During the company's most recent earnings call, Zscaler Chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry defended the vendor’s multivendor secure access service edge (SASE) and security service edge (SSE) approach, distinguishing itself from the recently noted single-vendor SASE trends. He also touted Zscaler’s head start advantage over Microsoft's late entry into the SSE market.

In Gartner’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, the firm expects a more than 50% increase in the number of vendors by 2025. Palo Alto Networks was listed as the only leader in the report and Zscaler was notably absent.

Meanwhile, Zscaler is also not included in Forrester’s zero-trust edge/SASE solution Wave report for the third quarter of 2023, which crowned Versa Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Cato Networks and Fortinet as leaders.

Magic Quadrant absence not a hindrance

When questioned during its earnings call about Zscaler's absence from Gartner's single-vendor SASE Magic Quadrant, Chaudhry responded: "This MQ is not slowing us down at all.”

“SASE is a broad generic term. When Gartner started it a few years ago, it was an integration of SD-WAN and SSE that are gateway products we have. And we've done integration with every SD-WAN vendor that matters out there,” he added.

Zscaler claims it provides a multivendor, “best-of-breed” SASE security stack that includes its SSE solution 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.

Chaudhry touted Zscaler’s unique proposition as offering zero-trust SASE without its own SD-WAN offering.

“That MQ that got started this time was for single vendor SASE with SD-WAN offering in it. We have often said that SD-WAN is often about zero trust. We do offer zero-trust SASE. But we don't offer SD-WAN SASE,” he said. “So we're not in that MQ. We are about changing the world, not really propagating the old world, and we are very successful in doing so.”

Analysts weigh in on Zscaler's single-vendor SASE ambitions

However, Gartner Distinguished VP Andrew Lerner expects Zscaler to enter the single-vendor SASE market. This is based on the vendor's portfolio expansion to include network capabilities, when it announced it had a hardware appliance at the Zenith Live 2023 event.

“It’s a very reasonable speculation to think that they’ll go forward and expand on that; we don’t have any specific knowledge of that, but it certainly looks like they would be trending in that direction,” Lerner told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

Zscaler has so far focused entirely on the SSE segment and has yet to offer SD-WAN, and it has started to feel the pressure to follow this single-vendor SASE trend, Dell’Oro Group Research Director Mauricio Sanchez said. The analysis firm found Zscaler has surpassed Cisco to claim the No. 1 revenue spot in the first quarter of 2023 in its recent report.

Yet Zscaler also faces a paradoxical challenge: As soon as it moves toward offering networking, its relationships with existing SD-WAN vendors could turn competitive. And for now, a fair degree of Zscaler’s SASE sales go through its networking partners. “It’s like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario, Sanchez told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

Zscaler competes with Microsoft for SSE leadership position

Microsoft’s recent entry into the SSE-but-not-the-SASE market has validated Zscaler’s SSE approach, Chaudhry noted.

“So SSE is widely understood and accepted. It's essentially the combination of ZIA [Zscaler Internet Access] and ZPA [Zscaler Private Access] we built. But the tank for SSE is large, and it's getting larger, than the market appreciates today,” he said.

However, Chaudhry pointed out that inline security is a new domain for Microsoft. “From Microsoft, it was natural to be in the market for identity and endpoint security as they have traditionally owned Active Directory and the Windows operating system. But inline security is a totally new area for them.

“This area of SSE that we pioneered has a very high bar, high performance, great security, no slowing down and supporting a range of destinations,” he said.

Zscaler claims it has been recognized as a leader for SSE in four analyst reports from IDC, Dell’Oro, Information Services Group (ISG) and Gartner. And Chaudhry argues it takes time for new entrants to challenge that position.

“We have to connect to applications that are on Microsoft and AWS [Amazon Web Services] and GCP [Google Cloud Platform] and a thousand SaaS [software-as-a-service] applications out there. So customers like the positioning of a provider like Zscaler that's not tied to applications itself,” he said. “And Zscaler has earned the trust of large enterprises. They'll take time for any new entrant."

Chaudhry said Microsoft’s SSE market entry validates Zscaler's approach, but he doesn’t expect it to significantly impact Zscaler’s leading positioning in the large enterprise SSE market. “There may be some impact on the lower end of the market,” he added.