 TheCube presents Ignite22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite22 from the MGM Grand in beautiful Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we just had a great conversation. First of all, we got to hear the keynote most of it. We also just had a great conversation with the CEO and Chairman of Palo Alto Networks, Nakesh Aurora. You know, this is a company that was founded back in 2005. He's been there for years. A lot has happened, a lot of growth, a lot of momentum in his tenure. You were saying in your bringing analysis that they are on track to nearly double revenues from FY20 to 23. Lots of momentum in this cloud security company. Yeah, I'd never met him before. I mean, I've been following a little bit. It's interesting. He came in as a sort of a security outsider. You know, he joked today, the host, I forget the guy's name on the stage, what was his name, Hassan. Hassan, he said he's the only guy in the room and knows less about security than I do. Because normally, this is an industry that's steeped in deep expertise. You know, he came in and I think has given a good compliment to the hardcore techies at Palo Alto Network. The company, it's really interesting. The company started out building their own data centers. They called it, now they look back and call it cloud, but it was their own data centers. Kind of like Salesforce did, kind of like ServiceNow. Because at the time, you really couldn't do it in the public cloud. To come up a public cloud was, you know, a little too, you know, unknown. And so they needed that type of control, but Palo Alto has been an amazing story since 2020. We wrote about this during the pandemic. So what they did is they began to pivot to the true cloud, native public cloud, which is kind of immature still. You know, they don't tell you that, but it's kind of still a little bit immature, but it's working. And when they were pivoting, it was around the same time at Fortinet, who's a competitor there. It's like, they call him a poor man's Palo Alto and Fortinet probably hates that, but it's kind of true. It's like a value play on a comprehensive platform. And you know, Fortinet a little bit. And so, but what was happening is Fortinet was executing on its cloud strategy, better than Palo Alto. And there was a real divergence in the valuations of these stocks. And we said at the time, we felt like Palo Alto being the gold standard would get through it, and they did. And what's happened is interesting, I wrote about this two weeks ago, if you go back to the pandemic, the peak of the pandemic, or just before the peak, kind of in that tech bubble, if you will, splunks down 44% from that peak, octas down, down, sorry, not down 44%, 44% of the peak, octas 22% of their peak, CrowdStrike 41%, Zscaler 36%, Fortinet 71%, not so bad. Palo Alto has maintained 93% of its peak value. All right, so it's a combination of two things. One is, they didn't run up as much during the pandemic, and they're executing through their cloud strategy, and that's provided a sort of softer landing. And I think it's going to be interesting to see where they go from here. And you know, you heard Nakesh, we're going to double and then double again. So that's 7 billion, 14 billion, you know, heading to 30 billion. Yeah, yeah. He also talked about one of the things that he's done in his tenure here as really a workforce transformation and we talk all the time, it's not just technology and processes, it's people. They've also seemed to have done a pretty good job from a cultural transformation perspective, which is benefiting their customers. And they're also growing the ecosystem. We talked a little bit about the ecosystem with Nakesh. We've got Google Cloud, and we've got AWS on the program today alone, talking about the partnerships. The ecosystem is expanding as well. Have you ever met near Zook? I have not. The founder and CTO. I haven't, we've never been on theCUBE. He was supposed to come on one day down in New York City. Stu and I were going to interview him and he cut out of the conference early, so we didn't interview him. But he's a very opinionated dude. And you're going to see, he's basically going to come on. I mean, I hope he has opinionated on theCUBE, but he'll talk about how the industry has screwed it up. And Nakesh sort of talked about that. It's a shiny new toy strategy. Oh, there's another one. There's another one. It's the best in that category. Okay, let's get in. That's how we've gotten to this point. I always use that OptiGraphic, which shows the taxonomy and shows hundreds and hundreds of suppliers in the industry. And again, it's true. Customers have 20, 30, sometimes 40 different tool sets. And so now it's going to be interesting to see. So my guess, my point is it starts at the top. The founder, he's an outspoken, smart, tough Israeli who's like, we're going to take this on. We're not afraid to be ambitious. And so to your point about people and the culture, it starts there. Absolutely. One of the things that you've written about in your breaking analysis over the weekend, Nakesh talked about it, they want to be the consolidator. You see this as they're building up the security super cloud. Talk to me about that. What do you think, what is a security super cloud in your opinion? So let me start with the consolidator. So Palo Alto obviously is executing on that strategy. CrowdStrike as well wants to be a consolidator. I would say Zscaler wants to be a consolidator. I would say that Microsoft wants to be a consolidator. So does Cisco. So they're all coming at it from different angles. Cisco coming at it from network security, which is Palo Alto's wheelhouse with their next gen firewalls, network security. What Palo Alto did was interesting was they started out with kind of a hardware-based firewall, but they didn't try to shove everything into it. They put the other function in there with their cloud. Zscaler, Zscaler's the one running around saying, you don't need firewalls anymore. Just run everything through our cloud, our security cloud. I would think that as Zscaler expands its TAM, it's going to start to acquire and do similar types of things. We'll see how that integrates. CrowdStrike is clearly executing on a similar portfolio strategy. But they're coming at it from end point. They have to partner for network security. Cisco is this big legacy, but they've done a really good job of acquiring and using services to hide some of that complexity. Microsoft, they probably hate me saying this, but it's the just good enough strategy. And that might have hurt CrowdStrike last quarter because the SMB was a soft, we'll see. But to specifically answer your question, the opportunity we think is to build the security super cloud, what does that mean? That means to have a common security platform across all clouds. So irrespective of whether you're running an Amazon, whether you're running on-prem, Google, or Azure, the security policies and the edicts and the way you secure your enterprise look the same. There's a pass layer, super pass layer for developers so that the developers can secure their code in a common framework across clouds. So that essentially, Nikesh sort of balked at it, said, no, no, no, we're not really building a super cloud. But essentially they kind of are headed in that direction, I think, although what I don't know, like CrowdStrike and Microsoft are big competitors. He mentioned AWS and Google. We run on AWS, Google, and in their own data centers. That sounds like they don't currently run on Microsoft because Microsoft is much more competitive with the security ecosystem. They got identity so they compete with Okta. They got endpoint so they compete with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto. So they're, Microsoft's at war with everybody. So can you build a super cloud on top of the clouds, the hyperscalers, and not do Microsoft? I would say no. You need, but there's nothing stopping Palo Alto from running in the Microsoft cloud. I don't know if that's a strategy, we should ask them. Yeah, they've done a great job in our last few minutes of really expanding their TAM in the last few years, particularly under Nikesh's leadership. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that you think really they've done a great job of expanding that TAM? He talked a little bit about, I didn't write the number, but he talked a little bit about the market opportunity there. What do you see them doing as being best of breed for organizations that have 30 to 50 tools and need to consolidate that? The market opportunity is enormous. I mean, we're talking about, well north of $100 billion. I mean, 150, 180, depending on whose numerator you use, Gartner, IDC, you know, Dave's, whatever, it's big. Okay, and they've got, okay, they're headed towards $7 billion out of $180 billion. You know, whatever, again, number you use. So they started with network security. They put most of the network function in the cloud. They moved to Endpoint. They, you know, a sassy for the edge. They've done acquisitions, the Cortex acquisition to really bring automated, you know, threat intelligence. They just bought CIDR security, which is sort of the shift left, you know, code security developer, you know, assistance, if you will, that whole shift left, you know, protect right. And so I think a lot of opportunities to continue to acquire best of breed, I liked what Nikesh said, keep the founders on board. You know, sell them on the mission. Let them, you know, help with that integration and putting forth the cultural aspects and then sort of integrate in. So big opportunities there, you know, did they get into Endpoint and compete with Okta? I mean, I think Okta's probably the one sort of outlier. They want to be the consolidator of identity, right? And they'll probably partner with Okta, just like Okta partners with CrowdStrike. You know, so I think that's part of the challenge of being the consolidator. You're probably not going to be the consolidator for everything, but maybe someday you'll see some kind of mega, you know, merger of these companies, you know, CrowdStrike and Okta or Palo Alto and Okta to take on Microsoft, which would be kind of cool to watch. That would be. We have a great lineup, Dave. Today and tomorrow, full days, two full days of CUBE coverage. You mentioned, Nersuk, we already had the CEO on founder and CTO, we've got the chief product officer coming on next. We've got a chief transformation officer of customers, partners. We're going to have great conversations and really understand how this organization is helping customers ultimately achieve their SecOps transformation, the digital transformation, and really move the needle forward to becoming secure data companies. So I'm looking forward to the next two days. Yeah, and Wendy Whitmore is coming on. She heads Unit 42, which is like, you know, from what I could tell, it's pretty much the competitor to Mandiant, which Google just bought. We had Kevin Mandia on at September at the CrowdStrike event. So that's why I was poking Nikesh a little bit on industry collaboration. You're tight with Google. And then he had an interesting answer. He said, yeah, you start sharing data. You don't know where it's going to go. I think Snowflake could help with that problem, actually. Interesting. Yeah, a little Snowflake and some of the announcements that reinvent with the data clean rooms, data sharing, you know, trusted data. That's one of the other things we didn't talk about is the real tension between security and regulation. So the regulators in public policy saying you can't move the data out of the country. And you have to prove to me that you have a chain of custody that when you say you deleted something, you have to show me that you delete, not only deleted the file, then the data, but also the metadata. That's a really hard problem. So to my point, something that Palo Alto might be able to solve. It might be. It'll be interesting conversation with Unit 42. And like we said, we have a great lineup of guests today and tomorrow with you to stick around. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante are covering Palo Alto Network's Ignite 22 for you. We look forward to seeing you in our next segment. Stick around.