According to a recent Gartner report, global enterprises are transforming their security spending strategy by moving away from prevention-only approaches to more detection and response-related ones. Gartner believes that the global spending on information security will grow 7.6% in 2017 to $90 billion and predicts this market to grow to more than $113 billion by 2020.
Palo Alto Network’s Offerings
Santa Clara-based Palo Alto Networks (NYSE:PANW) is a leading player in the network security market. It offers products that allow organizations to secure their networks while making it available for an increasing number of applications. It is tackling the emerging trend by enabling organizations to establish controls within the firewall through their proprietary hardware and software architecture while inspecting content for all threats in real-time. Palo Alto Network’s products are based on a traffic classification engine that identifies network traffic by application, user, and content and provides deeper visibility into traffic and applications at the user level.
Palo Alto Networks was founded in 2005 by Yuming Mao, Fengmin Gong, Rajiv Batra, Dave Stevens, and Nir Zuk. I had spoken with co-founder Nir Zuk a few years ago when he revealed several interesting facts about how the company was set up from being a $9.4 million concept finance company to, now, a multi-Billion Dollar Unicorn.
Palo Alto Network’s Financials
Palo Alto Networks recently reported its fourth quarter results. Revenues grew 27% over the year to $509.1 million, making it the first quarter where revenues were over half a billion dollars. The market was looking for revenues of $488 million. The company continued to report losses and ended the quarter with loss per share of $0.42. Losses have reduced from last year when it reported $0.69 per share. Adjusted EPS for the quarter came in at $0.92, ahead of $0.66 reported a year ago, and beating the market’s expected $0.79.
