Arora On The Record

Palo Alto Networks is driving hard toward its goal of transforming how cybersecurity is done in the era of distributed work and the cloud, with a broad portfolio of products “in the most relevant categories of today,” CEO Nikesh Arora said in an interview with CRN. Now, after spending his first few years with the cybersecurity giant focused on establishing that product portfolio, Arora is putting more attention on driving growth with channel partners. For Palo Alto Networks, 2023 is “all about go-to-market and the channel,” he told CRN in December at the company’s Ignite conference.

[Related: Palo Alto Networks CEO: We’re ‘Best Positioned’ To Deliver AI-Powered Security]

Customers that have seen their traditional security tools hobbled by the shift to hybrid work and the cloud are demanding the sort of “transformation” that Palo Alto Networks is uniquely positioned to provide, Arora said. Palo Alto Networks has aggressively expanded its product portfolio since he joined as CEO in mid-2018, acquiring 14 companies since then while investing heavily in its own R&D efforts to build out a full security platform. The Palo Alto Networks platform now covers key emerging areas such as secure access service edge (SASE) and zero trust, cloud and application security, extended detection and response (XDR) and AI-powered Security Operations Center (SOC) automation.

The portfolio of Prisma and Cortex offerings not only delivers the security capabilities that organizations need to provide secure remote access to workers and defend against intensifying threats, it also offers customers the opportunity to consolidate their security tools on a single platform, Arora said. Tool consolidation is something that organizations are increasingly looking for in response to challenging economic conditions and the complexity caused by security “tool sprawl” in their IT environments.

To achieve its aspirations, however, Palo Alto Networks will be relying on its channel partners more heavily than ever before, according to Arora. When it comes to partners, “I need all of their support to make that transformation happen,” he told CRN. In the current environment, where implementing security solutions requires a lot more than just setting up a firewall, “I think [partners] become more important,” Arora said.

When asked about his involvement to date with channel-related issues, he acknowledged that his focus has been on “fixing our product portfolio”—but said that this was exactly what the company needed in order to set the stage for the massive partner opportunity available today. “If I didn’t fix the product portfolio, it wouldn’t matter if I had a good channel strategy or a bad one,” Arora said. “If I’d focused on channel and we didn’t have the products we have today, we’d be having a different conversation. You’d be asking me how I am going to compete on firewalls with Check Point and Fortinet and Cisco.”

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Arora.

Interview conducted by Jay Fitzgerald, transcribed and edited by Kyle Alspach.