Anil Bhasin, Managing Director, India & Saarc, Palo Alto Networks, spoke to Sonal Desai about the company’s performance and its channel plan and strategy
Palo Alto Networks (PAN) is a relatively new entrant targeting the mid-market and large enterprise segments in India. Why should customers using competing security solutions switch to you?
Traditionally, large enterprises have been installing the best-of-breed security solutions from different vendors. The limit is tested when a sophisticated attack breaks into the signature of a security vendor and impacts the entire network. This is because the solutions developed by different vendors do not talk to each other in a heterogeneous environment.
Our USP is our products that span the security spectrum. They are offered on our Single Pass Parallel Processing Architecture which provides customers three levels of security—AppID, ContentID and UserID.
In just over 10 months, we have increased the India pre-sales and sales team from 3 to 17, on boarded 70 partners and signed on 200 new customers
This makes us a genuine next-generation network security solutions provider. Also, through our SSL-SSH methodology, we take the affected security component to the sandbox, allow it to operate, and create a signature in 30 minutes. The new signature is directly burnt into the ASIC chips; this prevents the malicious attack from penetrating the network.
Also, it has been proven that by using our appliances, per GB throughput does not drop below 50 percent compared to multi-vendor environments where the performance can drop to 90 percent.
While Cisco and McAfee acquired Sourcefire and Stonesoft to fill the gaps in IPS and NGFW respectively, these companies, which we consider our closest competition, will take a long time to meet our competencies.
But are not UTMs the current flavor? Are you not missing the market opportunities?
I don’t agree. We are not in the UTM space, and don’t want to be. They are for organizations which are looking for all the security components to be bundled in one box, and are not bothered about performance and latency, or application security at the L7 level.
I have not met a CIO or CISO who wants to deploy UTMs in a large enterprise.
Palo Alto has devised various tools for customer acquisition. How do these help?
We have devised an Application Visibility & Risk (AVR) report tool which provides a business with risk assessment based on the analysis of the application traffic traversing the network taking into account the different types of applications, how they are being used, and the relative security risk.
The tool is essentially a box in which we put some production traffic for a week. These are live tests being conducted at the customer sites, and at the end of the week, the customer knows the truth. Neither Palo Alto nor our partners have to say anything—the AVR provides a black-and-white report. Customers who are serious about security cut across the marketing hype; they just test the technology and sign multi-year contracts with us.
What are the key trends driving Palo Alto’s revenue in India?
Globally, threats are no longer about ports and protocols because the threat vector has changed to become app-centric. The core IP of any business is now the data that resides in applications. That is the number one trend and opportunity.
We are also looking at partnering with Indian MNCs in their global expansion journey. According to market estimates, 60 percent of CIOs and CISOs will have a strategy to migrate to next-generation platforms.
Vertically, while there are many greenfield opportunities in telecom, government, banking, ITeS, manufacturing and retail, we are also seeing significant business from customer migration.
Technologically, one of the most important growth drivers is the rapid adoption of enterprise mobility and BYOD. According to Frost & Sullivan, the demand for network firewalls and the emergence of value-added services in APAC is forecast to reach $2.9 billion in the next five years.
Palo Alto Networks (PAN) is a relatively new entrant targeting the mid-market and large enterprise segments in India. Why should customers using competing security solutions switch to you?
Traditionally, large enterprises have been installing the best-of-breed security solutions from different vendors. The limit is tested when a sophisticated attack breaks into the signature of a security vendor and impacts the entire network. This is because the solutions developed by different vendors do not talk to each other in a heterogeneous environment.
Our USP is our products that span the security spectrum. They are offered on our Single Pass Parallel Processing Architecture which provides customers three levels of security—AppID, ContentID and UserID.
This makes us a genuine next-generation network security solutions provider. Also, through our SSL-SSH methodology, we take the affected security component to the sandbox, allow it to operate, and create a signature in 30 minutes. The new signature is directly burnt into the ASIC chips; this prevents the malicious attack from penetrating the network.
Also, it has been proven that by using our appliances, per GB throughput does not drop below 50 percent compared to multi-vendor environments where the performance can drop to 90 percent.
While Cisco and McAfee acquired Sourcefire and Stonesoft to fill the gaps in IPS and NGFW respectively, these companies, which we consider our closest competition, will take a long time to meet our competencies.
But are not UTMs the current flavor? Are you not missing the market opportunities?
I don’t agree. We are not in the UTM space, and don’t want to be. They are for organizations which are looking for all the security components to be bundled in one box, and are not bothered about performance and latency, or application security at the L7 level.
I have not met a CIO or CISO who wants to deploy UTMs in a large enterprise.
Palo Alto has devised various tools for customer acquisition. How do these help?
We have devised an Application Visibility & Risk (AVR) report tool which provides a business with risk assessment based on the analysis of the application traffic traversing the network taking into account the different types of applications, how they are being used, and the relative security risk.
The tool is essentially a box in which we put some production traffic for a week. These are live tests being conducted at the customer sites, and at the end of the week, the customer knows the truth. Neither Palo Alto nor our partners have to say anything—the AVR provides a black-and-white report. Customers who are serious about security cut across the marketing hype; they just test the technology and sign multi-year contracts with us.
What are the key trends driving Palo Alto’s revenue in India?
Globally, threats are no longer about ports and protocols because the threat vector has changed to become app-centric. The core IP of any business is now the data that resides in applications. That is the number one trend and opportunity.
We are also looking at partnering with Indian MNCs in their global expansion journey. According to market estimates, 60 percent of CIOs and CISOs will have a strategy to migrate to next-generation platforms.
Vertically, while there are many greenfield opportunities in telecom, government, banking, ITeS, manufacturing and retail, we are also seeing significant business from customer migration.
Technologically, one of the most important growth drivers is the rapid adoption of enterprise mobility and BYOD. According to Frost & Sullivan, the demand for network firewalls and the emergence of value-added services in APAC is forecast to reach $2.9 billion in the next five years.