Palo Alto takes aim at firewall market
US firm Palo Alto Networks is looking to knock a few traditional firewall vendors off their perches with what it is calling its 'next generation’ firewall product.
Speaking about its UK channel campaign, Palo Alto’s UK, Ireland and Africa regional manager, Alex Raistrick takes aim at the current crop of firewall vendors: “The firewall market hasn’t evolved for long time. You still have the main players – CheckPoint, Juniper, Cisco, Fortinet, but nothing really exciting for long time.
“Existing firewalls don’t do the job they’re designed to do any more, which is to protect the perimeter of your network,” he adds.
Raistrick argues that while organisations are using a wider array of internet-based, consumer-oriented applications, security technologies have retained an outmoded ‘block or allow’ model, lacking the granularity and intelligence to recognise and control these new applications. He says Palo Alto offers the enterprise a range of policy responses to applications – including allow, deny, allow for certain users or functions, threat scanning, and with the launch earlier this month of the latest version of its operating system software, PAN-OS 3.0 – traffic shaping, which allows organisations give priority to business critical functions.
Palo Alto started shipping in 2007 in the US, and entered UK in January of this year. “We are targeting resellers that understand it’s time to step away from the low margin, highly competitive market of the normal firewall and try to be more imaginative in their pitch,” says Raistrick. “We’ve kept the channel quite small because the guys we have got on board have been very focused, and getting a lot of success.”
The vendor has signed up distributor VADition, along with its first partners earlier this year. These include Integralis, Data Integration, GSS, Quadrant, and Armadillo Managed Services. Raistrick says the firm will be adding more resellers in July and August this year.
