Palo Alto Networks is getting serious about SASE, announcing today the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million cash in a bid to bolster its Prisma Access offering.

The managed security provider turned secure access service edge (SASE) vendor, says CloudGenix’s SD-WAN capabilities will form the second pillar of its SASE offering.

Coined by Gartner research, SASE stitches together elements of edge computing, security, and wide-area networking (WAN) into a single cloud-managed package.

“The combined platform will provide customers with a complete SASE offering that is best in class, easy to deploy, cloud managed, and delivered as-a-service,” said Palo Alto Chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora in a statement.

Founded in 2013, CloudGenix has aggressively pursued larger vendors like Cisco, winning a reported 250 customers across a variety of verticals. In an earlier interview with SDxCentral, CloudGenix CEO Kumar Ramachandran credited much of the SD-WAN vendor‘s growth in 2019 — reportedly 300% year over year — to its ability to take on its much-larger rival and convince large enterprise clients to defect.

Max Gazor, CRV general partner and CloudGenix board member, in a Medium post praised the acquisition. “CloudGenix did what many consider impossible in networking. As a small startup, they competed and won at the highest level for Fortune 100 accounts against Cisco,” he wrote. CRV was one of several venture capital firms that helped to fund CloudGenix to the tune of $99 million.

The deal is expected to close during Palo Alto’s fiscal fourth-quarter this fall. CloudGenix co-founders including Ramachandran, Mani Ramasamy, and Venkataraman Anand have said they will join Palo Alto.

SASE Ambitions

Last fall, Palo Alto became one of the first security vendors to adopt a SASE architecture with the integration of SD-WAN and a data loss prevention (DPL) service into its Prisma Access offering.

Since then, security and SD-WAN vendors alike have been quick to board the SASE train.

Earlier this month Akamai rolled out secure web gateways to its security platform in preparation to adopt a SASE architecture.

Meanwhile, in February, security vendors Perimeter 81 and McAfee each announced their entrance into the growing SASE market.

However, some vendors have been quick to point out that many of these early SASE offerings fail to meet Gartner’s definition and that many still have a long way to go before they can claim a full-fledged offering.