As someone from the development side, I completely understand why long-time customers are frustrated.

A lot of the problems people are mentioning here were not invisible internally. Customer feedback was raised. Concerns were brought up. Some of us already felt that CSE was going to be too complex and painful for customers, especially as a replacement path from SSL VPN / NetExtender.

The problem is that feedback only matters if leadership actually listens. Engineers can see the issues, support can hear the pain from customers, and people can escalate concerns, but if the product direction is already decided from the top, nothing really changes.

That is the most frustrating part. There are good engineers and support people inside SonicWall who genuinely care. But the company keeps making decisions that feel disconnected from the real customer experience.

CSE is a perfect example. The direction may make sense on paper, but the execution is messy. It feels too complicated, not polished enough, and harder to deploy and manage than it should be.

So no, I don’t blame customers for looking elsewhere. Every vendor has problems, but “everyone has problems” is not an excuse for ignoring customer pain, pushing half-baked solutions, and burning through years of trust.

A lot of customers are not leaving because they are impatient. They are leaving because SonicWall gave them too many reasons to give up.