Cato Increases Investment in the DACH and Nordic Regions with New Hires, Footprint Expansion

Cato Networks, provider of the world’s first SASE platform, announced this week increased investment in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway) with the hiring of new Regional Sales Directors (RSDs) and the opening of a new Point of Presence (PoP) in Switzerland. The moves come just after appointing Nuvias Group as its first pan-European distributor.

“We’re very pleased to announce the hiring of Johan van den Boogaart as the new Regional Sales Director for the DACH region, and Michael Norin in the newly created RSD position for the Nordic countries,” says Luca Simonelli, Vice President of Sales, EMEA at Cato Networks. “Both Johan and Michael come to us with extensive sales management experience in networking technologies within their respective regions. We look to them to help us further reach enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers and channel partners to maximize the adoption of Cato’s industry-leading solutions for WAN transformation.”

New Executives to Lead DACH, Nordic Regions

Originally from the Netherlands and now based in Munich, Johan van den Boogaart has more than 20 years of experience in sales in the ICT industry. He has held sales positions for several IT companies, including Zerto Inc., Nexenta Systems Inc. and Acronis.

“I’ve spent my career working for organizations focused on solutions for enterprises to protect and secure their data and applications. Over the years, I’ve helped numerous customers overcome the challenges created by digital transformation, and nowadays, customer expectations regarding security, connectivity and agility are higher than ever,” says van den Boogaart. “Cato is the recognized standard for secure access service edge. I look forward to helping DACH region companies leverage Cato SASE to address their global connectivity and security needs.”

Norin comes to Cato as an experienced Key Account Manager within the IT and telecom industries. Most recently he was responsible for developing the Oracle Communications Enterprise business in Nordics and Netherlands. Prior to Oracle, Michael served in key account management roles at TDC Sverige AB, Stratiteq Sweden AB, Tele2, and other firms. He has more than 30 years of experience in the IT/telecom business. He is located in Malmo, Sweden.

“I’m excited to be joining the Cato team,” says Norin. “For too long, Nordic companies have suffered from the rigidity and high cost of global MPLS, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of Internet-based VPNs, on the other. We can address both concerns with Cato while preparing them from whatever comes next.”

Cato Expands Its Technology Footprint, Signs a New Distributor Partner

Deepening its investment in the EMEA region, Cato has established a new PoP in Zurich, Switzerland. The new PoP is Cato’s 14th in EMEA and the fourth in the DACH and Nordics regions, the others being in Frankfurt, Germany; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Stockholm, Sweden. Overall, Cato has more than 50 PoPs worldwide delivering all Cato’s SASE services.

The new PoP and appointments come after the April signing of a new distributorship agreement with the Nuvias Group. Nuvias will extend Cato Networks’ reach and growth through the EMEA channel with a tailored partner program and specialist services, including partner training, solutions engineering and configuration. The addition of Cato Networks extends and complements Nuvias’ portfolio with cloud-native secure network solutions designed to address the challenges of medium to large enterprise customers across a wide range of industry segments.

Cato’s investments in EMEA are paying off with key customer wins. One example is Komax, a leading manufacturer in the automotive industry. Komax moved from an appliance-centric, managed SD-WAN service for its global network to Cato. “Cato allowed us to move intelligence and computation away from the edge SD-WAN appliance into the Cato Cloud,” says Tobias Rölz, Vice President of Global IT & Digital Business at Komax. “As a result, deploying branch SD-WAN became simpler, faster, and with less operational costs than what we experienced with a managed service running security processing on SD-WAN appliances.”