Netskope purchased a French digital experience management startup led by former Accedian executives to monitor and proactively remediate performance issues across both SD-WAN and SSE.

The Silicon Valley-based secure access service edge vendor said its acquisition of Rouen, France-based Kadiska will bring network and application performance visibility to user devices as well as hybrid, SaaS and cloud applications. Actively monitoring network and application performance from a user's perspective ensures the success of digital transformation projects, hybrid work and digitized customer experiences (see: Reduce Cost and Security Complexity by Ditching Legacy VPN).

"We love how they built and architected their solution for the modern world," Netskope co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri told Information Security Media Group. "It was a great puzzle piece that fit in as we revolutionized DEM. No overlap. Very complementary."

DEM from the factory floor to the retail store

Kadiska's technology will allow Netskope to extend digital experience monitoring to nontraditional environments such as manufacturing floors, retail locations and branch offices where organizations can't put a piece of software on an end-user system, Beri said. In those environments, companies must ensure that equipment, third-party devices and guests - rather than just users - have a seamless experience.

The company also focuses on addressing the needs of infrastructure, operations and networking staff rather than just the security team by offering more network visualization capabilities that diagram packet flow, workflows and individual carriers. Beri said offering a bottom-up rather than just a top-down view makes it easier to get nonsecurity personnel onboard with SASE implementation initiatives.

"The way they want to view it is oftentimes different and much more detailed," Beri said. "What we're doing is ripping those blindfolds off and giving them full visibility and control even as they transform digitally."

The company also monitors the performance of applications even if end users aren't accessing them - to give companies more visibility into how apps are functioning throughout the day. Beri said Netskope and Kadiska's digital experience monitoring capabilities will be integrated in the coming months to create a new module that will debut in late 2023 and early 2024.

From a metrics standpoint, Beri said, Netskope will track adoption of its proactive digital experience monitoring offering as well as consolidation of competing data loss prevention, web proxy and DEM systems (see: Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri on Pushing Into SD-WAN, IoT Defense).

"We'll be miles ahead in terms of delivering true proactive DEM," Beri said. "A lot of folks are going to be playing catch-up for a long time."

DEM set to go mainstream in coming years

Kadiska was founded in 2020, employs 27 people and completed a seed funding round led by Axeleo Capital in March 2022. Kadiska CEO Gilles Huguenin, COO Boris Rogier, CTO Guillaume Savary and CMO Scott Sumner all previously worked at Montreal-based performance analytics firm Accedian at various points between 2012 and 2022, and Huguenin spent nearly three years as vice president of enterprise in EMEA.

"Through a 20-year journey, the Kadiska team has assembled unparalleled experience, bringing together individuals with a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities for improving digital experience across complex modern infrastructure, applications and hybrid workplaces," Huguenin said in a statement.

The Kadiska acquisition comes just a week after Netskope debuted a digital experience monitoring tool for SASE that combines real user monitoring and synthetic transaction monitoring to give customers a complete view of users' digital experiences. The offering provides endpoint health and performance monitoring, visibility into client performance and application response monitoring, Netskope said.

"What we're doing is ripping those blindfolds off and giving them full visibility."
– Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO, Netskope

Gartner expects the share of infrastructure and operations leaders using digital experience management to measure application, services and endpoint performance to increase from less than 20% in 2021 to at least 60% by 2026. In its Magic Quadrant for security service edge, Gartner analyst Charlie Winckless called out Netskope's lack of certain advanced digital experience management capabilities as a caution.

This is Netskope's first acquisition since taking on more than $400 million in debt from Morgan Stanley to further develop its SASE platform. The company acquired WootCloud in July 2022 to extend zero trust and give customers visibility into IoT and OT devices, and it bought Infiot in August 2022 to address traditional SD-WAN use cases such as connecting branch offices to a central location as well as emerging scenarios (see: Netskope Expands Into Cloud Networking With Infiot Purchase).