The remarkable growth in social networking sites, modern Web applications, and their use within the enterprise has driven rapid growth in application control sales and, thus, sales of NGN Firewalls. Employees are negotiating with their management for access to Social Networks and other Web 2.0 Apps and Services, the latter is worried about decline in productivity. To address this delicate situation, Palo Alto Networks has developed a Next Generation Firewall which uses the Single Pass Architecture and provides IPS, application control, Web security, URL filtering capabilities, enabling it to address almost the entire network security market.
Web 2.0 is clearly a high-growth opportunity with valuations to match. Palo Alto is the leading vendor of NGN Firewall offerings, which includes application control as a defining characteristic. The company’s application control solutions enable network administrators to have granular control over users’ Web 2.0 applications.
With Palo Alto’s NGN Firewall Technology, a company can permit access to Facebook on a granular level, denying access to productivity-draining games such as Farmville, or, for compliance reasons, to all messaging products that are not monitored by compliance systems in the highly regulated financial services industry.
Despite being innovative, Palo Alto faces competition from incumbents. Cisco recently launched an improved application control offering. When it comes to Corporate Network security solutions, customers are typically very sticky consolidating around one key network security provider, to reduce complexity and improve ease of management. This gives incumbents with large installed bases an advantage over newer competitors such as Palo Alto. Can India produce any such Innovative solutions ? Can it ever get to the Leading Edge or will this always be Indians in Silicon Valley ?