Palo Alto Networks Promotes Simone Gammeri To Chief Partnerships Officer: Exclusive

In an interview with CRN, Gammeri says the cybersecurity giant’s partnerships will be ‘even more critical’ for its next phase of growth, amid massive opportunities including network transformation and security operations.

Palo Alto Networks has promoted Simone Gammeri, formerly a senior vice president heading the company’s SASE and network security sales, to serve as its new chief partnerships officer, the cybersecurity giant told CRN exclusively.

Gammeri (pictured) has succeeded Kristy Friedrichs, who stepped down as chief partnerships officer last week after 20 months in the role, according to Palo Alto Networks.

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In an interview with CRN, Gammeri said he will focus on enhancing the company’s engagement across the full range of its partnerships, including with VARs and MSSPs, to better enable growth in key areas including network transformation and security operations. Michael Khoury, who is vice president for ecosystem partners and oversees the vendor’s NextWave Partner Program, will report to Gammeri.

For Palo Alto Networks, “we are at the point in our growth where partnerships are going to be even more critical than they’ve been thus far,” Gammeri told CRN. “You’ll see us, as a company, making very thoughtful investments to grow this part of our business and the way we do business with partners across all routes to market. You will continue to see us listening and adapting [as] partners change the way they work.”

For example, Palo Alto Networks has “a lot of partners who are traditional VARs that now are executing on managed services. We need to evolve to support that,” he said. “So we’re going to do that as well as making sure that we keep bringing to market the best products to help them serve their customers.”

Gammeri has held executive roles at Palo Alto Networks since early 2020, following more than a decade as a consultant at McKinsey.

Most recently, Gammeri had served as senior vice president for SASE sales and network security product go-to-market at Palo Alto Networks starting in March 2024. During earlier roles at the security vendor, he was given oversight of the company’s then-nascent SASE (secure access service edge) business, and his responsibilities grew over time to include additional areas such as network security.

With his promotion to chief partnerships officer, Gammeri said he aims to drive faster growth with partners beyond Palo Alto Networks’ core firewall product segment to next-generation offerings including Prisma SASE, Cortex XSIAM and Cortex Cloud.

Other major growth opportunities for Palo Alto Networks partners include the company’s Prisma Access Browser and AI security platform, Prisma AIRS, he said.

Ultimately, “we need all the other areas [comprising] next-generation security — around SASE, around Cortex, around cloud — we need this to start becoming a more natural partner motion,” he said. “We’re seeing it in pockets, but it’s still small. So I need to get both enablement and incentives aligned for partners to help us transform our customers’ infrastructure and operations.”

The overall goal, Gammeri said, is to become “very outcome-oriented with partners and incentivize the right outcomes.”

Doing so will “require perhaps a slightly different way on how we engage. Our operating model with partners may require slightly different incentives,” he said. “So there’s going to be work to do to take a hard look at NextWave and our incentives in the partner program, and [how we] are aligning to guide to those outcomes.”