Palo Alto Networks, Inc. operates as a global cybersecurity provider.
The company empowers enterprises, organizations, service providers, and government entities to protect themselves against today’s most sophisticated cyber threats. The company’s cybersecurity platforms and services help secure enterprise users, networks, clouds, and endpoints by delivering comprehensive cybersecurity backed by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
The company focuses on delivering value in four sector...
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. operates as a global cybersecurity provider.
The company empowers enterprises, organizations, service providers, and government entities to protect themselves against today’s most sophisticated cyber threats. The company’s cybersecurity platforms and services help secure enterprise users, networks, clouds, and endpoints by delivering comprehensive cybersecurity backed by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
The company focuses on delivering value in four sectors of the cybersecurity industry:
Network Security
The company’s network security platform, designed to deliver complete zero trust solutions to its customers, includes its hardware and software ML-Powered Next-Generation Firewalls, AI Runtime Security, as well as a cloud-delivered Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). Prisma Access, the company’s Security Services Edge (SSE) solution, when combined with Prisma SD-WAN, provides a comprehensive single-vendor SASE offering that is used to secure remote workforces and securely enable the cloud-delivered branch. The company’s network security platform also includes its cloud-delivered security services, such as Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire, Advanced URL Filtering, Advanced DNS Security, IoT/OT Security, GlobalProtect, Enterprise Data Loss Prevention (Enterprise DLP), AI for IT Operations (AIOps), SaaS Security, and AI Access Security. Through these add-on security services, the company’s customers are able to secure their content, applications, users, and devices across their entire organization. Strata Cloud Manager, the company’s network security management solution, can centrally manage its network security platform irrespective of form factor, location, or scale. Strata Cloud Manager includes the Strata Copilot which provides a natural language interface to simplify and accelerate platform management.
Cloud Security
The company delivers scalable and comprehensive security across the cloud application development lifecycle through its Code to Cloud platform, Prisma Cloud. As a comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), Prisma Cloud secures multi- and hybrid-cloud environments for applications, data, generative AI (GenAI) ecosystem, and the entire cloud native technology stack across the full development lifecycle, from code to cloud. The company also offers its VM-Series and CN-Series virtual firewalls for inline network security on multi- and hybrid-cloud environments.
Security Operations
The company delivers the next generation of security operations capabilities that combine security analytics, endpoint security, automation, and attack surface management (ASM) solutions through its Cortex platform. These include Cortex XSIAM, the company’s AI-driven security operations platform, Cortex XDR for the prevention, detection, and response to complex cybersecurity attacks, Cortex XSOAR for security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and Cortex Xpanse for ASM. These products are delivered as software as a service (SaaS) or software subscriptions.
Threat Intelligence and Advisory Services (Unit 42)
Unit 42 brings together world-renowned threat researchers with an elite team of incident responders and security consultants to create an intelligence-driven, response-ready organization to help customers manage cyber risk. The company’s consultants serve as trusted advisors to its customers by assessing and testing their security controls against the right threats, transforming their security strategy with a threat-informed approach, and responding to security incidents on behalf of the company’s clients. Additionally, Unit 42 offers managed detection and response and managed threat hunting services.
Product, Subscription, and Support
The company’s customer offerings are available in the form of the product, subscription, and support offerings described below:
Products
Hardware and Software Firewalls: The company’s ML-Powered Next Generation Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall and employ inline deep learning in the cloud, empowering its customers to stop zero-day threats in real time, see and secure their entire enterprise including Internet of Things (IoT), and reduce errors with automatic policy recommendations. All of the company’s hardware and software firewalls incorporate its PAN-OS operating system and come with the same rich set of features, ensuring consistent operation across its entire product line. The content, applications, users, and devices—the elements that run a business—become integral components of an enterprise’s security policy via the company’s Content-ID, App-ID, User-ID, and Device-ID technologies. In addition to these components, key features include site-to-site virtual private network (VPN), remote access Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN, and Quality-of-Service. The company’s appliances and software are designed for different performance requirements throughout an organization and are classified based on throughput, ranging from its PA-410, which is designed for small organizations and branch offices, to its top-of-the-line PA-7500 Series, which is designed for large-scale data centers and service providers. The company’s firewalls come in a hardware form factor, a containerized form factor, called CN-Series, as well as a virtual form factor, called VM-Series, that is available for virtualization and cloud environments from companies such as Broadcom Inc., Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft), Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), and Alphabet Inc. (Alphabet), and in Kernel-based Virtual Machine /OpenStack environments. The company also offers Cloud NGFW, a managed next-generation firewall (NGFW) offering, to secure customers’ applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure).
SD-WAN: The company’s SD-WAN is integrated with PAN-OS so that its end-customers can get the security features of its PAN-OS ML-Powered Next-Generation Firewall together with SD-WAN functionality. The SD-WAN overlay supports dynamic, intelligent path selection based on the applications, services, and conditions of the links that each application or service is allowed to use, allowing applications to be prioritized based on criteria, such as whether the application is mission-critical, latency-sensitive, or meets certain health criteria.
Panorama: Panorama is the company’s centralized security management solution for global control of it network security platform. Panorama can be deployed as a virtual appliance or a physical appliance. Panorama is used for centralized policy management, device management, software licensing and updates, centralized logging and reporting, and log storage. Many of the company’s existing deployments continue using Panorama as the security management solution, while new deployments benefit from using Strata Cloud Manager instead for managing network security estate—including its Next-Generation Firewalls and SASE—with a cloud-based, unified management interface.
Subscriptions
The company offers a number of subscriptions as part of its network security platform. Of these subscription offerings, cloud-delivered security services, such as Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire, Advanced URL Filtering, Advanced DNS Security, IoT/OT Security, SaaS Security Inline, GlobalProtect, Enterprise DLP, AIOps, and AI Runtime Security are sold as options to the company’s hardware and software firewalls, whereas SaaS Security API, AI Access Security, Prisma Access, Prisma SD-WAN, Strata Cloud Manager, Prisma Cloud, Cortex XSIAM, Cortex XDR, Cortex XSOAR, and Cortex Xpanse are sold on a per-user, per-endpoint, or capacity-based basis—and they can be activated by customers with or without the company’s firewalls. The company’s subscription offerings include:
Cloud-delivered Security Services
Advanced Threat Prevention: This cloud-delivered security service provides intrusion detection and prevention capabilities and blocks vulnerability exploits, viruses, spyware, buffer overflows, denial-of-service attacks, and port scans from compromising and damaging enterprise information resources. It includes mechanisms—such as protocol decoder-based analysis, protocol anomaly-based protection, stateful pattern matching, statistical anomaly detection, heuristic-based analysis, custom vulnerability and spyware ‘phone home’ signatures, and workflows—to manage popular open-source signature formats to extend the company’s coverage. In addition, it offers inline deep learning to deliver real-time detection and prevention of unknown, evasive, and targeted command-and-control (C2) communications over HTTP, unknown-TCP, unknown-UDP, and encrypted over SSL. Advanced Threat Prevention is the first offering to protect the enterprise from unknown command and control in real-time.
Advanced WildFire: This cloud-delivered security service provides protection against targeted malware and advanced persistent threats and provides a near real-time analysis engine for detecting previously unseen malware while resisting attacker evasion techniques. Advanced WildFire combines dynamic and static analysis, recursive analysis, and a custom-built analysis environment with network traffic profiling and fileless attack detection to discover even the most sophisticated and evasive threats. In addition, Advanced WildFire defeats highly evasive modern malware at scale with a new infrastructure and patented analysis techniques, including intelligent runtime memory analysis, dependency emulation, malware family fingerprinting, and more. Once identified, whether in the cloud or inline, preventive measures are automatically generated and delivered in seconds or less to the company’s network security platform.
Advanced URL Filtering. This cloud-delivered security service offers the industry’s first Inline Deep Learning powered web protection engine. It delivers real-time detection and prevention of unknown, evasive, and targeted web-based threats, such as phishing, malware, and C2. While many vendors use machine learning to categorize web content or prevent malware downloads, Advanced URL Filtering is the industry’s first inline web protection engine capable of detecting never-before-seen web-based threats and preventing them in real-time. In addition, it includes a cloud-based URL filtering database which consists of millions of URLs across many categories and is designed to analyze web traffic and prevent web-based threats, such as phishing, malware, and C2.
Advanced DNS Security: This cloud-delivered security service uses machine learning to proactively block malicious domains and stop attacks in progress. Unlike other solutions, it does not require endpoint routing configurations to be maintained and therefore cannot be bypassed. It allows the company’s network security platform access to Domain Name System (DNS) signatures that are generated using advanced predictive analysis, machine learning, and malicious domain data from a growing threat intelligence sharing community of which the company is a part. Expanded categorization of DNS traffic and comprehensive analytics allow deep insights into threats, empowering security personnel with the context to optimize their security posture. It offers comprehensive DNS attack coverage and includes industry-first protections against multiple emerging DNS-based network attacks, including real-time analysis of DNS response to prevent DNS hijacking.
IoT/OT Security: This cloud-delivered security service uses machine learning to accurately identify and classify various IoT and operational technology (OT) devices, including never-been-seen-before devices, mission-critical OT devices, and unmanaged legacy systems. It uses machine learning to baseline normal behavior, identify anomalous activity, assess risk, and provide policy recommendations to allow trusted behavior with a new Device-ID policy construct on the company’s network security platform. Other subscriptions have also been enhanced with IoT context to prevent threats on various devices, including IoT and OT devices.
SaaS Security API: SaaS Security API is a multi-mode, cloud access security broker (CASB) that helps govern sanctioned SaaS application usage across all users and helps prevent breaches and non-compliance. Specifically, the service enables the discovery and classification of data stored in supported SaaS applications, protects sensitive data from accidental exposure, identifies and protects against known and unknown malware, and performs user activity monitoring to identify potential misuse or data exfiltration. It delivers complete visibility and granular enforcement across all user, folder, and file activity within sanctioned SaaS applications, and can be combined with SaaS Security Inline for a complete integrated CASB.
SaaS Security Inline: SaaS Security Inline adds an inline service to automatically gain visibility and control over thousands of known and new sanctioned, unsanctioned and tolerated SaaS applications in use within organizations today. It provides enterprise data protection and compliance across all SaaS applications and prevents cloud threats in real time with best-in-class security. The solution is easy to deploy being natively integrated on network security platform, eliminating the architectural complexity of traditional CASB products, while offering low total cost of ownership. It can be combined with SaaS Security API as a complete integrated CASB.
GlobalProtect: This subscription provides protection for users of both traditional laptop and mobile devices. It expands the boundaries of the end-users’ physical network, effectively establishing a logical perimeter that encompasses remote laptop and mobile device users irrespective of their location. When a remote user logs into the device, GlobalProtect automatically determines the closest gateway available to the roaming device and establishes a secure connection. Regardless of the operating systems, laptops, tablets, and phones will stay connected to the corporate network when they are on a network of any kind and, as a result, are protected as if they never left the corporate campus. GlobalProtect ensures that the same secure application enablement policies that protect users at the corporate site are enforced for all users, independent of their location.
Enterprise DLP: This cloud-delivered security service provides consistent, reliable protection of sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information and intellectual property, for all traffic types, applications, and users. Native integration with the company’s products makes it simple to deploy, and advanced machine learning minimizes management complexity. Enterprise DLP allows organizations to consistently discover, classify, monitor, and protect sensitive data, wherever it may reside. It helps minimize the risk of a data breach both on-premises and in the cloud—such as in Office/Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Box—and assists in meeting stringent data privacy and compliance regulations, including the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard , HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements, and others.
AI Access Security: GenAI applications can inadvertently expose sensitive company data, such as intellectual property, trade secrets, source code, financial records and customer information, leading to significant business and compliance risks. In addition, public GenAI tools can be exploited to spread malware and compromise cybersecurity defenses. AI Access Security classifies and prioritizes GenAI applications to assess risk, detect anomalies and visualize insights across multiple GenAI-specific attributes. It prevents sensitive data loss and defends against malicious responses, ensuring safe and effective AI adoption.
AIOps: AIOps is available in both free and licensed premium versions. AIOps redefines network operational experience by empowering security teams to proactively strengthen security posture and resolve network disruptions. AIOps provides continuous best practice recommendations powered by machine learning based on industry standards, security policy context, and advanced telemetry data collected from the company’s network security customers to improve security posture. It also intelligently predicts health, performance, and capacity problems up to seven days in advance and provides actionable insights to resolve the predicted disruptions.
Secure Access Service Edge
Prisma Access: Prisma Access is a cloud-delivered security offering that helps organizations deliver consistent security to remote networks and mobile users. Located in more than 100 locations around the world, Prisma Access consistently inspects all traffic across all ports and provides bidirectional networking to enable branch-to-branch and branch-to-headquarter traffic. Prisma Access consolidates point-products into a single converged cloud-delivered offering, transforming network security and allowing organizations to enable secure hybrid workforces. Prisma Access protects all application traffic with complete, best-in-class security while ensuring an exceptional user experience with industry-leading service-level agreements (SLAs). With native SASE integration, Prisma Access Browser extends Zero Trust to any device—managed or unmanaged—in minutes. Prisma Access delivers exceptional user experience with a combination of application acceleration—up to 5x faster than direct-to-internet—and Autonomous Digital Experience Management. With these capabilities, Prisma Access delivers an optimized digital experience and application performance to end users.
Prisma SD-WAN: The company’s Prisma SD-WAN solution is a next-generation SD-WAN solution that makes the secure cloud-delivered branch possible. Prisma SD-WAN enables organizations to replace traditional Multiprotocol Label Switching based WAN architectures with affordable broadband and internet transport types that promote improved bandwidth availability, redundancy and performance at a reduced cost. Prisma SD-WAN leverages real-time application performance SLAs and visibility to control and intelligently steer application traffic to deliver an exceptional user experience. Prisma SD-WAN also provides the flexibility of deploying with an on-premises controller to help businesses meet their industry-specific security compliance requirements and manage deployments with application-defined policies. The company’s Prisma SD-WAN simplifies network and security operations using machine learning and automation.
AI Runtime Security
AI applications and large language model (LLM) models challenge traditional security. Increasingly sophisticated attacks on AI ecosystems require protection from AI applications, models and datasets. AI Runtime Security continuously monitors AI applications, models and datasets for potential threats and anomalies. It quickly adjusts to evolving attack techniques and detects suspicious activities in real time. It shields customers’ AI application ecosystem from AI-specific and conventional network attacks by leveraging real-time, AI-powered security.
Strata Cloud Manager
Strata Cloud Manager enables the company’s customers to easily manage their Palo Alto Networks’ Network Security infrastructure—including NGFWs and SASE environment—from the cloud, via one unified management interface. In addition to getting complete visibility, with Strata Cloud Manager, customers can predict and prevent network health issues, strengthen security, and configure and manage their entire network security estate. Strata Copilot, a part of Strata Cloud Manager, helps security teams quickly and easily find, understand and address threats leveraging the power and simplicity of natural language.
Cloud Security
Prisma Cloud: Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive CNAPP, securing both cloud-native and lift-and-shift applications across multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. With broad security and compliance coverage and a flexible agentless, as well as agent-based, architecture, Prisma Cloud protects cloud-native applications across their lifecycle from code to cloud. The platform helps developers prevent risks as they code and build the application, secures the software supply chain and the continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, and provides complete visibility and real-time protection for applications running in the cloud.
With its code-to-cloud security capabilities, Prisma Cloud creates a complete security picture by tracing back thousands of cloud risks and vulnerabilities that occur in the application runtime to their origin in the code-and-build phase of the application. Prisma Cloud does this by consolidating multiple code and cloud security technologies, such as Software Composition Analysis, Infrastructure as Code security, CI/CD security, secrets scanning, Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity and Entitlements Management, API security, Vulnerability Management, Cloud Workload Protection, Web Application and API Security, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Discovery and Exposure Management into a single unified platform. The platform enables organizations to ‘shift security left’ and fix issues at the source (in code) before they proliferate as a large number of risks in the cloud. The contextualized visibility to alerts, attack paths, and vulnerabilities delivered by Prisma Cloud facilitates collaboration between security and development teams to drive down risks and deliver better security outcomes. The context helps security teams block attacks in the cloud runtime and developers fix risks in source code.
A comprehensive library of compliance frameworks included in Prisma Cloud vastly simplifies the task of maintaining compliance. Seamless integration with security orchestration tools ensures rapid remediation of vulnerabilities and security issues.
Further, the Code to Cloud Platform is positioned to secure AI-powered applications for enterprises. In March 2024, the company announced limited general availability of data security posture management (DSPM) capabilities and in May 2024, the company released the early preview of AI security posture management (AI-SPM) capabilities to its customers. These features were made available to all customers in the company’s August 2024 software release. Prisma Cloud customers can activate them within the platform to discover, classify, protect, and govern AI-powered applications. DSPM and AI-SPM together provide visibility into the entire GenAI ecosystem, identify LLM vulnerabilities, prioritize misconfiguration risks, reduce the risk of data exposure, and surface compliance violations. The native integration of Prisma Cloud with Cortex XSIAM is further expanded with the recent addition of cloud detection and response (CDR) capabilities, providing a broader context to protect, detect, and respond to advanced cloud threats. It also brings together cloud security and security operations teams, fostering strong collaboration.
With a flexible, integrated platform that enables customers to license and activate cloud security capabilities that match their need, Prisma Cloud helps secure organizations at every stage in their cloud adoption journey. The platform enables security teams to consolidate multiple products that address individual risks with an integrated solution that also delivers best-in-class capabilities. Prisma Cloud’s code-to-cloud CNAPP delivers comprehensive protection for applications and their code, infrastructure (workloads, network, and storage), data, APIs, and associated identities.
Security Operations
Cortex XSIAM: This cloud-based AI-driven security operations platform for the modern SOC harnesses the power of AI to radically improve security outcomes and transform security operations. Cortex XSIAM customers can consolidate multiple products into a single unified platform that delivers security information and event management, extended detection and response (XDR), SOAR, network traffic analysis, ASM, threat intelligence management (TIM), identity threat detection and response, and CDR. CDR is the latest addition to Cortex XSIAM and XDR that addresses the growing need for security teams to respond to cloud threats with purpose-built SOC tools that seamlessly integrate with their security programs. Cortex XSIAM integrates these capabilities into a single, converged platform built for security operations, enabling organizations to simplify operations, stop threats at scale, and accelerate incident remediation. Cortex XSIAM automates data integration, analysis, and triage to respond to most alerts, enabling analysts to focus on only the incidents that require human intervention.
Cortex XDR: This cloud-based subscription enables organizations to collect telemetry from endpoint, network, identity and cloud data sources and apply advanced analytics and machine learning, to quickly find and stop targeted attacks, insider abuse, and compromised endpoints. Cortex XDR has two product tiers: XDR Prevent and XDR Pro. XDR Prevent delivers enterprise-class endpoint security focused on preventing attacks. XDR Pro extends endpoint detection and response (EDR) to include cross-data analytics for network, cloud, and identity data. Going beyond EDR, Cortex XDR detects the most complex threats using analytics across key data sources and reveals the root cause, which can significantly reduce investigation time as compared to siloed tools and manual processes.
Cortex XSOAR: Available as a stand-alone cloud-based subscription, an on-premises appliance, or delivered natively through Cortex XSIAM, Cortex XSOAR is a comprehensive SOAR offering that unifies playbook automation, case management, real-time collaboration, and TIM to serve security teams across the incident lifecycle. With Cortex XSOAR, security teams can standardize processes, automate repeatable tasks, and manage incidents across their security product stack to improve response time and analyst productivity. Cortex XSOAR learns from the real-life analyst interactions and past investigations to help SOC teams with analyst assignment suggestions, playbook enhancements, and best next steps for investigations. Many of the company’s customers see significantly faster SOC response times and a significant reduction in the number of SOC alerts which require human intervention.
Cortex Xpanse: Available as a stand-alone cloud-based subscription and a cloud-based subscription module within Cortex XSIAM, Cortex Xpanse provides ASM, which is the ability for an organization to identify what an attacker would see among all of its sanctioned and unsanctioned Internet-facing assets. In addition, Cortex Xpanse detects risky or out-of-policy communications between Internet-connected assets that can be exploited for data breaches or ransomware attacks. Cortex Xpanse continuously identifies Internet assets, risky services, or misconfigurations in third parties to help secure a supply chain or identify risks for mergers and acquisitions due diligence. Finally, compliance teams use Cortex Xpanse to improve their audit processes and stay in compliance by assessing their access controls against regulatory frameworks.
Support
Customer Support: Global customer support helps the company’s customers achieve their security outcomes with services and support capabilities covering the customer's entire journey with Palo Alto Networks. This post-sales, global organization advances the company’s customers’ security maturity, supporting them when, where, and how they need it. The company offers Standard Support, Premium Support, and Platinum Support to its end-customers and channel partners. The company’s channel partners that operate a Palo Alto Networks Authorized Support Center typically deliver level-one and level-two support. The company provides level-three support 24 hours a day, seven days a week through regional support centers that are located worldwide. The company also offers a service offering called Focused Services that includes Customer Success Managers to provide support for end-customers with unique or complex support requirements. The company offers its end-customers ongoing support for hardware, software, and certain cloud offerings, which includes ongoing security updates, PAN-OS upgrades, bug fixes, and repairs. End-customers typically purchase these services for a one-year or longer term at the time of the initial product sale and typically renew for successive one-year or longer periods. Additionally, the company provides expedited replacement for any defective hardware. The company uses a third-party logistics provider to manage its worldwide deployment of spare appliances and other accessories.
Threat Intelligence, Incident Response and Security Consulting. Unit 42 brings together world-renowned threat researchers, incident responders, and security consultants to create an intelligence-driven, response-ready organization that is passionate about helping clients proactively manage cyber risk. The company helps security leaders assess and test their security controls, transform their security strategy with a threat-informed approach, and respond to incidents rapidly. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team provides threat research that enables security teams to understand adversary intent and attribution, while enhancing protections offered by the company’s products and services to stop advanced attacks. The company’s security consultants serve as trusted partners with state-of-the-art cyber risk expertise and incident response capabilities, helping customers build effective security programs, uncover critical exposures to prevent incidents, and, should incidents occur, respond to them with speed and confidence.
Professional Services: Professional services are primarily delivered directly by Palo Alto Networks and through a global network of authorized channel partners to the company’s end-customers and include on-location and remote, hands-on experts who plan, design, and deploy effective security solutions tailored to its end-customers’ specific requirements. These services include architecture design and planning, implementation, configuration, and firewall migrations for all the company’s products, including Prisma and Cortex deployments. Customers can also purchase on-going technical experts to be part of customer’s security teams to aid in the implementation and operation of their Palo Alto Networks capabilities. The company’s education services include certifications, as well as free online technical courses and in-classroom training, which are primarily delivered through its authorized training partners.
Strategy
A key element of the company’s strategy is to help its customers simplify their security architectures through consolidating disparate point products. The company’s platformization strategy combines various products and services into a tightly integrated architecture and makes security faster, less complex, and more cost-effective.
Research and Development
During the year ended July 31, 2024, the company introduced several new offerings, including Prisma Cloud Darwin release with newly integrated Code to Cloud intelligence capabilities, PAN-OS 11.2 Quasar, Cortex XSIAM 2.0, new Cortex XSIAM features, Prisma SASE 3.0, and Precision AI.
Competition
The company’s main competitors fall into four categories:
Large companies that incorporate security features in their products, such as Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco), Microsoft, Alphabet, or those that have acquired, or may acquire, security vendors and have the technical and financial resources to bring competitive solutions to the market.
Independent security vendors, such as Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Check Point), Fortinet, Inc. (Fortinet), CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (CrowdStrike), Zscaler, Inc. (Zscaler), and Wiz, Inc. (Wiz), that offer a mix of security products.
Sales, Marketing, Services, and Support
Customers: The company’s end-customers are predominantly medium to large enterprises, service providers, and government entities. Our end-customers operate in a variety of industries, including education, energy, financial services, government entities, healthcare, Internet and media, manufacturing, public sector, and telecommunications. The company’s end-customers deploy its portfolio of solutions for a variety of security functions across a variety of deployment scenarios. Typical deployment scenarios include the enterprise network, the enterprise data center, cloud locations, and branch or remote locations.
Distribution: The company primarily sells its products and subscription and support offerings to end-customers through its channel partners utilizing a two-tier, indirect fulfillment model whereby it sells its products and subscription and support offerings to its distributors, which, in turn, sell to its resellers, which then sells to its end-customers.
The company also sells its VM-Series virtual firewalls directly to end-customers through Amazon’s AWS Marketplace, Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud Marketplace under a usage-based licensing model.
Sales: The company’s sales organization is responsible for large-account acquisition and overall market development, which includes the management of the relationships with its channel partners, working with its channel partners in winning and supporting end-customers through a direct-touch approach, and acting as the liaison between the company’s end-customers and its marketing and product development organizations.
Channel Program: The company’s NextWave Channel Partner program is focused on building in-depth relationships with solutions-oriented distributors and channel partners that have strong security expertise. The program rewards these partners based on a number of attainment goals, as well as provides them access to marketing funds, technical and sales training, and support. To promote optimal productivity, the company operates a formal accreditation program for our channel partners’ sales and technical professionals. As of July 31, 2024, the company had more than 6,500 channel partners.
Global Customer Success: The company’s Global Customer Success organization is responsible for delivering professional, educational, and support services directly to its channel partners and end-customers. The company leverages the capabilities of its channel partners and train them in the delivery of professional, educational, and support services to enable these services to be locally delivered.
Marketing: The company’s marketing team consists primarily of product marketing, brand, demand generation, field marketing, digital marketing, communications, analyst relations, and marketing analytics functions. Marketing activities include pipeline development through demand generation, social media and advertising programs, managing the corporate website and partner portal, trade shows and conferences, analyst relationships, customer advocacy, and customer awareness. Every year the company organizes multiple signature events, such as its end-customer conference ‘Ignite’ and focused conferences, such as ‘Cortex Symphony’ and ‘SASE Converge.’ The company also publishes threat intelligence research, such as the Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report and the Unit 42 Network Threat Trends Research Report, which are based on data from its global threat intelligence team, Unit 42.
The company’s products and services have been recognized as leading in 24 categories by third-party industry analysts firms that perform independent assessments of these categories. This recognition by third parties is an important measure of validation for the company’s customers.
Seasonality
The company’s business is affected by seasonal fluctuations in customer spending patterns. The company has begun to see seasonal patterns in its business, which it expects to become more pronounced as the company continues to grow, with its strongest sequential revenue growth generally occurring in its fiscal second and fourth quarters (year ended July 2024).
Manufacturing
The company’s electronics manufacturing services provider is Flextronics International, Ltd. (Flex).
History
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. was incorporated in 2005 under the laws of the state of Delaware.
