Ecosystems

CF: You had mentioned ecosystems. Where does Cato land in the ecosystem world, and what does embracing ecosystems mean for Cato?

FR: I think it’s a great question, and to be honest with you, I don’t totally know yet. But if you look at it, you have three models: the refer model, the resale model and the managed model. I think that’s part of the ecosystem. Where it extends beyond that could be into the CSPs, which are really interesting right now, whether it’s AWS, GCP or Azure. But it’s also so far beyond that. I’ve been working with ServiceNow, Splunk and other companies in different phases of my career. There are some really interesting opportunities there. Even somebody like Dell, somebody like Nutanix. They’re possibilities. It’s way too early to discuss them in detail. 

Because I’ve gone from HPE, which plays directly into that field, to VMware, which was pretty agnostic across most of those alliances, to Check Point, which gave me a window into the security environment, the possibilities are endless. But it’s not just me. It’s going to be working with the executive team. It’s going to be working with the field teams. I think we have a really really bright future. One of the things I learned from Meg Whitman, whom I used to work for over at HPE, is that strategy is the art of deselection. Sometimes it’s not, “What are you going to do?” It’s “What are you not going to do?” and prioritizing.

CF: In terms of deselection, is there anything you’d want talk about in terms of Cato?

FR: (laughing) No, not at all.