Aryaka Adds More AI To Flagship SASE-As-A-Service Offering, Simplifies Pricing To Boost Consumption-Based Buying

'It’s easier to quote, easier to buy, easier to consume. It's 100 percent predictable, and that lets the channel remove friction from the sale and also to pre-sell the next phase of the project because these are never one-and-done projects,' Ken Rutsky, Aryaka chief marketing officer, tells CRN.

A year after the launch of its Unified SASE-as-a-service offering, Aryaka is introducing AI Observe to the platform to arm enterprises with increased visibility into issue or security incidents and help reduce alert fatigue by injecting more automation into network management, the company told CRN.

Alongside the introduction of AI Observe in the company's winter 2025 update, Aryaka is also introducing new pricing and packaging to make their services easier for partners and end customers to adopt, said Renuka Nadkarni, Aryaka's chief product officer.

Aryaka first unveiled its Unified SASE as a Service — what the company called its “biggest innovation” in its history — in March 2024. The offering is a unified single-pass architecture that combines Aryaka's own global private network backbone, security, observability and application performance capabilities, all-in-one platform and delivered as a service. The AI Observe capability, the second product in Aryaka's AI portfolio alongside AI Perform, applies AI and machine learning to user and application data to detect early network threats and anomalies such as ransomware.

"One example of this is when there is ransomware, there is initial infection where there is lateral movement [as] the ransomware spreads in different locations, and you suddenly start seeing different network patterns. This is very early stage of the attack, which is long before you see logs coming from a firewall or any other devices, which is what many vendors have access to," Nadkarni said. "AI Observe takes care of all of those early indications by analyzing massive amounts of data."

Aryaka can now run 2,000 different machine learning models on large set of data that comes from hundreds of its customers to derive insights, she added.

AI Observe is now available for early access.

Accelerating As-A-Service Sales

As part of the winter release, the company simplified its packaging and pricing model of its offerings with the intention of helping partners boost the as-a-service sales model, Nadkarni said.

Enterprises are now charged based on the number of sites and end users. The pricing change will give enterprises more flexibility with their distributed, multi-cloud environments, especially in light of increasing AI use cases and new demands on the network, the company said.

“In our earlier model, customers had to buy different amounts of bandwidth for different sites, and they had to do sizing up-front. They had to answer all the questions: how much traffic do I need? How much should I pay for it? And then the security components were sold as an add on, on top of that. Now we have simplified all of that. Now it's like one price, almost like an all-you-can-eat of capabilities and features with Unified SASE as a Service,” she said.

It will also help partners with quote creation and dramatically reduce the number of line items included in a quote, Nadkarni said.

The three new as-a-service plans include Aryaka SD-WAN for global connectivity and application performance, Aryaka Unified SASE for customers ready to fully converge their networking and security, and Aryaka Advanced Security for customers interested in additional security capabilities. Each tier is delivered as a service, Aryaka said.

"It's so much easier for customers buying than it used to be before," she said. "It's a big change. We think we are also leading the industry with this kind of simplification."

The simplification of the SASE buying model and pricing predictability was a big priority for Aryaka's channel community, said Ken Rutsky, chief marketing officer, (pictured) for the company.

"It’s easier to quote, easier to buy, easier to consume. We’re able to do this because we understand the economics of the business and the customer doesn't have to worry about our issues of service delivery, which was kind of the old way it was," he said. "Now it's just straightforward … it's 100 percent predictable, and that lets the channel remove friction from the sale and also to pre-sell the next phase of the project because these are never one-and-done projects."

As part of the winter release, Aryaka is also introducing Dynamic Points of Presence (PoPs). This allows enterprises to expand into new countries easily while addressing requirements such as GDPR compliance. Dynamic PoP instances can be deployed on-demand by Aryaka in any AWS or GCP region, the company said.