the SASE market is part of an ongoing pivot in the company's philosophy, MacFarland said.

Until now, Masergy has focused almost exclusively on large enterprise customers. The company now looks to change that by introducing new support models such as co-management, support for third-party underlay networks, and tighter intergeneration with public cloud providers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

"We're pivoting away from being so focused on the last-mile communications and allowing our customers to either be fully over the top, or they can bring their own network whether that's private or MPLS from a third-party other than Masergy," MacFarland said. "The second thing that we did was instead of just delivering fully-managed solutions, we actually allow for a different flavor, which is what we call co-managed."

This, he says, allows the customer to take a much more active role in the management of their WAN while allowing them to choose their own providers where advantageous or necessary.

These advancements will dramatically enhance the company's addressable market, MacFarland adds. "This, from our perspective, allows us to probably go from reaching 25% of marketplace to 75% of the marketplace," he said. "Now we are able to serve one set of businesses that were roughly $500 million to $10 billion. We think now we have the ability to serve customers as small as $50 million a year in annual revenue."