What Customers Need From Partners

CF: What are customers looking for from their partners?

KS: When it comes to vendor consolidation and doing more with less, customers are looking for a holistic solution, someone who can … meet all of their needs from end to end to increase their security posture. That’s the platform that Palo Alto Networks brings to the table. So I think from a technology standpoint, you’ve seen us bring a lot of innovations to the table, both organic and inorganic, to help with that and then interlock them all in.

Secondly, I think calendar year 2022 is going to be the year of automation when it comes to security operations. Machine learning (ML) can detect anomalies faster and more consistently than any human operators. And I think that message is clear now to customers, and people are gravitating toward that at record numbers right now. We see that as a great opportunity for them to increase their security posture.

And third, when I think about our partner community, we use a term called increasing the services economy here at Palo
Alto Networks. There’s more opportunity for partners to wrap their version of services into the sale than ever before, and that can be everything from presales consulting, through deployment and full-blown managed services, really thinking about life-cycle management of these technologies. So when we think about filling in that talent gap, that’s a big part of it.