Zscaler Chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry claims the vendor’s multi-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) solution has won customers from a firewall-based single-vendor SASE solution, reinforcing its position as a SASE market leader during Zscaler’s Q1 2024 earnings call. Meanwhile, Chaudhry also introduced the vendor’s newly appointed chief revenue officer (CRO) and chief marketing officer (CMO).

“We are starting to see some wins where customers are coming to us after initially purchasing a firewall-based single vendor SASE solution that failed to deliver in the real world,” Chaudhry said, adding that the firewall-based single-vendor SASE offers the combination of SD-WAN, firewall and VPN deployed as virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud.

He said one customer deployed a leading firewall-based SASE solution across its 50 office locations and multiple public cloud sites, but found it expanded the customer’s attack surface and increased the risk of lateral threat movement, so they decided to move to Zscaler’s zero-trust-based platform for their 25,000 employees.

“Our Zero Trust Exchange connects users directly to apps, eliminating attack surface and lateral threat movement,” Chaudhry said. “Deals like this reinforce our conviction that firewall-based Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] solutions are not the future of security that some analysts advocate.”

Zscaler provides a multi-vendor SASE solution that includes its security services edge (SSE) solution — Zero Trust Exchange— that consolidates Cloud Access Security Broker, data loss protection, secure web gateways and zero-trust capabilities, while partnering with most of the leading SD-WAN vendors. It was named as one of the leaders in the SSE market.

When asked about some traditional network security providers facing a tough time selling more hardware and doubling down their focus on the cloud and SASE, Chaudhry said, “It is flattering to see all kinds of vendors becoming SASE vendors overnight.”

“But the challenge for them would be, it's a different architecture. It's not an incremental change and feature you can add on to it. That's where we spent a dozen-plus years building a true zero-trust architecture, which is an advantage,” he added. “That's why we became the market leader.”

Chaudhry likens the firewalls to mainframes — still in use but increasingly obsolete. “What I said many times, firewalls won't go away, but they will become like mainframes. We have been replacing firewalls at the branches for the last several years.”

He claims Zscaler’s branch connector technology accelerates the demise of firewalls and branches.

“The market has made progress with traditional SD-WAN. We think traditional SD-WAN is a transitory technology,” and the branch connector technology is the next phase to make the networking simple, Chaudhry said.

“Very excited with the opportunity to make the world free of firewalls,” he added.

To bolster its go-to-market execution, Zscaler appointed Mike Rich as its CRO and president of global sales and Joyce Kim as CMO.

As Rich is taking over the leadership role for Zscaler’s sales organization, its COO and former CRO Dali Rajic will now focus on scaling business operations, including lead-to-cash processes and systems, post-sales customer engagements, productivity improvements and streamlining to maximize value realization.

“Mike joins from ServiceNow, as the president for Americas, he established an efficient and scalable process to drive deeper engagements to large enterprises and to scale their business to over $8 billion in revenue. And the experience, that's critical to the next phase of our growth journey,” according to Chaudhry.

“Joyce's previous experience includes CMO roles at Twilio, Genesis and ARM with expertise in building high-performance marketing teams and driving impactful marketing strategies and campaigns,” he added. “They bring a wealth of experience in driving revenue and pipeline growth.”