Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform Reviews

Among our clients, there are roughly 30-50 employees using this solution. 

Versa Titan is very flexible. It integrates well with third-party devices. 

Our customers are very satisfied with this solution. They have not mentioned any areas for improvement. 

Versa Titan is stable. 

Their technical support is very good. Their response times are good. They provide us with very clear information — it's excellent. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment took a few hours. 

Deployment only required two engineers. 

We pay on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

I am working as a network engineer, and I test the performance of virtual routers and other products. I work in a lab environment where we test the performance of these products. I have worked on Data Plane for Versa. We have a controller deployed, and we have different templates on it.

The division of Control Plane and Data Plane is most valuable. It can be deployed anywhere, and you can control it and configure it from anywhere. This is one of the good features of this solution.

I heard about them for the first time just before I started working on Versa. They do have blogs for information, but they could publicize more about the documentation and architecture. It doesn't seem to have that much exposure, and they should work on their customer base more.

I have been using this solution for only six months.

It is easy to scale if you know about the SD-WAN technology, and you have worked on a similar solution. It is similar to other SD-WAN technologies and components. If you are experienced in working with other SD-WAN products, it will be easier. If you don't have a clue about it, it will be a problem.

In terms of the number of users, in my team, there are 15 to 20 people. We get a requirement, and then we work on it. For example, a customer has a requirement for Versa Flex to be deployed in their environment. Sometimes, there may be ten people working on it, and sometimes, there may be just two people working on it. It depends on a customer's requirements.

Their technical support is good. We directly communicate with Versa if we have any issues or questions. Their response time is really good. 

Our issues were related to some glitches. Some of our test cases were also not working fine. They helped with what we were doing wrong. In our test environment, we had different configurations, and they were pretty helpful about that.

I've worked on Viptela's SD-WAN technologies.

It has a straightforward setup.

If you are trying to implement Versa Flex, I would recommend understanding how all the components work and stick together. You should know this because this is a next-generation technology using which you could deploy an orchestrator in other environments. You can then deploy your nodes on various sites, such as a physical site or a cloud environment, and control them from there. You should have good knowledge of how this technology works, and then you should appropriately use its new features, which segregate it from legacy routers.

It is a great product with good scalability features. It is good compared to other leading products in the market. I would rate Versa FlexVNF an eight out of ten.

The solution is great at picking up orders.

There are great security and ops features without the need for having a different box for security. 

The product would be better if they could think of more enterprise options. They need more variables and sizing models for larger clients. 

With the pandemic and changing work models, it would be ideal if the product more accessibility options or more diversity within the solution itself.

We've been using the solution for the last three and a half years.

The solution isn't great for scalability if you have an enterprise-level organization. It's more for smaller companies and less so for larger ones. That might limit it for some users.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been pretty happy with it so far. 

We mostly implement this product for our clients.

There are many great aspects to the product. 

It's flexible. It's possible to have it on a universal CPE. The CPE is a small server or device that can be installed on the client's premises which the FlexVNF software can be installed onto. It doesn't have to be a vendor-specific CPE. This can help users reduce costs. Other solutions don't offer such flexibility.

One of the interesting things about the solution, which is not an easy feat, is that they offer a multi-tenancy solution at the CPE level.

They also allow for the integration of their solution as a provider with other security vendors, like Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Forcepoint. With other vendors, they stick with their own security appliances or images. This solution, however, really does try to integrate with everything.

In terms of support, they are very focused on SD-Wan technology. They are not working on multiple technologies. This ensures your business is very focused. It allows you to be very focused on your support and ensures your level of support will be very high. The customers will be satisfied with the results. 

The development is fast because they are only focused on one direction. Of course, SD-WAN not only means that you are optimizing the routing and the speed of the internet but also it allows you to optimize the security. Users can have better, more advanced security features. 

They are focusing on integrating their security features right now. They are growing quickly in this direction. That means they're giving a lot of attention to the security within the product. It's making it a more complete product without forcing you to just use Versa.

Overall, it's nice and very user friendly. That's what makes it so successful. They give you complicated features but with a very simple user interface, and that's been a big success for them.

The support needs to be improved. 

The interface does still need enhancements to make it even easier to operate in the future. They have complicated policies that need to be applied.

We've been using the solution for about one and a half years now.

If the setup is done properly, the solution is quite stable. There's no need to worry about bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash.

It is easy to scale. The solution has considered various roadmaps and focused on future growth for organizations. Some features may not be active just yet, however, they are in the roadmap.  They are looking at, for example, delivering Ethernet over two or three layers, over the internet, which is very interesting and is, in my opinion, revolutionary.

The solution benefits huge companies, more so than smaller ones. Currently, various product features are capable of fulfilling any big enterprise requirements. They are trying to get the certifications from international security communities like Gardner. Their focus is more so on the larger scale organizations and they are trying to compete with companies like Cisco, Palo Alto, etc. Since it is meant for bigger companies, it can get pretty big itself.

Their support is okay, but they need to grow it out faster. They need a better mechanism for getting quick responses to clients and to hire more people on the support level. The gold standard is Cisco, and they should try to be more like that. 

They have a very focused product and because of that, they need a very focused support staff. They should have different people who are specialized on different aspects. They don't have to spend a lot of money to do this, they just need to ensure they have the right people in place to answer questions.

It seems a bit unfair to judge them in totality, however, as I just had one instance with them so far. 

The solution's initial setup is complex in that it's not plug-and-play. You won't face zero-touch provisioning with this solution. Instead, there will be a staging process. It requires certain commands and you need to run it on Linux or Unix.

The solution has some issues with staging, and, if you compare it to other products, you'll see other vendors are much more straightforward. Zillow Clouds and Meraki are two good examples of a straightforward setup.

For myself, I have a technical background. These things are interesting for me, and I'm happy to do it, but on the commercial side of things, the customers don't really want to deal with difficult setups. Usually, however, it's the partner that provisions for the client, so the client never has to really deal with these issues. If you are a partner or a supplier, you'll end up doing this part yourselves. So, for those that know the product, it can be considered straightforward.

After that, users will enjoy a lot of features. 

It only takes about one hour to deploy the solution. I handled the POC myself and I've done some extensive training. I didn't feel comfortable in staging Versa devices. This was a problem. For comparison, if you would like to stage a VeloCloud device, it may take from you 10 minutes, whereas Versa could take about an hour.

If you are facing complications, you need to spend time understanding them before doing the provisioning. It will take some effort to understand the staging process, but it's worth it to take a step back. 

I handled the POC myself and I've done some extensive training, so I was able to handle all the provisioning and staging. We found we struggled a bit with our engineers figuring out how to write everything correctly. Unlike other deployments where it's a very straightforward couple of clicks, if you make a mistake in provisioning there is a receipt required, and you need to call the engineer from your Versa vendor to help troubleshoot problems.

In the end, it's not only about cost. A lot of big enterprises don't care about the cost. They care about having a single point of contact to take care of their security and internet routing optimization. Having one support ultimately reduces costs, as there would only be one maintenance contract and one device.  

We have a lifetime implementation. We're using the latest version of the solution.

It's a good product for high-end and large enterprises, but smaller enterprises might not be a good fit.

I'd just advise that especially surrounding the initial setup, a new company needs to ensure they have the right support in place. Companies need to make sure their SLA's are very clear so they can get the support they need from the outset and into the future. Compare companies and be clear about the requirements and you will have an easier time.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd give it full marks, however, I do believe that they can continue to improve on the existing product in various ways. 

It's a purely internet-based solution. That means the customer already has their Ownned up-link(s), which we call DIA(Direct Internet Access). That means the customer brings their own connections to set up the virtual SD-WAN network and just use our white-box solution. On top of it, we set out an SD-WAN appliance which can be controlled by the setup on the CTG side.

Versa FlexVNF helps customer uses existing infrastructure to quickly complete the SD-WAN deployment through software appliance. Except for the edge hardware equipment used in customer case(s), SD-WAN provider no need invested in any hardware inside, but completely uses the existing Cloud platform.

Versa FlexVNF supports multi-tenancy, which is very important for ISP's TCO in running a SD-WAN network. Meanwhile,Versa FlexVNF is purely software based solution that help CSP(cloud service provider) upsell SD-WAN business.

We need to think about how to leverage the MPLS-VPN customers, so to integrate the SD-WAN network. We are thinking about how to make customers consolidate the loads to an SD-WAN network so that the customers can have a bigger chunk from the SD-WAN plane.Under the trend of Digital Transformation, enterprise customers looking for lower price with border bandwidth. In the designed direction,customers can have critical data be transferred by MPLS-VPN network while non-critical data or some labeled traffic can be transferred by the SD-WAN network. Considering the uncertainty of the economic situation, perhaps more companies will seek to expand data pipe based on the original network instead of building a new network. For new business areas which requires more flexible contract term,and shorter provision time, SD-WAN integrated with MPLS-VPN would be a important direction.

I have been using Versa since 2017. 

The stability has been quite good. It's a purely software-based solution, so it can easily be scanned or installed in a virtual environment. It's very adaptive to those environments.

Good and stable

It is generally stable but when we have trouble with deploying or configuration we encounter certain issues. Their support is helpful and they respond in a timely manner. 

The price is consist of several aspects but it makes sense for the market.

For the SD-WAN solution, it's not just the pricing for accreditations from the solution side. We need to combine the hardware and the connections, even managing service ourselves. Customers need to have a integrated solution from a skilled engineer team, but not just to judge if the solution providers are fair or not. But generally, when we compare with other brands, I think this solution is lean and agile.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There's no brand that can rank a 10. A ten from my perspective, means good enough to ramp-up. Eight is the highest that can be scored amongst the choices of SD-WAN brands. I think the SD-WAN products Versa has have great space to improve. For example, automation. We are saying it's an SD-WAN solution, but it's not fully automatic for the service provider side. It requires a skilled managed service team to handle service delivery, even senior technical team involved.Their expertise is very important in customer solutions deploy and operation.

It takes a lot of manpower to go to market which is why I'm not fully satisfied. Also, currently, we have to treat the solution as an isolated direction to go with. If the customer has invested a lot in their network, like Cisco, Huawei, or even Juniper, the customer needs to abandon their current invest. In that case, we hope that Versa will allow the customer to leverage their current and past investments.

We primarily use the solution for connecting to other branches via SD-WAN tunnels. The solution is routing data via application area polices and deprecation tools. It's a mix of a firewall and prevention software.

Versa's virtualization features are very good.

Our organization finds the application routing features extremely useful.

The UTM features can be improved. It should offer better functionality. 

The features, overall, could be improved upon. There aren't in general, enough of them. It's my understanding that it's part of the roadmap, so we're likely to get some functionality in the future.

We've been using the solution for about two years now.

The solution is quite stable. We've found it to be reliable. There haven't been any noticeable bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to increase its capacity, it's easy enough to do so.

We have about 500 users on the platform currently. Some of them are hosting on the VNF, and some them are hosting on the physical advisors. It's a mixed platform. Our team uses it on a daily basis.

The technical support that the company offers is very good. They've been very supportive. We're satisfied with the level of attention they provide us.

The initial setup was challenging for us. It was a little bit difficult because the customer interface had too much audio which made it challenging. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward.

In terms of deployment, and how long it will take, it depends on the customer requirements. Sometimes it only takes 30 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour. It depends on the configuration.

We have a team of about 16 people who help deploy the solution. You only need two people to maintain the solution once you have everything up and running. 

We had both an internal team and an integrator that handled the implementation. If there was some aspect our team couldn't handle, like clustering or extending, we had the integrator come in and assist.

We're telecom operators and customers. We don't have a special relationship with the company and we aren't partners.

I would recommend the solution. I would also recommend that people have some specialists deploy and maintain it to make it easy to use.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.