APAC partners excited about opportunities from Palo Alto Networks’ CyberArk acquisition

Regional partners believe the deal allows them to drive more consolidation efforts from customers in the region.

When Palo Alto Networks announced plans to acquire CyberArk a few months ago, the strategic combination also marked the global cybersecurity vendor’s formal entry into Identity Security. For CyberArk, its capabilities in Identity Security and Privileged Access Management (PAM) with Palo Alto Networks' comprehensive AI-powered security platforms will extend privileged identity protection to all identity types including human, machine, and the new wave of autonomous AI agents.

While the acquisition is only expected to close during the second half of Palo Alto Networks' fiscal 2026, the partner ecosystem is already excited of the forthcoming opportunities from this deal.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Michael Khoury, vice president of Global Channel Programs at Palo Alto Networks said that he has heard nothing but excitement from partners around the world on this deal. While Khoury acknowledged that there is still some time to go before how the solutions will be integrated and how partners from both companies will work together, he said in his conversations with partners in other regions, they are excited about adding identity to the rest of the Palo Alto Networks platform.

“There is a lot of excitement from the partners that I have had a chance to talk to about adding identity to complement the rest of our cybersecurity story and having that platform end to end. So, I am really excited and looking forward to as we complete that acquisition. When we start doing more integrations, our partners are going to have more options and more choices. And I feel between CyberArk and us; it's going to exponentially give access to partners on both sides,” Khoury said.

Michelle Saw Vice President, Ecosystems, Asia-Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) at Palo Alto Networks echoes Khoury’s views, with partners in JAPAC also sharing similar sentiment.

“In fact, all of them are very excited. They say, can we go and sell now? They see the opportunity, and they are very confident with this acquisition. It gives them even additional relevance in front of their customers, and they already start the whole consolidation. As platformization is about consolidating, they are consolidating the network security, consolidating the cloud security, consolidating the SOCs and now they see an opportunity to look at the identity security to see how they can help customers to consolidate more. So, they see a lot of upside and opportunity,” Saw said.

Consolidation is all about integration

For Saw, while there are a lot of cybersecurity vendors that talk about consolidation, Palo Alto Networks has a more unique approach to this since they started acquiring companies way back in 2013.

“We don't acquire and just resell the products. We acquire and integrate into the platform. Our consolidation is about integrating into a platform so that we can leverage AI, because it's in the same platform. That's why you can leverage AI at scale and make sense of it. And that actually helps customers to close the security gap. The driver of consolidation in cybersecurity is because each time customers deploy a point product, it creates new gaps that they need to catch. That's why customers are going into consolidation, because in the AI era, if your product doesn't talk to each one another, if you don't integrate, it won't talk. You cannot leverage AI to be efficient to keep your environment secure,” Saw said.

“When we acquire a company, we integrate into the platform to be a single platform that each of the technology that we acquire can talk to one another. So that is the beauty and the value we bring. And over time, both customers and partners understand. That's why our partners are all leaning in, because they're hearing from the customers on what works for them. And that's where they're embracing our platformization and do the consolidation effectively for our customers,” Saw explained.

Saw also highlighted that this has been how Palo Alto Networks has been acquisitions, with the strategy not requiring much change and the focus remaining on innovation and helping customers.

For Khoury, Palo Alto Network’s platformization strategy is all about leveraging AI and data.

“If you have data in different vendors, in different places, you can't bring it together unless you have a common platform strategy. So that's what gives us an advantage. And if you think about everything moving to agentic AIs, and all these companies have these different solutions leveraging agentic AI, well, identity is going to play a key role,” he said.

Khoury explained that privilege access management is all about bringing the information together behind the scenes. This is where he believes agentic AI is going to be so important, and that's where the security, not just of AI security, but also of the identity security and privilege access management is going to come in a huge place.

“Every vendor is going to talk about how great their solution is, but they're still more in one area, like almost like a point product. And it's not across the entire cybersecurity spectrum. Now with identity added in the whole solution from Palo Alto Networks, I feel we are well positioned to help our customers really achieve those customer outcomes that they need. So that's why we're so excited about all these things, because they all tie into that platformization strategy,” Khoury concluded.