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Nikesh Arora CEO, Palo Alto Networks
All About The Platform A central part of what Arora-led Palo Alto Networks has done differently from the rest of the industry is the focus on building out a true cybersecurity platform, solution provider executives said. Importantly, the company’s approach has emphasized being able to still offer security capabilities that are “best of breed” even while offering seamless integration between the tools, executives said. Arora and Palo Alto Networks set out on the platform journey at a time when many still thought buying best-of-breed point products, and stitching them together, was the only way to get optimal security outcomes. “We had our fair share of naysayers early on,” Arora said. “Hopefully we’re on our way to proving them inaccurate.” To assemble its platform, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company spent years acquiring leading technologies—there have been 14 acquisitions under Arora to date—and then tightly integrating them together.The deals have largely proven successful and have totaled more than $3 billion, according to Shaul Eyal, managing director for equity research at investment bank TD Cowen. “Nobody initially expected that he’s going to embark on that sizable acquisition phase,” Eyal said. “I think his ability to come in with an unbiased view of the market and then understand the benefits and challenges ahead, strategize and execute accordingly, and then bring everybody around him toward that same goal—that has all coalesced into the success we’ve seen in recent quarters.” The bottom line, he said, is that “we’re beginning to see Palo Alto [Networks] leading the pack.” As customers look to reduce the number of security vendors they work with, Palo Alto Networks is “in the right place at the right time because of all the execution they’ve done over these years to put them in that pole position,” said Mark Jones, founder and CEO of Austin,Texas-based BlackLake Security, No. 282 on the 2023 CRN Solution Provider 500. Arora has never been “chasing the ball,” Jones added. “He’s well ahead of it.”
inevitable that challenges would present themselves along the way. Arora, however, has brought a level of commitment to mak- ing the partnership successful that’s unusual for a high-powered executive, according to Accenture’s Thexton. During quarterly meetings about the progress of the partner- ship, for instance, “there were times when either side was not meeting those goals and objectives” that everyone had agreed to, Thexton said. After hearing others describe the barriers to meeting the goals, Arora “would break them down, and he would just say, ‘OK, we can do this to take care of that issue. We can solve this issue by doing this,’” Thexton recalled. “And he just systematically would break it down and push it through, where a lot of [CEOs] would just say, ‘Just do it.’” As a core part of its growth strategy, PaloAlto Networks has been broadening its work with channel partners, which are involved in generating more than 95 percent of its revenue. For solution provid- ers of all sizes, from the giants likeAccenture down to MSSPs with a few dozen employees, the company has increasingly become a go-to security vendor, according to solution provider executives. The partner opportunities are being driven in part by greater demand for a variety of services, both professional and managed. Such services, according to Arora, are crucial to help customers get the full benefit of technologies such as secure access service edge, a cloud-delivered architecture aimed at providing secure access for distributed workforces. Likewise, when it comes to other newer areas such as cloud secu- rity and Security Operations Center automation, PaloAlto Networks partners are playing a pivotal role in enabling customer adoption, Arora said. “If you look at the first two quarters of this fiscal year for us, the proportion of business we do through some of the key partners who are building services capability has increased,” he said. “Whether it’s our traditional partners’ services teams or trans- formation teams or cloud adoption teams—or whether it’s MSSPs with network transformation skills, or systems integrators with cloud security skills or SOC transformation skills—you are seeing a clear trend toward more solution orientation [by partners] for the customers,” Arora said.
Growth Opportunities For Optiv, No. 24 on the 2023 CRN Solution Provider 500,Arora’s
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AUGUST 2023
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