Palo Alto: Making Firewalls Cool Again

Company:

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: PA-4000 Series Firewall

Year Founded: 2005

Number of Channel Partners: 150 to 170 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Palo Alto Networks makes no bones about it: "It's time to fix the firewall." The network security vendor prides itself on partnering with leading-edge, innovative partners that want more than just basic firewall functionality.

The Lowdown: Palo Alto Networks does things differently. The four-year-old company isn't so much trying to build a better firewall as it is trying to completely reinvent a technology that hasn't changed much in the last decade.

Take a look at the technology of the 90s, when firewalls classified traffic based only on ports and protocols, like identifying Web traffic as HTTP coming through Port 80 with no further details. That functionality has become useless with the amount of traffic and the various applications running across the network, said Chris King, Palo Alto's director of product marketing.

"The firewall no longer does what it's supposed to do, which is govern traffic as it goes across the network," King said. "This is a market ripe for some renovation."

Palo Alto is flipping the script, building firewalls that bring visibility and control of applications and content, by user, not just IP addresses, at up to 10 Gbps. The firewalls use App-ID technology to identify applications regardless of port, protocol or evasive tactic of SSL encryption. Then it scans content to stop threats and prevent data leakage.

Focusing on the application and not on the port lets users write policy based on applications, while also integrating with Microsoft Active Directory to set policy based on specific users and groups as well, King said.

And King is quick to caution that Palo Alto's firewalls aren't UTM solutions, since that confusion sometimes happens. "The ability to incorporate application control in the firewall, and have application control period, end of story, is huge," King said.

For channel partners, Palo Alto is looking to pair up with the best of the best, the ones that are innovative and are on the leading edge. Simply put, Palo Alto is looking for partners that "get it," King said.

"The angle here is we use channel partners that have the capacity to understand us," he said. "When you're merging, you want to focus on partners who are going to focus on you."

In return, King said, Palo Alto partners get high margins and a chance to crack into the roughly $4 billion worldwide firewall market, an area where end users still allocate budget.

"We've been fortunate in this climate to have been able to grow quite nicely," King said, adding that in December Palo Alto was able to secure $10 million in venture funding.

Palo Alto's firewalls, he said, give partners the ability to sell something truly different, with tactical value and a strategic value that can help build relationships and lead to other security investments.

And partners are taking notice. Hayes Drumwright, CEO of Trace|3, an Irvine, Calif. solution provider, said Palo Alto's firewalls are one of Trace|3's key products and help tell an ROI story as customers look to do more with less. Drumwright said Palo Alto makes some of the best and most innovative products of the last decade, which helps Trace|3 stay ahead of the curve and build new relationships with customers.

"If a VAR can do that, what value does that VAR add?" he asked.