Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora: 2023 ‘All About’ Channel

In interviews with CRN for our February magazine cover story, Palo Alto Networks executives said the theme of 2023 is bringing the vendor’s work with the channel to the next level as it seeks wider customer adoption of its newer products, which span from cloud and application security to zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE) to extended detection and response (XDR) and automated security operations.

Among other things, this partner push will mean Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora will be taking a more visible role in the vendor’s channel efforts. Arora recently told CRN that channel partners may be “surprised” by how much they see of him going forward.

“We’ve taken four and a half years to get to a place where we believe we have a robust product portfolio in the most relevant categories of today,” Arora told CRN in December at the company’s 2022 Ignite conference. That has meant spending 70 percent of his time focusing on the product portfolio, leaving other executives to worry about the go-to-market and channel strategy, he said.

“If I didn’t fix the product portfolio, it wouldn’t matter if I had a good channel strategy or a bad one, so I spent my time [on products],” Arora said, likening himself to a doctor who had to triage the damage. “People didn’t see me in the channel because I was busy fixing the broken elbow and the bleeding arm.” Now that the portfolio he envisioned is a reality, Arora said his focus over the next three years will shift to spending 70 percent of his time “to make sure we actually take all these products to market and upsell all of our customers into a better security proposition.”

That will include a lot more involvement with initiatives that impact the channel, he told CRN. “[This] year is going to be all about go-to-market and the channel,” Arora said, “and they’ll be surprised to find me.”