Credit: Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks has unveiled an enhanced approach to partnering through prioritising specialisation, incentives and enablement as the core tenants of a revamped go-to-market channel strategy.
Under the banner of NextWave 3.0, the refresh is designed to help partners differentiate services and build new security expertise in response to increased customer demand.
Central to such efforts is a sharpened focus on driving differentiation within the channel, anchored around new specialisations in the form of Prisma SASE, Prisma Cloud and Cortex XDR/XSOAR certifications, backed by new incentives, deal boosts and rebates.
Delving deeper, expanded partner opportunities are expected to take shape in the form of strengthening existing deal referral incentives on all Palo Alto products, in a move designed to extend partner-delivered support across the vendor’s wider portfolio. In addition, NextWave partners can also resell Prisma Cloud via a two-tier go-to-market strategy.
“The future of our business and that of our partners are fundamentally linked," said Karl Soderlund, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels at Palo Alto. “The NextWave partner of tomorrow will enable digital transformation for our customers by embracing new technology, offering product-specific expertise, and leading with services.
“NextWave 3.0 helps our partners do just that. It is the most sweeping set of enhancements we have done to help our partners become security experts across our entire technology portfolio.”
Currently, the vendor’s NextWave partner program includes approximately 6500 partners, supporting more than 80,000 customers across the world. This is alongside over 18,000 partner engineers holding over 40,000 Palo Alto technical certifications.
“As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, the need for agile and adaptable security solutions has never been greater,” added Mike McGlynn, vice president and general manager of Global Security at World Wide Technology (WWT).
“Palo Alto Networks’ NextWave 3.0 offers a comprehensive security suite that enables WWT to help organisations construct and evolve their security infrastructures in the cloud, at the edge, and through AI-driven automation, tailored to their unique transformation needs.”
The move comes days after the vendor rolled out a number of new features for its Prisma cloud-based security package, as well as announcing plans to buy cloud security specialist Bridgecrew for approximately US$156 million in cash.
Palo Alto's Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behaviour monitoring and other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.
Managed through a single console, Prisma includes firewall as a service, zero-trust network access, a cloud access security broker and a secure web gateway.
With Prisma Access 2.0, the company says it has simplified its workflows to include configuration templates and automated resource assessments that streamline cloud network configuration and improve security out of the box, wrote Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager at Palo Alto, in a blog about Prisma 2.0.
Prisma Access 2.0 uses machine learning (ML) for inline zero-day protection. It gives customers the ability to instantly stop new threats with embedded ML technology to provide realtime signature-less attack prevention and extend security coverage to all devices, including never-seen-before Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Oswal stated. Prisma now includes the ability to automate policy recommendations that save time and reduce the chance of human error, he added.
