Less than a year after joining OpenText, Bill Steen has taken a new role with Palo Alto Networks in global systems integrator (GSI) partner marketing.

Palo Alto Networks’ Bill Steen

Steen announced his new role with Palo Alto Networks in a LinkedIn message. Last August, OpenText hired Steen as its director of channel and field marketing.

Before OpenText, Steen was director of indirect channel and alliance partner marketing at Comcast Business. And before that, he was with Level 3 for 13 years. His last job at Level 3 was director of partner programs and marketing.

Steen tells us he worked with Palo Alto Networks while with Comcast Business.

“I was always very impressed with both the quality of the people at the company, as well as the technology they were bringing to the market and partner ecosystem,” he said. “They were absolutely on my top three list for where I wanted to take my career. I worked with several GSIs as part of my most recent time at OpenText and really enjoyed focusing on partnering to bring security and cloud solutions to enterprise accounts. I love Palo Alto Networks’ vision of a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. Spanning firewalls, SASE, XDR/MDR and cloud security, the product portfolio is comprehensive and provides value to all partners and their customers, particularly to GSIs.”

Working With GSIs

Steen said he’s “super excited” to be working with several of Palo Alto Networks’ largest GSI partners, including IBM, Kyndryl and PWC. He said he’ll focus on:

“GSIs are all unique,” he said. “I believe my time at both OpenText as well as Lumen/Level 3 has provided me with great experience I can leverage right out of the gate to make an impact for partners and customers.”

Top To-Dos in New Role

Steen said he has three top “to-dos” in his new Palo Alto Networks partner marketing role.

“Get to know the key stakeholders at Palo Alto Networks so I can be effective with bringing in the right resources that the partners need; I look forward to collaborating across the channel organization, sales and product teams,” he said. “Go deep on the GSIs strategy for who they target and with what specific value-proposition. Listen and learn from what has worked in the past to go forward accelerating the funnel together. Start thinking about how we expand our go-to-market (GTM) and co-marketing efforts together, developing marketing plans and driving new business. We have several key products, such as SASE, that will help the GSIs enter new accounts and grow their revenue.”