What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation.

This time out, Palmer spoke with Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope. Beri Sanjay brings more than two decades of innovation and success in the cloud, networking, and security industries. His unique business sense combined with his technical acumen, vision for the future of the industry and unwavering focus on culture have contributed to his building a world-class team and iconic company as founder and CEO of Netskope.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Beri discussed in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: There's been a lot of debate on secure access service edge (SASE) lately, right? And it feels like there's like a gazillion flavors. There's unified SASE, single-vendor SASE, multi-SASE ... all of that. What's your take on how the SASE market has evolved, and where do you see it evolving?

Sanjay Beri: Just taking a step back, there's been a lot of discussion around platforms, right? I just want to zoom in on that, because then we can zoom in on SASE. I am a believer in platforms. You want to consolidate, converge, simplify operational savings ... But I'm also not a believer that there's one platform for security and networking. In the history of time, there's never been one, and in the future, there never will be one and so I'm a believer that there are multiple platforms for security networking.

These platforms are not priceless, integrated. They give you true convergence and operational savings kind of built ground-up and they're one. For us we call that Netskope One.

Zooming in on SASE, the concept is, hey? It's one platform for SASE and SSE. It integrates with your other platforms, your endpoint detection and response (EDR), your identity, your sensor, your XDR. And so you have multiple platforms. And these are four core platforms, and they should be open. They should have APIs for the betterment of the customer, so you can integrate all these different platforms.

And so even within SASE, if you go to a high-end enterprise ... they're going 'give me something that converges to one proxy that is capable of handling web and SaaS and public cloud and data. It gives me true data protection, great performance when I go direct internet, no matter where I am.' And they may make a separate decision on things like NFC, WAN or so on.

Our goal is to give you one thing for everything in one client, one piece of infrastructure, one console, 1-0 trust engine converged, not a bunch of things we bought and kind of jury-wrigged together, but true convergence

But as stewards of the fact that we all live in the same world, we all fight the same people — criminals — we will also integrate with if you choose, something else for a portion of it. And I believe that that is what all of us who got into this for a reason to fight the good fight. We do need to not forget that. And we need to build these APIs to integrate not only with the other broad platforms like EDR and identity but within the ecosystem of the platform you're in.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.