Palo Alto Networks has always viewed our professional service offerings as a make-or-break capability. We understand that delivering innovative, world-class cybersecurity solutions is only as useful as our ability to tailor those solutions to each customer's unique requirements – where, when and how to deploy our products to help our customers achieve their business technology goals. This is where our certified Professional Services Partners step in to play a crucial role.
Our professional services team recently took a huge step forward, thanks to a partnership with one of the industry's biggest and most capable business technology consulting firms: Wipro. As the newest addition to the Palo Alto Networks Certified Professional Services Partner (CPSP) program, Wipro enables us to scale our professional services partner ecosystem in some very unique and valuable ways.
With this background, it's a good time to look more closely at what CPSP status means for our customers and partners, what's involved in achieving a CPSP distinction, and why Wipro will be such a welcome addition to our extended family of elite professional service providers.
Professional Services: A Make-or-Break Capability
Professional services are an especially important capability for any cybersecurity technology provider. Some of the world's largest enterprises rely on our products to protect business-critical applications, networks and data stores across a vast range of diverse, and often very complex, cloud and on-premise environments.
Cybersecurity today can be a high-stakes, high-risk undertaking. Mistakes are costly, and our customers trust us to deliver fast and flawless product implementations. That's why we have invested so much time and effort in building an extended network of implementation and professional services partners that understand how to deploy Palo Alto Networks technology solutions in ways that make sense to our customers, while maintaining our rigorous standards.
Our NextWave partner program, which now includes more than 8,500 highly trained and certified providers, is a key segment of our professional services strategy. The other segment is our group of CPSP – an elite group of approximately 90 providers that are individually selected and invited to participate in this advanced post-sales enablement program.
Wipro's CPSP program journey, like other providers, involved a number of key steps:
- Each Palo Alto Networks CPSP commits to being certified via our most rigorous and comprehensive set of learning paths. While the exact number of participating consultants will vary from one partner to the next, it typically involves a major commitment of a partner's time, talent and bandwidth.
- Before a potential CPSP joins the Palo Alto Networks program, we typically expect its consultants to complete a number of prerequisite learning tasks, including product-specific training and certification programs.
- Finally, a CPSP's selected team members participate in the same advanced, lab-based workshops, covering every aspect of our technology program as our own in-house professional services team members.
The CPSP program learning paths are demanding and time-consuming, both for our internal bench and for a potential partner. But the result justifies the effort – a partner that can serve as an extension of our own professional services team, solving our customers' toughest and most complex cybersecurity challenges.
A Unique Partnership Takes the Next Step
Wipro is one of the world's most respected and experienced IT professional service providers, and they continue to build on a number of core strengths that have made them one of our most reliable and valuable partners:
- Proven expertise in deploying, managing and operationalizing network infrastructure, they're just as adept at architecting modern cybersecurity solutions designed to protect enterprise applications, networks, infrastructure and the IT Edge across complex multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.
- Deep, battle-tested experience with virtually every product in the Palo Alto Networks portfolio, from our cutting-edge Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, built on Prisma Access and Prisma SD-WAN to security intelligence and analytics offerings, like Palo Alto Networks Panorama, Data Lake and WildFire.
- Wipro is also one of the world's top providers of Palo Alto Networks managed services, having recently added Prisma Access to their existing managed Prisma SD-WAN offering, giving organizations around the world access to reliable and affordable SASE managed security services.
Wipro also has a unique history with CloudGenix, which we acquired in 2020 as the foundation for our current Prisma SD-WAN solution. At the time, Wipro had already partnered with CloudGenix to offer a fully managed SD-WAN service with their #WANFreedom SDWAN solution, and that history confirms Wipro's expertise and commitment to its current set of Palo Alto Networks managed offerings.
A Professional Services Team Proves Its Value
There's one more reason why we view Wipro as such a valuable addition to our CPSP program – it’s passion and talent for delivering practical, scalable, well-executed technology solutions.
One example is in our recent case study, highlighting Wipro implementing our technology for a leading office facilities management company. Wipro delivered a complete overhaul of the company's existing, highly complex cybersecurity infrastructure. Wipro worked closely with our team to deploy and manage a single embedded security architecture, consolidating a tangle of legacy-solution vendors with more than 700 legacy firewalls. They also implemented a modern security solution that automatically protects and connects the client's endpoints and the security edge.
It's the kind of project that could have spiraled quickly with a less experienced hand on the rudder, and it exemplifies why Palo Alto Networks named Wipro the EMEA Systems Integrator Partner of the Year for 2021. Bringing Wipro into our CPSP program will create even bigger opportunities to work together and enhance their experience to better serve our customers.
Learn more on how Palo Alto Networks and Wipro use next-generation security and network capabilities to improve business acceleration, deliver innovation and secure digital transformation.