 TheCube presents Ignite22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. Hey guys, girls, welcome back. It's TheCube, live in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand for Palo Alto Networks, Ignite22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of two days of Cube coverage. We're talking with Palo Alto executives, their partner network, their customers. Going to be learning a lot about what they've been doing to really be that golden nugget. We've talked, Lisa, about how Palo Alto Networks is affecting a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration. And company CDW that I remember, you know, been around a long time. I remember back in the Comdex days, talking about transformation of a company, really excited to have them on. We're going to talk about that. Stephanie Hagopian is here, the VP of security at CDW. Stephanie, it's great to have you on the program. It's so nice to be here. Thank you. So lots going on. CDW has made several acquisitions in the past couple of quarters alone as it relates to security. Talk to us about what's going on. Yes, so we are way more than the computer warehouse that you used to know. The computer catalog days, we've moved beyond that. We've made a lot of strategic acquisitions in the past several quarters. The reason for that is we're trying to change our image and our brand and how, more importantly, we engage with our customers in security. We used to traditionally be, you know, kind of at the end of the procurement cycle with our customers and we want to be an advisor. We want to really sell solutions and help influence the outcomes that our clients are trying to achieve when it comes to not just security, but also risk, governance, threat and vulnerability management. How are they dealing with major issues around zero trust and building a zero trust framework for a company? And I imagine these acquisitions that really, from a catalyst perspective, was really driven by the customers and what they were wanting to see and feel and hear and be able to do. Absolutely. So the acquisitions have given us over 400 delivery resources, consultants, advisors, people who can actually engage with our clients who have real life experience, have worked with global organizations, some of the biggest companies in the world in order to solve their problems and using that experience to be able to really create a higher value, you know, as we interact and engage. You were telling us, Stephanie, that you actually came into CDW through an acquisition. And I think if you go back 10 years ago when the cloud was just sort of hitting its steep ramp, it was pretty obvious. And at the same time, you had what we affectionately called box sellers. And it was very clear that if they didn't transform their businesses, and a lot of them are small regional companies, the owners had big houses and big boats, but the companies were going to go away if they didn't transform. So it's interesting to me that you've chosen security and governance in some of the really most difficult areas as part of that transformation. Where did that come from from your perspective and why security and why such challenging areas? Well, I've been part of security in the security industry for over 20 years. And I've loved the fact it is challenging. It's what makes us so important and critical to our clients. Security's not an easy problem to solve. And it's because the landscape keeps changing. The advent of cloud and now hybrid infrastructure creates endless challenges for our customers, threat actors change, we have insider threats, we have external threats. There's all sorts of risk when you talk about third parties and how third parties interact with organizations. We have supply chain management. And now that we've moved into this hybrid work environment of virtual, not virtual, we have people kind of engaging within organizations in different ways. There's just a lot of risk associated with that. It's not easy and you have to engage with stakeholders across the entire organization. You have to understand how legal things of this and compliance and HR, it's not just an IT issue, it's a business issue. And we understand that and it's just, it's so interesting for us to engage with our customers on critical initiatives and security is at the top of the list. It's not just a CISO or even a CIO problem anymore. Boards care about this. We make or break companies with cybersecurity and risk strategies. That's why it's so critical. So we consider ourselves to be a high priority for every single organization, big or small. From a security perspective, what's the common denominator among industries that you're seeing? Oh, I mean, we see in terms of common denominator, I think every single organization is contending with ransomware, that's probably number one, breaches. How do you prevent bad actors from doing something that's threatening to information sensitive data, especially consumer data? Third party risk is a big topic and how to secure hybrid cloud infrastructures, which is a key part of Palo's strategy as well. And we realize that. Why do they buy from CDW? Pitch me, I'm a customer, what can you do for me? Because we want a partner. So we provide true advisory and consulting services to our customers. We aren't there just to make a sale and walk away. We want long-term commitments and long-term partnerships with our customer base. We're there to give them outcomes, right? And to align to their priorities and their challenges. It's not a one and done for us. This is about a long-term partnership and that's what makes us so different. And we're now through the acquisition strategies, we're the largest security integrator in North America in terms of our revenue and our size, just our sheer size and capability and the amount of full-time employees we have dedicated to this part of our business. So they know they can trust us and that we can scale. Do you, is it a teach me how to fish strategy or is it also if you want to have, if I as a customer want to have you continue to manage or at least provide some kind of managed services, where's the line? Yeah, so we're incredibly unique in the way we've built out our security practice and that we do both. And we want our clients to understand that there are going to be elements of what they do that they want to keep in-house from a security perspective. That is why, and it also came from an acquisition, we have a workforce development team for security. We actually are a Palo authorized training partner and we're incredibly proud of that fact because we don't just want to configure technology, we want to enable our customers to enhance and maintain their investments with Palo and with all technologies, with all of security. At the same time, we know they can't do everything in-house and that it just might make more sense to do manage through us. So we have end-to-end managed capabilities as well and we continue to enhance that part of our business. So a lot of opportunities for customers there. Talk a little bit about the PaloAuto Network's extension of the value prop that you just talked about. Oh yes, we love, you know, Palo is taking a platform approach and really focusing on helping customers rationalize their IT infrastructure around security. We're doing the same exact thing and focusing on zero trust is huge. We're having those conversations with our customers as well. We want them to take their Palo investment and try to create a platform approach because there's simplicity and cost savings in that. The security conversations becoming a CFO conversation, right? We love rationalizing those technology investments in a way that makes sense and we're right in line with Palo in that we want to provide those capabilities end-to-end and we want to ensure they integrate and use that all of the capabilities within your platform to the extent of that investment, right? We want them to use everything and not just parts of the technology or just do a partial deployment. We want them to use everything that it functionally is available to them through that investment. The question is keynote this morning said the answer is not just more people. I know there's this gap between the number of required number of cyber professionals that we need and how many employees we have, et cetera, et cetera. However, you just can't get there overnight so that's where service providers come in. I saw a stat recently, I think it said 50% of organizations in North America don't have a SOC. That's true. Okay, so they need managed services. So what are you seeing with some of the small and mid-sized companies? Managed. And how is that going? We're entering a new era with, you know, cloud can be a great help and reduce the IT load internally. What's the dynamic like in the customer base? Smaller customers especially, they just can't attract the cyber talent. It's a high demand field because there just aren't many people who have that capability, right? For us providing a managed SOC is huge. One of our key acquisitions, Sirius, who's our largest acquisition recently, brought us a 24-7 managed SOC capability and that's exactly what our mid-sized customers want and demand and what they need and it's more cost-effective and now they don't have to worry about being a security business. That's not what they are. They need to run their businesses and that's what we provide through managed capabilities especially for that customer base in particular. How about the really small customers, right? Who, you know, they're in some ways the most vulnerable, right? And they don't have the budgets. They're kind of working hand to mouth. How do you help them? Yeah, so we provide cost-effective managed capabilities so there's managed for enterprise, there's managed for mid-market but then for small medium businesses they want something that is at the right price point and that's what we're doing actually in co-development with Palos. That's why we're expanding not just our professional services capabilities with the Palo platform but also providing managed support for every aspect of the platform so that customers don't need to invest in full-time employees to do that. They have a predictable cost model that's affordable that they can leverage over time so we're very intent on making sure we're fulfilling that not just for our big customers but also for SMB and small businesses as well. So you really have that whole suite, the whole suite. Can I talk about some of the large enterprises for a second? I saw a survey recently that, you know, you talked about security is a board level conversation. It is, we talk about it all the time. CFO conversation but the survey that I saw recently was that there's lack of alignment on boards with the executive suite where security is concerned. Are you seeing that? And how can CDW and the Palo Alto partnership help gain that important alignment? So we face this all the time. What's on the CISO whiteboard? Might not be on the CFO's whiteboard or the board's whiteboard, right? We love, and this is the whole part of our strategy and our strategy partnering with Palo is that we want to engage further up on the cycle. We don't want to talk to them at the end of the purchasing cycle because we're not providing value. We want to help advise them and build the business case. And by them, I mean our CISOs, our heads of network security, there are various stakeholders that we want to engage with to help them build the business case and the justification so that they are speaking the same language as the board member or the CFO. And we do that in many ways. I think the biggest is that we've built a global security strategy office that encompasses practitioners. So these are former CISOs, CIOs, CTOs who have sat in their shoes and done what they've done. And we bring that experience to bear coincidentally but not so coincidentally, Palo has the same capabilities. So Palo also has a team of field CISOs and former practitioners. So we're partnering together to make sure that we're enabling our customers in providing the right value statements and the right ROI within the board meetings so that they get that investment, right? And they're able to do what they need to do to secure the infrastructure. I mean, historically, the business case has been, we're going to help you not get breached and you're going to reduce your loss. Still relevant. And it's still very relevant. Is there any sort of, on the other side of the algebraic equation where actually having this kind of security practice can actually drive productivity or even drive revenue? And can you talk about that part of the equation? Yeah, security as an industry, we've gotten a lot smarter. We understand it's not just about the compliance aspect or the data privacy aspects. It's very important to your point. Breach prevention is certainly a great justification. It's also about automation. So you think of SOAR, right? Providing automation and visibility and dashboard views into who's doing what actually really reduces administrative overhead. We want to allow our clients to repurpose individuals because there are a finite amount of people in the security industry to focus on higher value tasks. So we're enabling just a lot of cost savings through that. Self-service is a big piece of this. When you think about security, we bring along a lot of automation, self-service, automation of business logic and business process. There's a huge value in cost savings attached to that. So that's huge. That's a huge part of the security conversation. I was reading, you talked about the cybersecurity skills gap and I was reading some interesting numbers that there's 26 million developers in the world, but less than three million cybersecurity professionals. Talk to us about one of your favorite customer stories where you think CDW and Pella really nailed it in terms of helping organizations drive that value, the top line value, the bottom line value. Well, enabling them with your expertise. Oh my gosh. I don't even want to focus on one because since we became a Palo authorized training partner, we have worked with over a hundred clients. We just started this, this year and we've helped over a hundred clients and thousands of people get enabled on Palo firewall configuration and training and development. So we've partnered together and we've impacted over a hundred organizations this year in making sure their people are enabled and they're going from that I'm a developer generic to I'm a security professional. So we're helping to close that cybersecurity workforce gap and we're just so excited at the scale. We've been able to do that in such a short amount of time that I mean, if you think about next year and the year following, I mean, it's going to be thousands of different clients but you think about each client, we're holding classes with 30 plus people. So we've already impacted thousands of people which is amazing. Right, so the idea to scale the program in calendar year 2023. Absolutely, we tried it, this was a trial run and it was amazingly successful trial run. So we're incredibly excited to scale this even more and continue to provide that element, that workforce development element, that training element for the entire Palo stack, not just elements of it. Excellent. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on the program, sharing what CDW and Palo Alto Networks are doing together, the what's in it for me from a customer perspective, big impact there. We appreciate your insights. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. It's great to have, great to be here. Yeah, for our guests and for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage.