Analyst: — okay, recorder's on. You left the seat at the end of last year. Start with how the SASE decision actually got made, because on paper it reads like a strategy call and I don't believe that.
Expert: You're right not to believe it. It wasn't a strategy call, it was a refresh. The remote-access concentrators and a chunk of the branch firewall estate were going end-of-support inside — I want to say a fourteen-month window, though it stretched to seventeen once we got extensions on two of the SKUs — and somebody in infrastructure put a capex number in front of me that I did not want to spend. That's the origin. The strategy deck came about four months after the decision was already made in the room. The strategy deck always comes later.
Analyst: What was the number?
Expert: Low eight figures. That's as far as I'll go.
Analyst: Fine. And the pitch you were getting from the vendors back then — how close was it to what you actually bought?
Expert: The pitch was: take your firewall, your remote access, your web gateway, your data controls, your zero-trust access, put them on one platform, security follows the user instead of the network, you go from seven vendors to two, your run rate drops, your users stop complaining. I can tell you which part of that came true. Users stopped complaining. Took about a year and a half, but it was real and I'll defend it. The vendor count went from seven to nine before it got to six. Nobody models the nine.
Analyst: Say more about the nine.
Expert: You keep the old estate up while you migrate, so for a stretch you pay twice. Everybody knows that. What nobody tells you is you never fully retire some of it. We still had — I said fifteen percent to someone last month and that was wrong, that was the prior year's figure. Closer to eleven, eleven and a bit, still on the legacy remote-access path the week I left. Thick clients. Two vendor-managed appliances. One system where the support contract says in writing that if you put it behind anything, they won't take the call. So you carry the box, and the licence, and the two people who know how it works. Forever.
Analyst: What did people call the programme internally?
Expert: Steering deck said Network Modernisation, tranche two. Everyone in the building called it the Great Unplugging, which was optimistic, because we barely unplugged anything. Finance had their own name for it. I'll keep that one.
Analyst: Let's go to the money, which is really what I'm here for. The number that circulates is twenty-five percent off the security network stack. Modelled or realised?
Expert: Modelled. And it isn't twenty-five. It's twenty-three and change. Somebody rounded it on a slide and it has been quoted back at me in that form ever since, wrong every time.