Palo Alto Networks partners in Asia excited about new offerings, enablement programs

“I believe partnership is both ways and should not be one-sided. We value our partners as they are key and strategic to our success,” says Michelle Saw, Vice President of GTM Shared Services at JAPAC for Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks made several changes to its Next Wave Program a few months ago, with the aim of enabling partners to have better opportunities as they scale their operations. While the changes have seemingly given partners the capabilities to offer more services and reach out to more customers, enablement remains a key area in which partners are hoping to get more support in.

For example, in Asia, Lumen Technologies is one of Palo Alto Networks’ partners that continues to record strong growth in its MSP offerings with the vendor. According to Michelle Saw, Vice President of GTM Shared Services at JAPAC for Palo Alto Networks, the team at Lumen continues to engage with the cybersecurity vendor on enablement as they want to be able to support the demands of their customers in the region.

With changes to its Next Wave Program, Saw added that the focus on the program is about both partner enablement and profitability.

“It's very important that our partners are profitable. Because when they are profitable, they can reinvest into their business and also reinvest into expanding and scaling our business. So, if you look at our Next Wave program, we actually have unlocked a lot of incentives. So, we take away the cap and we also have sales acceleration. The more that you sell, the more rebates you will get. And then, as part of the portfolio, they sell our next generation security portfolio; they will even get more acceleration on top of that. We also have partner incentives for distributor-managed partners,” Saw explained.

Specifically, for distributors who have many partners, Palo Alto Networks provides them with incentives. There are also startup programs for new partners that are coming in. For managed services, Saw shared that a lot more partners want to be managed services today.

“We also want to support and help them to have a kickstart and to encourage them to make sure that they invest in this and we also invest in them. With the Partner Development Fund, we have a strategy in terms of the rebates that we give to them. 50% of it go into the Partner Development Fund for them to reinvest, enable their people, train their people, and such.”

“We want to make sure that the incentives that we give to them in a way also benefit the customers. It means they make sure that they have a robust team, enable, or they need to invest in the marketing to drive more engagement and all those stuffs,” she added.

Enabling partners

Interestingly, Saw also highlighted that while there is plenty of opportunity for partners in the region, many are still challenged because of the constant evolution of new threats daily. And this is why she believes that many partners, especially MSSPs, are approaching Palo Alto Networks because of its platformization strategy.

“They see the value that it is a fully integrated platform. It's highly secured. And they also see that Pala Alto Networks is always a few steps ahead of many of our competitors. For example, how we built our platform using Precision AI over the last few years. And now, when it comes to agentic AI, our platform is agentic AI ready. So they see the value because they are seeing a lot of challenges in deploying a point solution. And they cannot catch up. And when you provide a managed service offering, you do have certain SLE you need to deliver and other stuff. And they find it a struggle. So that's where a lot of them are now coming to us. They say that we want to get into your platform,” Saw said.

Saw added that with the closing of the CyberArk solution and the recent introduction of Idira, the integration across the platform is what partners are really looking for.

“Now we are in the era of modern security. You need to have real-time security to secure modern security. We are living in the AI era, and we can see that accelerating with our AI security platform end-to-end. We truly believe in the next 6 to 12 months, the adoption on AI is going to go off the roof. So, we are seeing that the landscape is changing. That's why partners are also changing. Customers are also changing because they want more outcomes,” she said.

Asian partners

For Saw, what excites her the most is the culture of the partners in the region who are very passionate and driven about the business.

“We are investing time in our distributors because we are very passionate. Of course, as we scale, our business has been growing. And the good thing about Palo Alto Networks is when we want to grow our business, we also invest. So, we also invest in growing our team. To me, it's no point you have your partner coming to you and then you're not able to support them. So, we make sure that we are serious about it,” she added.

For Saw, while Palo Alto Networks expects partners to be serious about them, the cybersecurity vendor also needs to be serious about its partners.

“I believe partnership is both ways and should not be one-sided. We value our partners as they are key and strategic to our success,” she concluded.