2022 Channel Sales Goals

CF: What are your goals in terms of Palo Alto Networks’ channel sales in 2022?

KS: I always stay away from financial numbers, but what I will say when I look at my leading indicators and when I look at the health of the business, I look for, one, a high level of activity from our partners and those are things that I track, like the amount of deal registrations, the amount of folks that are submitting opportunities, looking to see where our pipeline is growing. Is it growing in just firewall or growing in our adjacent security areas as well? So really, there are multiple indicators that I track for the health of the business. And I think that’s more internally from Palo Alto Networks.

When we think about our partners, we look at the customer satisfaction scores that we track with our end-user base. And I’m really proud to announce that if I look over the past 36 months, our customer satisfaction scores through our partner community have been increasing regularly, which means going back to what I said about enabling. They’re being educated, they’re being trained, they’re working closely with our teams, there’s an alignment in the field and we’re really solving problems out there. So we feel as though there’s a tremendous amount of momentum in the system right now going into 2022, and our partner community is excited.