We're a 350-person company looking at SASE/SSE vendors, and Netskope keeps coming up. After the initial sales calls, they pushed us into their sign-up process. I have to say, it feels less like a straightforward procurement and more like a maze designed to obscure what you're actually committing to.
The main issue is the disconnect between the "starting point" they sell you on and the final contract. The sales team talks in use cases and users, but the actual provisioning and contracting brings in a whole other layer: capacity units, bandwidth tiers, and feature add-ons that aren't clearly priced upfront. You don't just get a per-user quote and sign. You get a "proposal" that then needs to be translated into a service order with terms that feel custom-built every time. For a mid-market company without a dedicated cloud procurement team, this is a red flag. It makes comparing final costs against Zscaler or Palo Alto very difficult.
Has anyone else navigated this recently? Specifically:
* How transparent were the incremental costs for things like advanced DLP policies or specific cloud app support beyond the baseline?
* Did you encounter any hard bundling of services you didn't need to get the features you did want?
* What was the actual lead time from signed agreement to having a fully provisioned, usable pilot environment? The sales rep's estimate and the implementation team's schedule seem to be two different things.
I'm concerned this process is a leading indicator of how complex vendor management and future true-ups will be with them.
Show me the data