Spending The Day With Open Systems in Zurich

Open Systems was kind enough to invite me, along with other Avant employees and Trusted Advisors, to their headquarters in Zurich Switzerland. Of course, we’d be indulging in Swiss chocolate and fondue, but the intention was to dive deep into their SASE offering, understand exactly the types of customers they’d be a good fit for, and ultimately build even more trust between our two organizations.

I’d say all of those objectives were accomplished, so I want to take you behind the scenes to share what I learned and took away from this trip.

Technical SASE Deep Dive

We didn’t get too technical during this meeting because it wasn’t all engineers involved, but we’ve done several technical trainings with Open Systems, so I wanted to start with this section for anyone who might not be as familiar with their SASE solution.

Open Systems delivers its SASE solution through a hybrid approach of both edge-based devices and POPs, meeting the specific needs of each individual customer. Their solution includes all of the necessary features to be considered SASE: SWG, CASB, ZTNA, firewall, and SD-WAN. All of these features were developed in-house at Open Systems, so it is truly single-vendor SASE. Their POPs are distributed globally, but their architecture does not solely rely on them (i.e., Open Systems can be deployed as an edge-based, POP-based, or hybrid solution). New POPs can also be deployed strategically based on customer needs.

Just to give some context, their closest competitor in the market (in my opinion) is Cato Networks. Cato is very well known in this space for being a leading single-vendor SASE provider with globally-distributed POPs. While Open Systems isn’t as widely recognized in the North American market (yet!), their approach offers similar comprehensive capabilities with the added flexibility of on-premises deployments where needed.

Onboarding and Deployment

The main thing that always sticks out to me is the level of service that Open Systems offers their clients. From what I’ve seen, it’s unmatched. After talking through everything they do during deployment as well as their ongoing managed services, they seem to have the resources of a large company, but they were able to keep the flexibility, nimbleness, and drive of a startup.

Because I’m asked this question relatively often, I asked their team how long their quickest deployment could be and what that would look like. Their answer was that they are rarely the bottleneck as they are usually constricted by the customer’s timeline, but theoretically, it would look like this:

• One week to deploy and ship devices
• One week to test 3-4 sites
• Deployment of 10-20 sites per week after that

With that knowledge, it sounds like a company with 20 global sites could be fully up and running in three weeks. Of course, they can (and usually do) take things slower to match the needs of the customer they’re working with.

There were a few more details that stood out to me specifically about the deployment stage:

• Open Systems does their own shipping, and they have found ways to ship into hard-to-reach countries (North Korea, Russia, etc.).
• They use a software tool during deployment to update exactly what they’re doing and when. The customer can log into this for full transparency.
• The onboarding team will have weekly project sync and technology sync meetings with the customer during deployment.

Open Systems Mission Control

Mission Control is what Open Systems calls the group of people that handle issues on the network and incoming customer tickets. Open Systems is typically deployed as a managed or co-managed service, so some of these tickets are proactive, and some were opened by the customer.

The biggest thing that I took away from chatting about Mission Control is that all Open Systems engineers are required to spend a certain amount of time handling these tickets. It used to be 20% of their working time, but after increased efficiency due to implementing AI, it’s now 15% of their time. I thought this was fantastic!

This means that a) the engineers are very in tune with what issues customers are having, b) customers get their issues resolved by people that are the most knowledgeable on the platform, and c) the engineers care about making a quality product because they will be the ones fixing it if something goes wrong.

Open Systems has a huge dashboard that is visible to pretty much everyone in the Zurich office that shows the number of tickets open, the names of people working in Mission Control, and some other data, so we could see the numbers all day.

Dedication to Their Customers and Partners

There are a number of quality SASE technologies on the market today, and Open Systems is certainly among them. However, I think their biggest differentiator is their customer support.

“Every provider says that, Sarah!”

Yes, they sure do, but not every provider has their engineers working incoming tickets. Not every provider is dedicated to transparency between them and their customers, as well as their partners. Not every provider has willingness to get creative in certain scenarios when their clients need something that they don’t usually do. Open Systems does all of this, and more.

Ideal Customers for Open Systems

I realize this has started to sound like an Open Systems infomercial, but I’ll be the first to say they aren’t going to be a fit for every customer out there. As I’ve mentioned, their biggest value is in their customer service, so they require either co-management or full management. If a company is looking to buy devices and manage the solution themselves, Open Systems won’t be a great fit for that.

With that, domestic companies with less than 5 sites probably aren’t going to be a great fit either as they likely won’t see enough value to justify the cost of the solution. That said, if a company has 4 sites and 1,000 remote users, that’s a different story. You can always run the scenario by me and my team, and we can help vet who might be a good fit, whether it’s Open Systems or another provider.

To get the most out of what Open Systems has to offer, a global company with 10+ sites, maybe some remote users, looking for network security and/or SD-WAN would be the best fit here. With their hybrid architecture, their SD-WAN feature will help optimize cloud/SaaS applications, and their security suite will help secure any type of traffic whether it’s coming from an office or a remote user.