An Edge Conversation is a video series produced by SixSq exploring the fast growing IT field of edge computing. In this episode, host Pierre Mirlesse talks to Scott Sumner, CMO at Kadiska, and Marc-Elian Bégin, CEO & Co-founder of SixSq, about how the extended enterprise can improve business performance with Kadiska’s network performance monitoring tool.
Topics Covered
- Need to understand what is happening at the far edge & user experience
- Visibility gap due to transition to cloud & SaaS
- IT impacted by hybrid working
- Service providers need to better understand where problems lie
- Over 80% applications delivered via SaaS model
- How does Kadiska help ensure the quality of applications to the extended enterprise?
- Who owns the problem?
- Kadiska complements existing tools
- CIOs and business line owners need a simpler tool
- Value of Kadiska + SixSq to the extended enterprise
- One-click deployment app
- Example of customer who benefits from Kadiska + SixSq
- IT staff spend 60% of time on maintenance and not on business-impactful projects
- Deployment, agility and simplicity are key to ensuring customer success
Interview Highlights
Can you introduce yourself?
Kadiska is a SaaS-hosted digital experience monitoring platform that integrates visibility into SaaS, web and cloud-hosted application performance, internet, SD WAN and hybrid network performance, and real user experience.
Kadiska was founded in 2020, with fortune 500 enterprise customers in retail, manufacturing and service industries.
I am the CMO at Kadiska. In addition to marketing I’m involved in partnerships (like SixSq and Ekinops) and solution and corporate strategy.
What problem do you solve ?
The shift to SaaS, cloud, SD WAN and work from anywhere has created a visibility gap that impacts IT and network operations’ ability to maintain performance of key business applications to employees and customers. Encrypted traffic, highly distributed application hosts and users, SASE/CASB security platforms and web-based applications all impact the ability for traditional tools–APM, NPM, RUM–to capture a complete picture of application and network performance, at a time when IT has less control over this complex, modern infrastructure.
64% of IT organizations say they lack effective monitoring tools to detect, diagnose, resolve and optimize performance in this context. They are effectively running blind as complexity increases.
How do you solve it?
Kadiska was designed expressly to complement existing monitoring tools with capabilities to reveal issues with SaaS, cloud and web applications, SD WAN and internet-based networks that connect them. The integrated view of network, application and user performance allows IT teams to rapidly identify the scope of an impairment, its impact and origin. This eliminates the need for war rooms and finger pointing by identifying the action and team responsible within minutes. The Kadiska platform is designed to be used by network and IT operations teams, SRE/DevOps and the service desk. It creates a ‘Switzerland’ of actionable insight that each team can understand in their own language and context.
Where does SixSq fit in?
One of the most important problems underlying performance issues today stems from the rapid adoption of hybrid networks and SD WANs, in particular. The basic monitoring tools that SD WAN vendors provide are not sufficient to reveal the source of network performance issues caused by the underlying ISPs and networks they rely on.
SixSq provides an edge orchestration environment that manages applications at distributed sites and locations, including on premises and cloud locations, on white boxes, clouds and SD WAN appliances, for example. One common request from their customers was an application they could deploy to their NuvlaEdge to monitor SD WAN performance. Kadiska’s Net-Tracer app is container-based, very lightweight, and can easily be deployed using the Nuvla.io orchestrator. Net-Tracer continuously maps and monitors all network routes to SaaS and web-application hosts, data centers, clouds and other enterprise locations.
The Net-Tracer app is available from SixSq’s Nuvla marketplace, where it can easily be deployed to managed edge devices to provide instant visibility into complex networks and underlying performance bottlenecks. This integration makes it simple to deploy Net-Tracer at edge locations managed by Nuvla, including Ekinops’ popular uCPE appliances.
Can you give us a customer/use case example ? ie: What does success look like?
One of our global customers recently migrated their MPLS private network links connecting hundreds of mining sites and clouds to an SD WAN. The process of SD WAN migration requires benchmarking of network and application performance before, during and and after migration.
Kadiska was deployed to on premises and cloud locations on-demand as different groups of sites were on-boarded onto the SD WAN network. Performance was optimized using the detailed performance data, and results were compared to the initial benchmarks.
The migration proceeded ahead of schedule, and MPLS links were retired early, saving significant cost. Users were not impacted by performance issues during the transition, so business performance was not affected.
How do you continuously improve and ensure customer success?
Working with partners like SixSQ allows us to engage a great variety of enterprise IT organizations, learn about their projects and the visibility gaps that introduce risk, delays and cost overruns. By working with these global leaders our DevOps team responsively introduces capabilities into the Kadiska platform to help them achieve their business goals as efficiently as possible. Whether in retail, manufacturing, natural resources, aerospace or healthcare, we see the same challenges introduced by digital transformation that need to be addressed. We work to ensure there is a 360° view into modern infrastructure so these companies can deliver an amazing digital experience to their employees and customers.
How can we engage with you?
Kadiska works with technology partners like SixSq, as well as a global network of solution partner providers. Customers generally reach out to us directly. We assess their needs, setup a simple PoC, then match them with the best partner to help them evaluate and deploy the solution.
Kadiska is surprisingly simple to deploy and use. It’s a SaaS platform that can be spun up and scaled within minutes. This means that customers can jump in and gain insight quickly, and often consult us to interpret results rather than for technical support.
