Cloud-first networking and security solutions company Aryaka has announced its move into the Australia as part of go-to-market investment in the Asia Pacific region.
Aryaka has partnered with ASV Platforms in Australia and NI+C in Japan, and hired Nitin Ahuja as VP and GM of Asia Pacific.
Ahuja – who previously served as a sales and GTM executive across APAC markets at Imperva – sees the APAC region becoming a $3 billion to $4 billion market by 2028.
“If you look at some of the challenges that customers are facing today, it's all about asking for the convergence of network and security,” he said.
“There is a sprawl of solutions out there, predominantly because no one has a solution from start to finish, an end-to-end solution. I believe that Aryaka has an edge, predominantly because we have built a converged platform from the ground up.”
Ahuja identified three focus areas for partner recruitment in APAC - telcos, value-added resellers and MSPs.
“Customers are demanding optimisation of the network, application performance, SLA-driven backbones - and this is only possible if you move into the SASE world,” he said.
In Ahuja’s view: “If you look at it from a customer perspective, telcos are really well placed if they're able to offer the traditional networks, like Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and the new world solutions, which is SASE and relies on the SD-WAN solution. A combination of the two is, I think, a good sweet spot for all the telcos to take it to market."
For MSPs, Ahuja talked up Aryaka’s entry into the market as a “fantastic opportunity” to build services on top of the solutions they already have available.
“A lot of the MSPs have help desk services or NOCs and SOCs and there's a lot of value-add services that they can provide on top, managing the entire network, and then taking other solutions and adding on top of that,” he said.
“There's a lot of money to be made for the MSPs from the infrastructure layer to the network to the security and then on top is the help desk and NOC services.
“The third element is the value-added resellers - this is where we need the reach of our partners. We can only scale through our partners, and that means we are ready to make sure that this is a profitable engagement for both sides.”
ASV Platforms’ “strong network”
The business ASV Platforms – newly formed at the end of last year and serving as the strategic exclusive partner for Aryaka across Australia and New Zealand, servicing government and enterprise organisations - designs and delivers cloud-first software and cybersecurity solutions locally.
Ahuja said the background of the ASV co-founders and directors – Bob Peebles, Ian Woollett and Gavin Wood – comprising decades in the security and infrastructure industries is “extremely exciting” for Aryaka.
“Over that time, they have built a very strong network and relationship with the CXO levels, from CEOs to CFOs to CIOs and CISOs, which is exactly where we believe our product should be positioned” he said.
“It's a brand-new relationship from our perspective. It just happened over an event where we came across [ASV] and that's where we started talking. Before you know it, this became a reality on discussing how we can grow the Australian market based on the solutions we can offer.”
Those solutions include as-a-service capabilities for SD-WAN and Unified SASE, with the latter aiming to solve issues around patchwork architectures where vendors are piecing together both network and security offerings through acquisitions, which can lead to poor integration, performance issues and management complexity, as well as the platforms from some providers being routed over the public Internet, where performance is unpredictable and there can be security blind spots.
“What we bring to the table is a fully converged cloud network and security platform that seamlessly integrates, with full visibility of what's happening on the network layer,” he said.
“You're eliminating all the complexity of managing multiple vendors while offering managed, co-managed and self-managed options for customers. A customer could manage it themselves, a partner could manage or Aryaka themselves could manage.”
In addition to Ahuja, other GTM executives brought onboard include Nick Alagna as VP of global channels, based out of the US, as well as four channel sales directors across India and both the ASEAN and EMEA regions.
“We are looking at investing at least 50% more head count as a minimum within the APAC region and also expanding from a marketing perspective too,” said Ahuja.
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