Newly appointed partners are Sydney based ASV Platforms for Australia and New Zealand and network and systems integrator Nippon Information and Communication (NI+C) for Japan.

Nitin Ahuja has been named vice president and general manager for APAC and APJ and William Ho, former CEO of Hong Kong Broadband Enterprise Solutions, has been named a strategic advisor for the Asia Pacific region. Other regional appointments include Meng Foo as channel sales director, ASEAN and Abhijit Neelga as channel sales director, India. Foo joined Aryaka from Cato Networks in late 2024. Neelga is a former Southeast Asia partner manager for Google Cloud.

Ahuja told ITWire that Aryaka gained about 10-15 percent of its revenues from the APAC region and was looking to lift its regional resources by 25 percent by the end of 2025.

“The global [SDWAN and SASE] market will be worth about $US28b to $US30b by 2028. Our market in APJ today is between $US4b and $US5b,” he said.

Aryaka’s ANZ partner, ASV platforms, was formed specifically for the role (its website is https://www.aryakaanz.com/). Ahuja said the key factor in the company’s appointment was the CXO level connections of its staff.

“ASV is a brand new company. These are people with the right CX connections who came out of their existing operations and businesses to form ASV platforms.

“I believe our solutions will resonate extremely well with the CX level. ASV is one partner we believe can take us from having a small presence in Australia to the next level.”

Ahuja said the creation of ASV and its role came out of a meeting with its principals at an event. “We had conversations about how we wanted to grow the Australian market, and what we were looking for. We thought they had the right skillset and the right executive connections to help us penetrate that market quite extensively.

“They're going to be a strategic premier partner for us, which basically means we are operating at the moment through ASV Platforms. They will be one of our very few strategic partners. There could be others, but we're not looking to add them at this stage.”

Ahuja said Aryaka was looking for partners to serve specific vertical markets: manufacturing, retail, logistics and transportation, healthcare and financial services.

He said Aryaka had only a handful of customers in ANZ at present, the local arms of multinationals, but there was ample opportunity to expand, and the company was investing to meet expected demand.

“We have a PoP in Sydney. We're also investing in a virtual PoP in Melbourne (software running in a commercial data centre). So that tells you that we have commitment to grow the ANZ market.”

He attributed the forecast 25-30 percent market growth rates to the convergence of SDWAN, “a fairly mature market” with SASE as customers looked for integrated solutions.

“A lot of companies are realising the benefits of converged SASE and SDWAN. And I think Aryaka is well positioned to be that single platform offering SDWAN, plus the security components that will help them reduce latency and increase application performance.”

Aryaka is headquartered in Santa Clara and its main presence in the region is in Bangalore in India, where it has some 300 employees, but Ahuja said Singapore, where he is based would become the regional hub.

Prior to joining Aryaka, Ahuja ran the cybersecurity specialisation business for Imperva in APAC and APJ and was previously general manager and sales director for Asia emerging markets at VMware. He spent 14 years in Australia in roles with HP, Microsoft, Xerox and others and holds master’s degrees in engineering management and telecommunications from, respectively, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of New South Wales.

He told ITWire he had been attracted to Aryaka by the company’s vision and by its technology, acknowledging that the company operated in a crowded market.

“Many customers today are asking for convergence of network and security, but what they are getting is patchy, because a lot of architectures are driven by acquisitions: companies that have a SASE offering do not have an SDWAN offering, and vice versa. That causes a lot of integration and performance issues, and management complexity.

“On top of that, most of our competitors are carrying traffic through the public Internet, which is not stable and is completely exposed to security blind spots. At Aryaka, we have our own private network we’ve built from the ground up, enabling us to provide convergence of network and security. … We are probably the only SDWAN provider offering a five nines service level guarantee.”

Like almost every other IT company, Aryaka sees artificial intelligence having a big impact, both on how it operates its services and on customer requirements driven by AI.

Ahuja said AI was a core enabler “making networking security smarter, faster and autonomous,” and the company was deploying AI in two main ways.

“We are optimising and protecting customers’ Gen AI implementations. We want to ensure that these Gen AI workloads perform really well across the network. We are also protecting organisations from knowledge and data leakage from Gen AI applications, while protecting against AI model specific network threats.

Also, he said Aryaka had just launched a service in which “we use hundreds of AI models to provide a real time visibility into network security, both for AI and the non AI traffic. … We're also trying to inherit AI as a company inside our platform for traffic optimisation, to ensure that applications always take the fastest, the most reliable path. This will allow self-healing and reduce downtime without human intervention.”

Further down the track, Ahuja said the components of SASE/SDWAN were expected to converge into a new entity powered by AI.

“Today, the word SASE has five components [ChatGPT lists these as: SDWAN, firewall as a service, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker and zero trust network access]. Already you can see the market is converging. In the future, it may be called something else, powered by AI, but at the end of the day, this is all going to be converged into a single platform. You're going to have all the components from security and networking fully converged and running AI for threat models, for threat detection and a security models.

“That is exactly where we are heading. Our vision is to ensure that we can look at Gen AI applications from a convergence landscape, and use AI embedded into our own platforms to make sure that we have positive security models, we have threat detection covered, and we are detecting threats faster than they're operating. That is the vision we have, and we're moving in that direction.”