Google LLC is meeting growing security demands through a series of cloud integrations with Palo Alto Networks Inc. on Google Cloud Marketplace.
These cybersecurity-focused collaborations have benefited both parties, allowing Palo Alto Networks to expand its reach while offering customers better deals.
“As we started developing a lot more integrations into the marketplace, what we found is we could close deals faster,” said Munish Khetrapal (pictured, left), vice president of Google Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. “Customers … would use the Google Cloud Marketplace to get us a larger deal. We’ve seen over a period of four to five years … between a 16 to 22% increase in our transactions just because we were in Google Cloud Marketplace. That’s because customers could close faster, larger deals, more licensing, and they could leverage that common budget and commercial capabilities.”
Khetrapal and Stephen Orban (pictured), vice president of migrations, ISVs and marketplace, Google Cloud, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Palo Alto Networks is enhancing its services through cloud integrations with Google Cloud Marketplace. (* Disclosure below.)
Modernizing customer networks with cloud integrations
Together, Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks have developed more than 75 joint integration solutions, with Orban accelerating initiatives to help Palo Alto implement further security capabilities. Their engineers frequently communicate back and forth on new projects and are constantly developing new cloud integrations.
“One of the things that makes this such a winning relationship is Palo Alto invests deeply in training our customer engineers, so they understand the technical nuances of Palo Alto versus other solutions and how a customer can set that up in their cloud environment,” Orban said. “Oftentimes, we’re working on accounts together for months or leading up to design wins that we’re trying to help them with. I think it’s just the continued maturation of their value proposition and our value proposition.”
Two main trends in the Marketplace are network and application modernization, according to Khetrapal. Palo Alto Networks provides greater security throughout its customers’ networks while offering integrations for on-premises and cloud applications.
“Integrations become important because the customers don’t want to become system integrators themselves,” he said. “They want to go into a Google Cloud console … configure a capability [and] they want to enable security on top of that, bringing in the Palo Alto technology, which they might buy from Palo Alto, through a reseller, through the Marketplace. They can buy through any channel, but they want to enable those solutions and then be able to deliver on the business outcomes in a secure manner.”
A partnership for a world of artificial intelligence
Unsurprisingly, the overarching trend for Palo Alto Networks’ customers is AI. Google Cloud is focused on supporting faster model deployment for all of its customers, supported by a security infrastructure from Palo Alto Networks.
“With probably over 200 AI projects that we have started to work together [on], we are now looking at how to secure the whole life cycle of customer’s journey and how they train their models, how they build AI applications and how they have [large language model] ops to ensure they’re operating these AI applications,” Khetrapal said. “We are putting together a full security architecture that the customers can start deploying so that at least from a security standpoint, they’re looking at AI with the combination of Google and Palo Alto Networks as a unique proposition.”
Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud’s partnership will continue to evolve, Orban and Khetrapal emphasized. Customers are constantly demanding more cloud integrations for an increasingly AI-centric world.
“Software is never done, and we’re going to have ephemeral compute instances and lots of these capabilities that are going to continue to evolve,” Orban said. “If anything, the number of integrations that we’re doing is accelerating, because we’re never going to be done. We come out with new capabilities; [Palo Alto Networks] comes out with new capabilities. AI has become of strategic importance to both of our companies, but because it’s of strategic importance to our customers.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels special interview series. Neither Google LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)