In an exclusive Interaction with EE, Gilles Huguenin said “By joining Netskope a leading SASE vendor, Kadiska can share the vision, that needs to be proactive, automating remediation for the customer”.
Electronics Era: Please Introduce Kadiska in brief as a company?
Gilles Huguenin: Kadiska was founded in 2020 with a French HQ and a hybrid international team of Digital Experience Monitoring experts. With decades of experience in DEM, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Kadiska’s technology combines real user experience monitoring with network performance and application visibility through a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring (STM), across SaaS, web, hybrid cloud, and PaaS-hosted applications, enriched by AI-based automated root cause analysis.
Electronics Era: How’s your journey with Kadiska?
Gilles Huguenin: My journey started with Performance Vision, an early Network and Application Performance Monitoring pioneer that I co-founded in 2004 – eventually incorporated into Accedian in 2018. Following the successful integration into Accedian, my attention turned to building a new generation Digital Experience Management solution, taking everything we had learnt over the last 15+ years, and applying it to how businesses function today, moving to a SASE architecture and any-to-any connectivity method. We realized that enterprise IT teams were losing visibility into their modern applications and infrastructure based on SaaS, internet-based connectivity, and the cloud, and that a completely new approach to monitoring was required to effectively close this new visibility gap. Joining me in forming Kadiska were colleagues with similar experience in DEM across engineering, development, and customer success disciplines.
Electronics Era: Why did Kadiska decide to join Netskope?
Gilles Huguenin: Both Kadiska and Netskope shared the same vision for DEM, one that needs to be proactive, automating remediation for the customer. To fully realize this vision, DEM needs to be embedded into the core security tools a customer uses. As more organizations adopt a SASE framework and move to Secure Access Service Edge and SD-WAN solutions, DEM needs to have not only an outside in view, but an inside out view. By joining Netskope, a leading SASE vendor, Kadiska can realize this vision. The new joint team continues to focus on innovation in observability, automation of diagnostics and frictionless, adaptive monitoring while at the same time, integrating key capabilities into Netskope’s Proactive DEM, Borderless SD-WAN and the broader SASE platform. Kadiska and Netskope develop within a similar framework, which facilitates co-creation and innovation at speed as a single team.
Electronics Era: What’s the product portfolio of Kadiska?
Gilles Huguenin: Kadiska’s product portfolio is now part of Netskope’s Proactive Digital Experience Management (P-DEM), which provides visibility into – and control over – users’ SASE driven digital experience, no matter the location of the user or the application. Proactive DEM controls the user experience through both proactive and policy driven changes before the user realizes they have a problem.
There are three key components of Netskope Proactive DEM:
1.Hop-by-hop visibility – across all applications, even when users and applications are not on the network.
2.Proactive optimization of the user experience – Instead of waiting for users to experience problems, using machine learning modeling to detect changes in network conditions and self-heal through automated SD-WAN and first/last mile routing changes. Proactive DEM detects problems developing with a particular application, either locally, regionally or globally.
3.Critical application monitoring – Netskope Proactive DEM automatically monitors the organization’s most important applications based on actual traffic profiling, to ensure a consistent user experience for the apps that matter the most.
Electronics Era: What are various platforms that Digital Experience Management covers?
Gilles Huguenin: Netskope Proactive DEM provides insight across SaaS, Cloud, SD WAN, SASE/CASB and teleworking, offering a complete view from both the user and network perspective, integrating various segregated technologies including Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Real User Monitoring (RUM) into a single, easy-to-deploy, and managed platform Without the deep integration of DEM into a SASE platform, organizations are unable to gain true insight into the actual path both users and networks traffic takes, including how latency within the SASE platform affects the user experience.
Electronics Era: Explain in brief about Kadiska’s Digital Experience Management?
Gilles Huguenin: The Kadiska technology will augment the existing Netskope DEM offering, providing complementary monitoring capabilities, broadening the scope of where and who can be monitored, and enabling richer insights that will be deeply integrated into Netskope’s existing Proactive DEM solution set. Key complementary capabilities include real user monitoring, end-to-end connectivity, and application monitoring from browsers and mobile devices to modern SaaS, cloud and web applications, including connectivity across public and cloud networks. Kadiska also developed autodiagnostics capabilities that use machine learning to identify the root cause of network and application issues within seconds.
Electronics Era: How does Digital Experience Management help with business productivity?
Gilles Huguenin: The insight provided by Kadiska’s technology will further augment Netskope’s ability to proactively manage the user’s digital experience through various Netskope and customer-controlled remediation capabilities, often solving digital experience problems before the user is even aware of an issue. This insight not only helps to increase user productivity, but also reduces IT operations, Network operations and Helpdesk overheads through automation and streamlining workflows.
Electronics Era: Kindly flare some light over various components of Digital Experience Management?
Gilles Huguenin: As organizations transition from Digital Experience Monitoring to Management, two key extra components come into play, how to inform both the Network Operations team and the User in real time, and incorporating the various control mechanisms that enable true management of the experience.
An example of this proactive approach includes the ability to inform a user that his Teams video digital experience is poor due to a poor internet connection, and to enable an SD-WAN tunnel via the Netskope Client – adding a layer of connection optimization. A second example of proactive remediation is the ability for Netskope to automate routing changes from the Netskope SASE platform to a SaaS application, based on insight from real user monitoring of the various paths, routing around an issue in one specific geography – only possible because the DEM component is deeply integrated into the SASE platform.
A key aspect to providing this level of insight focuses on both coverage and context, so components of the DEM solution include both synthetic and real user monitoring probes on the user device, within the organizations network, in the SASE platform and across various third party locations and networks.