Hi, I'm Chad Kinzelberg. I run corporate and business development at Palo Alto Networks and I'm here to share my perspective on the Citrix/Palo Alto Networks partnership that we announced today.
As many of you may know, Palo Alto Networks pioneered next-generation firewalls. We build a firewall that uses policies based on applications, users, and content – not the traditional stateful inspection technology that most organizations have used for the last decade. With a focus on what we call safe application enablement – which means that organizations can use almost any application without taking on unnecessary risk – we've built a customer base of over 9,000 enterprise customers in 5 years of selling firewalls. Our next-generation firewall enables these organizations to allow users to employ a diverse set of applications – SaaS, cloud, social, mobile applications - but mitigate the associated risk. We use the phrase, "allow, but…" to signify this – allow, but scan for threats, or limit to certain users, or limit function, or limit bandwidth consumption, etc. Like Citrix, we've been recognized externally for our leadership in our core market (in our case, the network security market) by folks like Gartner and Forrester.
To me, the most interesting element of this partnership is that two leaders in their respective spaces have come together to enable customers to get things done better and faster. I would argue that Citrix has the most comprehensive view of application delivery in the market. It isn't just enterprise web application delivery controllers that Citrix focuses on, but a picture that includes delivery of web applications, desktop applications, enterprise apps of varying architectures, distributed apps, and importantly, cloud-based applications. Similarly, Palo Alto Networks has the most comprehensive view of network security in the market – with a solution that effectively narrows the attack surface of the network (without impeding business), and protects against known and unknown threats – across all users and applications, regardless of location. For customers, the benefit of this partnership includes both those comprehensive strategies, delivered in an increasingly integrated manner. Today, we announced deployment guides for several key applications. We're also working to align not only products, but services and support as well – so customers get an integrated approach to application delivery and security, without the serious functional compromises that almost always come with a single-vendor, "integrated" approach.
In other words, we’re delivering best-in-class delivery and security, without the figure-it-out-yourself, do-it-yourself integration. I think because of the tremendous value enterprises will find in this partnership, you'll see a lot more from Citrix and Palo Alto Networks together.