Michael Khoury, vice president of Global Channel Programs at Palo Alto Networks and Michelle Saw Vice President, Ecosystems, Asia-Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) at Palo Alto Networks share how the cybersecurity vendor is helping both partners and customers with AI in cybersecurity.
Following the launch of Palo Alto Networks’ Secure AI by Design portfolio last year, the cybersecurity vendor unveiled Prisma AIRS earlier this year. Prisma AIRS is a groundbreaking AI security platform that serves as the cornerstone for robust AI protection. It is designed to protect the entire enterprise AI ecosystem, from AI apps, agents, models, and data, at every step.
As businesses in Asia shift their focus to AI in cybersecurity to better manage their cybersecurity, Palo Alto Networks is making sure their partners are capable of helping customers achieve this.
In an interview with CRN Asia, Michael Khoury, vice president of Global Channel Programs at Palo Alto Networks and Michelle Saw Vice President, Ecosystems, Asia-Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) at Palo Alto Networks share how the cybersecurity vendor is helping both partners and customers with AI in cybersecurity.
How are partners understanding and reacting to the changes in cybersecurity with AI and how are customers implementing AI in their cybersecurity?
Khoury: If you look at the way the industry has gone, it’s almost impossible to find a company where AI is not part of their strategy. When you think of our position with our platformization strategy, and when you run across an entire network, the AI is embedded in our platform.
When you look at our Prisma AIRS, AI security is part of our product offering. So, it’s really a natural evolution of our strategy by having AI embedded and by having AI security part of that strategy. You can’t look at these different products from different solutions from different companies and stitch them together and do the best you can without thinking of AI’s impact.
Cyber-attacks are no longer just human driven, they’re becoming AI driven. You need the ability to detect very quickly and you need to remediate very quickly. And this is where we know how to excel in that space.
We are one of the first cybersecurity leaders to think about AI runtime security and have an offer for that. And ultimately, our partners are going to be the one delivering that outcome to the customer.
Saw: We are here to help our partners. Partners recognize that definitely there’s a demand on AI security and every customer that we talk to together, customers are embracing AI.
What we are hearing is the challenges on the adoption of AI. Every customer says they want to adopt AI, but it hasn’t gone mainstream yet. Many of their AI adoptions are still in pilot. And one of the biggest challenges is because of cyberecurity, because they do not know how this is going to impact them by going into AI. And that’s where partners understand and hear it.
If you look at in the market today, a lot of vendors are talking about AI security, but how many actually have that AI solution today?
And that’s the value we bring to our partners and our customers. We are not just talking; we are actually deploying that. Our AI journey started in 2013. Across all our portfolio, we have precision AI, GenAI, machine learning, analytics, and more which will be able to give them insights.
And this year itself, we just launched Prisma AIRS, an agentic AI which is very key in order for customers to drive adoption. How do we secure from the beginning of their AI development, the runtime to the end, and make it available? How do we secure that application layer?
And today, no vendors can provide that, and we are. In fact, we have sold our first Prisma AIRS in India, and globally, we have sold many to big enterprises. So, I think the value that we bring to our partners is really in how we enable them to provide them with the right technology, AI security, and enable them also to scale in terms of developing their competency.
If you look at our partners, we have very strategic partners, we have advisory partners, we have GSI. They know about AI, and they are consulting about it. But the gap that they have is technology. That’s why with our technology and with their consulting expertise, we can deliver an outcome.
Because customers today are not buying products anymore, they are buying outcome, which is how do we help them with their AI journey.
How are you ensuring partners are capable of becoming trusted advisors, especially when it comes to providing solutions like this, which can be complicated for some companies, in terms of understanding what’s going on?
Khoury: When we look at our training today for our partners from our learning enablement, everything now is a role-based performance, meaning across our entire platform, you have roles that are, for example, like a business consultant training, you have an architect training, you have engineer training, and you have basically analysts.
Across the entire motions that partners do from a consulting, from a business consulting perspective, from an architect and a design perspective, or from an engineering and deployment standpoint, or from a support perspective, we have training across our entire portfolios.
So, partners who are driving the consulting and the advisory, they have the area to go deeper versus the partners who are doing the delivery, they have that as well. We feel across our entire portfolios, partners basically are required to do the learning enablement and not just the certification.
When I look at certification for the engineers or the architect or the analysts from a soft perspective, we look at that as a first step. Basically, partners have to go beyond that. The first step is you do the training, but after that, you do more of the hands-on, whether it’s the lab environments, the demo environments.
And from a post-sale, from a delivery standpoint, a lot of our requirements now involve co-delivery or delivery assurance as well. So ultimately, we’re always thinking of the customer, looking at it from a customer lens and saying, it’s not enough to be certified, but you need basically hands-on experience. And this is where our partners team up with Palo Alto Professional Services to deliver that customer outcome.
And we have to do it a few times before we check the box for that partner to be authorized. So, our full training from a certification specialization involves beyond just the engineer. It goes way deeper into making sure that partner is ready and has delivered a customer outcome and a customer success.
And that’s why we’re looking at that journey and saying, these are the partners. We have the ability to say they are a trusted advisor to customers because they’ve proven they’re able to deliver those outcomes.
Saw: If I look at our focus in enablement, we have four pillars in our AI transformation for enablement. And if you look at it today, not only do we want to embed AI across our portfolio. We want to make sure that we are helping to secure our customers’ AI journey with Prisma AIRS.
The second thing is about how do we supercharge our workforce with AI. We are empowering every employee to make sure that they have AI in their fingertips. They know how to use AI.
I was recently in India with the leadership team. We had a session on enablement to enable our leaders how to write a prompt that gives you accuracy in your search. So, to help to drive productivity and efficiency. So, this is what we are doing.
We are also reimagining how we work with AI. For example, how are we leveraging AI for customer support to be able to fast track, identify issues quickly, troubleshooting and resolution? What does that mean to our partner? Because our partner can be more efficient. They can get the problem resolved. We are 100% partner led.
Our service and support are provided by our partner. So having this customer support, leveraging on AI to fast track the resolution, provides better customer support.
For sales enablement, we believe there is no one size fits all. How do we customize our sales enablement across our sales, pre-sales, post-sales and the delivery team to make sure that we give a holistic 360 enablement to our sellers. And this doesn’t stop at our sellers. Because we see our partners as one team. Partner is our extended team that connects and engages with our customers.
So, all this enablement that we are doing, leveraging on AI, we are rolling out with our partners. That’s why our partners are very excited. Increasingly we are seeing partners investing with us, doubling down with us.
We don’t treat them like just transaction partners. We treat them as one team as part of our extended arm. So whatever enablement that we do, we make sure partner also get access to it.
For us to achieve our aspiration to be a US$15 billion in AR by 2030, the only way we are going to get there is with our partners. Because partners are our multipliers. Partners is our virtual team. So that’s where whatever good things that we are doing. We make sure that our partners have access to and are part of it.
What more are you hoping to see from the partners?
Khoury: If I look at how the business has evolved, I don’t talk to any partners anymore who are just going to resell Palo Alto and hope to be competitive. None of that.
Part of our conversation now is always around what value we’re bringing to the customer. And that goes even across our entire ecosystem. When I think of our resellers, they’re not resellers anymore. They’re actually trusted advisors. They’re doing more consulting and more advisory services. When I think of our GSIs, they’re looking at it from more transformation type relationship with these customers.
When I think of our MSTC, it’s our fastest growing even route to market. Even when I think of our distributors, many of our distributors now are evolving their model to go even beyond just a distribution. A lot of them offer a ton of services, including some of them do even deliver on behalf of the smaller partners who can’t do it.
So overall, when I think of our ecosystem, it’s evolved from the transaction part that it used to be 15, 20 years and moved towards the more consultative approach, the more investment in services and investment in resources. They all realized that something has to happen in terms of you need to sell something. But after that, it’s all about your consulting, your advisory, your migration, your managed services, all that’s part of it.
We feel our partners are all in. I know from a global perspective, and I always look at the value-added services that our ecosystem offers to the customer to help them realize that outcome.
So overall, it’s a great insight into where we’re going, because our partners are investing more in Palo Alto and putting their resources more on Palo Alto. So, I feel it’s a positive for us.