Transcript
So we're here today to talk about a super interesting subject and almost like a meeting zone of Cato Networks and Atera. And we're calling this session IT Efficiency Unlocked. Obviously, we're talking about efficiency everywhere all the time. I want to introduce the speakers today. I'm joined by Eyal Weber-Zvik, who is the VP of Product Marketing for Cato Networks, VP of Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances. Eyal, maybe you can elaborate on that in a second. And Oshri, Oshri Boyal, who is Atera co-founder and CTO, who you've probably seen join me in a bunch of these. And we have a great discussion today. Before I hand it over to you guys, I will just review a few of our housekeeping rules. So as you know, this webinar, as every webinar, is being recorded, and you will be getting a recording of the session right after the webinar. You can ask all your questions in the Q&A tab. We're going to be monitoring and moderating, and we're keeping 10 or 15 minutes at the end of each webinar to really answer all your questions. So please, comment, engage, ask away. My amazing speakers are waiting for that. And let's get going. So please feel free to introduce yourselves, Eyal and Oshri. Eyal, go ahead. Yeah, I'm going first. Okay. So, hi. I'm very happy to be here. My name is Eyal. I'm leading Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Cato Networks. I don't know. It's a long title, but essentially, I'm a product marketeer with a few more hobbies in the company. Very nice. Okay. Oshri? Hi, everyone. Oshri Moyal, CTO and co-founder of Vetera. I'm having fun with AI lately. I love developing the system and, you know, listen to you guys and do the fun stuff. Do you want to cover maybe a bit about Etera or? Sure, we can. Maybe we'll go back to the slides. Yes. Maybe some of the audience here don't know Etera, so maybe a few words. Etera is an all-in-one IT management platform and powered by a gigantic AI. I'll elaborate on that in a second. We have customers in 120 countries around the globe, 13,000 customers. We're managing 5 million devices and over 1 million tickets going through our system every month. So what is Etera? As I mentioned, all-in-one IT management from remote monitoring and patch management and service desk and automations and app center and, of course, remote desktop. And in the middle, you can see we have a gigantic AI, autopilot and copilot. And I'll just elaborate on that if we can move to the next slide. What is autopilot? And we'll talk about probably efficiency, you know, and automations and AI. Autopilot is something that we are working on right now. We have a few design partners now helping us develop this system. It's actually a first-tier support being done automatically by AI. We call it autopilot. So you can let your customers or your clients open tickets 24-7. And just like any human technician, the AI will check the right issue and solve it. So let's just show you this slide. So exactly if your client is complaining about something like, you know, internet connection or something, you'll probably go and check your speed and do some things. The AI will do exactly the same. You will diagnose and use Etera system to remotely connect to the end-user device. And by the end of the day, we'll offer one-click solution to the end-user and solve the problem. Today, from those design partners, we're seeing something like 20-40% tickets that's being solved automatically by autopilot. But we're still working on it. It's actually an amazing journey that we started two years ago. And I think we can move on. I'll tell all about it later. Yeah, you're giving everything away. No, Eyal, go ahead. Please tell us a bit about Kato and SASE to anyone who's joining us and doesn't really know. Okay. So we're all in the IT space, but we're on a different angle of IT. Mainly in the business of solving big problems for IT teams, enterprises everywhere go through a digital transformation journey, which essentially means there are a lot of advanced projects they need to solve, whether it's growth through mergers and acquisitions, or expanding globally, or supporting the hybrid workforce, which has become the norm worldwide after COVID, and migrating applications to the cloud, and doing everything while controlling the cost of the network and network security infrastructure. And to achieve that, all enterprises are actually hoping to build a network security infrastructure that is secure, resilient, agile, global, and optimized. The problem is that in reality, it looks very much like this. The infrastructure that the enterprise has doesn't have the same security everywhere. It's very difficult to maintain resiliency while keeping it agile in a way that it can adjust to business needs quickly, and to expand this globally and optimize costs on top of everything. And there is a great quote from Gartner, but they're not the only ones saying it, that complexity is the enemy of availability, security, and agility. And the solution to that is to stop looking at problems in isolation and solving them with point products, but to converge multiple capabilities into a platform approach. And this is what is called SASE, acronym for Secure Access Service Edge. And that's exactly what Cato is doing. We're actually taking, we've taken all the different point solutions that the IT teams use to integrate, to build the network and security infrastructure, and we've reprogrammed them as a single software stack that lives in the cloud, and is provided as a service. And that enables enterprise to actually achieve this consistent and autonomous network and security infrastructure that can sell them wherever they go. The logic is very simple on how to use this. Enterprises connect all their edges to the SASE cloud service, then all the traffic flows through the cloud service. It effectively becomes the new enterprise network, which is in the cloud. And as a result, it's very easy to inspect and secure all the traffic. It also comes with an improvement in management and day-to-day operations that allows enterprises to be much more self-sufficient and dynamic as they need to go along. Obviously, this is a huge software, and the enterprises that are distributed need to be able to consume this everywhere in the world. And for that purpose, Cato has built its own global private cloud. And you can see a list, which is almost up to speed, of all of our POPs or points of presence worldwide. This list continues to grow on a monthly basis. And from there, we deliver the entire service. I won't go into too many details, but essentially, there are multiple ways to connect all the edges of the enterprise to our cloud service. They are from the cloud to provide both the traffic processing and threat prevention and data protection. We have an additional layer of detection and response, which is where all the big brains of AI sit, single management and single API to manage everything. So it's a huge transition from multiple point products into one platform that does almost everything the IT needs. But that was the quickest pitch I think I've done, ever. A good one. And you mentioned Gartner's code, but also something we spoke about a few times prior to this conversation, and we were talking about IT teams of today and the growing expectation and rising pressure on them to constantly over-deliver, especially when we're thinking about the rising complexity. So what are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing that IT teams are dealing with right now in terms of improving efficiency and security while managing that growing complexity? This is to me or to Ashry? Whoever wants to grab it first. I'll go first. I think the main problem that I hear IT facing right now is to improve the value of the organization. And it's actually a symptom of a list of underlying problems that complexity is one of them. But these are the people who are usually the smartest people in the enterprise. And if I need to master five applications, they need to master 100. But still, they're always the ones that people come and complain because things are slow and they can't move projects fast enough and there's slow innovation and slow growth. But it's not their fault. It's the industry's fault for not giving them the right tools to operate efficiently. And I think this is changing very much in these past few years with introductions of platform for solutions instead of point products and AI and generative AI. It brings a lot of improvement and efficiency. And the result will be for the IT teams to be able to better express and present their value to the enterprise because I think everybody in this forum agrees that this is one of the most strategic pillars in every organization. Ash, do you agree? I totally agree. I think the IT teams are really in a tough spot because they're expected to do everything Anna just mentioned. Efficiency, tighten security, drive business impact, etc. But they are stuck with tons of routine, everyday mundane tasks that are pulling them down. And I would also add to that that there is a shortage of skilled people. So when they are expected to do all of those very tough things, their biggest challenge is figuring out how to clear the clutter from those tasks. Of course, automation and smarter management tools and AI are the things that they need to adopt and implement in order to achieve more. So I think that takes us really nicely to something that Eyal mentioned, having to prove ROI or the impact on the organization, right? As I'm sure you're dealing with the same challenges within our respective organizations. Do you have any kind of tips or advice in terms of what you've been doing in the past year to really kind of push these initiatives or anything you're planning on taking on this year? You should just call one name so we know who answers first. I think we need to understand that we're in a point in time that there is like a generational change in the tools that we use. And that means that it's a transformation, it's not an incremental change. And it may take time to see the actual ROI. It would not come in day one or in the first six months. It may take longer because we are changing the way we look at problems and the way we solve problems in a completely different approach. So we see on Cato that when customers adopt our platform and usually we replace multiple point solutions. So it's a journey to deploy that can span over months to several years. The big ROI comes sometimes after two years when the level of consolidation is significant. The first product replacement or the second one will probably be cost neutral. And there will be an improvement in efficiency and security posture but not a financial return on investment. But from this third and later year, then the customers are starting to see a very meaningful cost saving beyond just the operational and efficiency improvement. And I wonder if that's the same with solutions like Atera. Yeah, so I get what you're saying. But I think that the impact that we're seeing, especially with AI and Atera, it's more immediate. Because I'll give you the example that I just mentioned. I mentioned Autopilot. Autopilot is giving IT services 24-7 and it's immediate. So it means that the company automatically reduces the SLA times to near zero. And it's not only the IT technician or the IT teams that are being more efficient, it's also the employees that enjoy their time being freed up by getting the service immediately when they have problems. So it's much easier in our environment to see the ROI. But also implementing Atera, it's challenging. You need to deploy the agents and you need to set up the system right. And at the beginning, the AI is just starting to learn your environment and your company and it takes time to see higher ROI numbers. So I totally agree with you. And I think time is absolutely something that they need to take into consideration. I think it's actually a very interesting difference between the two platforms. And I'm happy for you that you can show a very quick ROI. I think it works good for you as a vendor and it works good for your customers. And that's probably one of the reasons that you're so successful. But I think also one of the differences that we didn't speak about preparing for this meeting is that you live in the reactive world. Something happens and how can I fix that as quickly and efficiently as possible? And we live mostly in the proactive world, trying to make sure that nothing breaks, that the network is never down, no one hacks into the network and more in the preemptive side of the IT infrastructure. And maybe that also, to some extent, impacts where we see the ROI. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe let's touch on that, Oshri. You mentioned AI and we're talking about going from being reactive to proactive. AI plays a big part in that. Maybe you want to talk a bit about that and what it looks like when companies are beginning to integrate these AI agents or agentic AI tools and how that helps answer both of these promises. Yeah, so this is interesting because we realized during the process of developing and testing Autopilot using our amazing partners that we're actually delivering a proactive approach. It means that every time a user has an issue, the AI is there to solve it. But we also collected the data and understand exactly what are the things that happened that caused those problems and we are using those inputs to be more proactive. We have a very nice system. We call it an auto-detection system that we gather all from out of the 1 million tickets that we have in a month. We try to see how many of them we can just eliminate. So we identified some of them and we were able just to reduce them to lower numbers. I'll give a few examples. One, I think the first one will be the most painful for our crowd. We noticed that one of the most common tickets that we saw is resetting passwords. So a user is stuck out of his computer trying to log in and he doesn't even have the way to open a ticket because he's stuck out of his computer. He's just trying to get the password. So we've added a very nice system that after the third failure, he will get an immediate SMS from Autopilot saying, you want to reset your password? And if he clicks yes, he immediately gets a temporary password. So this is not 100% proactive, but it just eliminated this kind of tickets to zero. In another case, we noticed that users moving with laptops between their network in the company to their homes when they are working remotely. And the default printer is not always set right. When they go to the office, they can't print because the printer is the one at home and vice versa. So Autopilot is automatically adjusting it for them. So every time they click print, it just works. And those examples of how we take a step from the reactive to proactive approach also with Autopilot. That sounds amazing. Yeah, I want to say something about that because it's an area that I'm intrigued by. The first example that you mentioned, the use case of users being locked out, their experience was that before they even opened the ticket, someone thought about them, figured out that they are stuck, sent an SMS and solved the problem. The end user experience is that someone helped them. It was evident. Automatically setting the default printer is completely transparent. And this is where I find it most intriguing on how to show the value of the solution. Because for us, the network never goes down. No one complains. There is a lot of value. The security is always optimal. There's a lot of value because no one breaks into the enterprise. But then if nothing bad happens, no one knows that someone was preventing it or failed to prevent it. Yeah, that's a challenging one. I must say that yesterday we had a meeting on this exact scenario. I don't have a solution for this yet. But yes, it's challenging because we're doing a lot of things behind the scenes and making things run smoothly, but we can't always say that it happened. We have logs, of course, and things like that, but more than that. I think that what drives this and why customers should care about it is that this is where the competition drives product excellence. You know, and we know, and many other vendors we compete with in our respective spaces know that we need to go above and beyond to make our buyers champions in the organization. It's not only about the things that will be evident and presented in the dashboard, but also everything that has happened autonomously under the hood. At the end of it, the sum of the value that we bring is greater than what you see on the dashboard. And this is what sets some vendors apart from the competitors in the markets. This is a really interesting topic. How do you excel at not just solving these problems practically behind the scenes, but also being able to communicate it? So Eyal, if you have anything interesting you want to share in terms of how Cato kind of approaches that ROI communication to the actual customers. Yeah, well, I'm not thinking which example to give. We can show in our product or in our management application how many attacks we blocked and how many malware we prevented from entering the network or moving within the network and how much we improved the network reliability over time across even a global organization. But if you speak, if you get to speak to Cato customers and they speak with each other and analysts in the industry speak with customers, the feedback that they get about how Cato helped them is usually not about the technical details. And I got, I was fortunate to experience it firsthand. I was at the conference in Barcelona a few months ago, and I'm very lucky to be working for a vendor where customers come and say hi at the booth and that they are happy customers and not coming to complain because the escalation didn't work. And customers always come to our booth and say how much they like us. And I say, thank you for your business and for your trust. And then I asked one customer, which is the CIO of a 5,000 employees global manufacturer, I asked him, what do you like about Cato the most? And he gave me a very short answer. Completely not related to the technology that we've built and the features that we have on our feature list and on our website. It's related to the outcome that he got. And for him, this is the best ROI. Sleeping at night is the metaphor for peace of mind, for reliability, for being able to deliver what the enterprise needs, for knowing they're always secure. This is an unquantifiable ROI. It seals the deal more than everything else. I think we can agree. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. As a CTO, you like sleeping sound at night. We don't sleep, so our customers can sleep. We did have a question pop in, but maybe, you know, we can take it now and not wait because Ashri was talking about password research. Just touch on that for a second so we're not far away from the topic. So there's a question asking, can admins get notified when a password reset happens? Yeah, absolutely. Behind the scenes when it happens, in this case, unlike the printer, you know, setting the right default one, in this case, we open and close the ticket. So Autopilot will, you know, log everything inside the ticket. But it happens and the user got everything he needs. Amazing. And maybe we'll take one targeted at Eyal. If you can explain how long is the onboarding process and what challenges should one anticipate when integrating SASE into existing services? Sure. So the answer to the question how long is really the customer move? In terms of the simplicity of deploying a solution like Cato, it can be extremely fast. We can onboard hundreds of branches in a week and thousands of users to the service. Everything is highly automated and just plug and play. What really slows this down is how fast the enterprise can move in terms of having a maintenance window to install our Edge appliance and connect it to our cloud SASE platform, etc. So it's really up to the customers to set the pace. But generally speaking, it's extremely fast. We had one customer who had to rebuild the entire network from the ground up after a huge security breach before they became a Cato customer. And it was like a green slave. There was no legacy technology that they needed to migrate from. And they were able to connect 180 branches in 50 countries in less than four weeks. So it can be extremely fast. But usually enterprises don't do it that fast because they have a legacy technology that they need to migrate from. I'll pick on something again you mentioned regarding global teams and multiple locations. Let's move maybe to a different topic that's also a super challenge for IT teams looking to reach efficiency. When we're thinking about these hybrid workforces and globally distributed teams and IT having to keep everything secure and manage such versatile and much broader environments, what would you say are the biggest challenges that come with managing these type of environments? And respectively, how can SASE and Oshri, maybe after Eyal, how can AI help? I think one of the things that really help teams become more efficient, not only the technology, is standardizing on processes and tools. And one of the things that SASE really helps is for the networking and security teams, which with larger organizations are usually siloed and not collaborating very well, is to standardize on a platform that serves both sides of the house. Not only as the technology but how you manage and monitor it and how you handle incidents in an efficient way. So standardization is a very powerful tool, but it has to come with a very robust and granular role-based access control that the bigger and the more distributed enterprise is, the admins or the security teams can control who can do what in the enterprise with private information of the employees, sometimes with private information of our customers, and it needs to be done with full responsibility and visibility. Sri, can you talk about AI a bit and hybrid teams? Sure. Actually, from the IT service perspective, managing a global hybrid work setup is challenging in terms of the IT needs to juggle different work schedules and handle more employees and the timing should be a 24-7 sometime service. So, of course, AI, I mentioned the autopilot that can give 24-7 service, close tickets, many times, run everything even when IT teams are off the clock. So, of course, AI automations is something that helps with that topic as well. Amazing. Let's move on to maybe a topic again that as folks running IT budgets within your companies, we know that budgets are often stretched very thin. And I think everybody always wants to know how can IT teams optimize the resources they have? Should they expand both in tools, personnel, again, without compromising security and service quality? Oshri, Oshri, you can start. I can start, of course. So, I think it's all about getting the most out of your tools and people. Identify bottlenecks, identify repetitive work, automate it, use amazing tools like, you know, AI and automations and we have this philosophy in Etera, I called it automate everything. Everything that you do twice, try to automate it. So, I think that's my advice here to the audience. Just do it. And when you do it, you get the most out of your people, you free time, you know, to work on security, technical debt, project, things that you usually don't have enough time to do. So, that's it, I think. I'll say something to complement what Oshri is saying, which I agree with a hundred percent and I wish I could automate everything I do more than once, but I haven't got there yet. I think the question of cost can also be looked at from a perspective of risk and I'll give an example. Both Cato and Datera are relatively new players in our industries to a large extent disruptive players and many organizations their risk appetite is low. They would prefer to stay with the traditional tools that they know and they're already trained on and they implemented and integrated them and they're not perfect but they're good enough. And, what is happening and what we're seeing in the industry and Oshri touched on it earlier with the skill shortage in IT in security the estimation is that there is over a million professionals shortage in the global worldwide in the industry. Continuing to use legacy tools burns our staff. They get exhausted because they do so much manual work because they are falling under the pressure. Providing new tools that drive automation and efficiency and enrich it with advanced technologies like AI the same way that we get excited about it I want to believe that our customers get excited about it and it brings more energy and enthusiasm and motivation into the day-to-day work and it helps retain these employees. And if you think about medium or even large enterprises every employee in the IT team matters and every time you lose one there is a huge hole to fill even just in available hands to do the work. Using innovative technologies helps retain employees and help reduce the risk of churning employees and that on its own has a huge cost impact on enterprises whether it's in the network security infrastructure or IT management where Eterra is it's true I think for both domains and for many other domains and it's something that IT leaders should really consider when they strategize their risk-averse approach to introducing new technologies into their enterprise. That's a great point we're always talking about you know how do we retain the talent and that's by obviously empowering them with the most innovative tools out there. I want to ask maybe you know not a question about your customers but maybe Eyal you can elaborate a bit on how do you go about choosing your tech stack like how do you to make sure you're making the right decision and really empowering these employees. So I think very much like you like Eterra we're looking to introduce automation and AI and efficiency not where it's shiny and then eye candy and has a wow effect in the sales pitch but in places that would actually make a difference in day two. We're both service companies which are replacing in many cases product companies product companies the customer is a one time transaction every three to five years so you can do a great sales pitch sell walk away and in five years it's going to be someone else's problem. At a service company which is most of the companies today if you don't do a good job the customers churn so we always have to be on our toes to continue delivering value and increasing the value that we bring to the enterprise and I think it has to continuously increase and at Cato we always look at what are the problems now we have a customer we've onboarded them we're the network we're the network security we're fully deployed they're happy there's always something more we can do for them so we analyze customer behaviors we have a customer advisory board we meet with customers our product management team is traveling all over the world meeting with customers to understand what is the next benefit and improvement that we can bring to them I'm assuming the practice is not much different for you but that's the logic it's not about what's shiny and eye-catching but what actually delivers long lasting value to the buyer Ashri do you agree do you have anything to add yeah I totally agree and I'm I'll just add to that that you know as a CTO of a big company with a lot of different departments I think and this is something very interesting about the role that is being changing now when you know AI is growing and adding more and more amazing tools to almost every department in the company I developed this you know new way of thinking and I'm trying to preach it in Atera I call it AI first approach I think that we're in an era of you know new tools new way to do almost everything and I think that's the right time you know to look for tools that doing things a bit different and the results are amazing I can say that we have in Atera a lot of places that are amazing so yeah and of course exactly like Eyal mentioned it's not only because they are you know having AI and it's shiny and very nice tools because I think they will last they give amazing solutions they are making us more of that topic I saw a great question come in actually something that's been brought up quite often speaking about AI and integrating AI and autonomous AI or autonomous IT if you will what about the risks right so it's so I'll take it Eyal because I think I said AI a lot of times during this session you know when working with AI and we are working around the clock developing the most AI tools of course security and privacy is the number one thing to check before you go into one of those tools you need to see that the companies we are working closely with them on everything we do we don't share private information with AI we don't train on customers data and we are you know using a dedicated tool so make sure and we also are doing it in our company when we are evaluating some product we are making sure they follow the latest and greatest and of course it's challenging because the risks are there I agree with everything Oshri said I think it's very much similar in terms of the processes to integrate new capabilities and data it's not something that any one of us can afford if we 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