Cato expands SASE reach in DACH region

In what will be its 16th point of presence (PoP) in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Cato Networks, which claims to be the provider of the world’s first secure access service edge (SASE) platform, has announced further expansion in the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region with a new facility in Munich.

The new Munich PoP joins Cato’s Frankfurt and Zurich PoPs and strengthens the company’s offerings in the south of Germany and in bordering Austria, allowing for “even better” networking and security performance, said the company, adding that it will deliver converged networking and security services across the region’s major financial centres.

“Our Munich PoP will be instrumental in serving the major automotive and services companies in the south of Germany,” said Johan van den Boogaart, Cato’s regional sales director for Germany. “With our expanded sales management team, we’ll be better positioned to help enterprises throughout the region experience the benefits of SASE.”

Cato now has more than 60 PoPs worldwide, interconnected across its self-healing, optimised global private backbone. Each PoP runs Cato’s converged, cloud-native software stack that provides a networking and security services suite to sites, users, applications or cloud resource. And for maximum control, Cato owns and operates the PoP infrastructure, instead of running them in a Google, Microsoft or Amazon cloud.

To date, Cato has seen adoption of its global SASE platform by leading DACH companies such as global car rental company Sixt, which is headquartered in Germany, and Switzerland’s Komax Group, said to be a market leader in automated wire processing.

“We were impressed by Cato’s thinking,” said Tobias Rölz, executive vice-president, market and digital services at Komax. “They were one or two steps ahead of others. Cato was moving the network and security into the cloud, which completely fits our vision for more or less a serverless office in a few years from now.”

Along with the new PoP, Cato has added two members to its EMEA sales management team. Willibald Inderst joins as channel manager for the DACH region, and Andreas Gabelin becomes regional sales director for northern Germany.

“We’re pleased to welcome Willibald and Andreas to our team,” said Luca Simonelli, Cato’s vice-president of sales for EMEA. “As we expand our network footprint and sales efforts in EMEA, their experience will be invaluable in identifying the customers and channel partners looking to address the networking and security challenges of digital transformation.”

The opening of the Munich Pop comes just weeks after Cato announced a partnership with Japanese telco KDDI to deliver SASE services across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The networking firm said the agreement will demonstrate how CSPs can take advantage of cloud-delivered SASE to quickly meet enterprise requirements for pervasive security and optimised access from the branch, the road and the office to any application.