Transcript
My pleasure. Thank you and Palo Alto Networks for being a sponsor here at the show. Look forward to this interview. So Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks have been really good partners for many years now. Can you talk about the value of our partnership and even more important, the value that it brings to our joint customers? Absolutely. First of all, it's great to see you again, Adrian, and great to be at another .NEXT. Thank you very much for awarding us with Partner of the Year. In terms of the partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix, I think one of the things that I love most is the fact that we are basically bringing two best-in-class solutions and putting them together in a seamless experience for our joint customers. This provides basically something that you would call something like an intelligent trust at scale. And what I mean by that is that we are providing together infrastructure that is secure by default and scalable by design and easy enough that you can use it anywhere. So whether that's on-prem in a data center or multi-cloud or hybrid cloud or at the edge or in a branch or even containerized in AI now, this is something that we can do together to benefit our customers. I think the partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix is much different for us than it is with the thousands of other partners that we work with. Our partners are very important to our ecosystem, but the partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix is at a much deeper level. We have deep integration and collaboration from our executives across our sales and marketing all the way down to deep technical engineering level. And that integration, I think, really helps customers in a couple of different ways. One is we take the burden of that integration away from effort that they would otherwise have to do. And I talk to customers all the time, and most people who are in infrastructure or network or security roles have plenty to do. If you think about the work that we do together, the integration, some of the things that are on the roadmap, these are taking us sometimes months to do. And so by us handling that integration between the two organizations, we take that burden off of our customers so they are able to go do something more productive. And then the second thing is really just enabling customers to provide better security and be able to adhere to things like compliance regulations and to policies like zero trust and trying to do things like provide defense in depth by, again, leveraging the technology and offering the Nutanix flow and other foundational security can offer and layering our world-class security capabilities on top of that. So at the end of the day, basically the strategic alignment between Nutanix and Palo Alto is really providing customers with that security posture and that reduced complexity of IT operations. Great. Yeah, I totally agree with that, and thank you for the great collaboration, especially with all the joint development work, the joint marketing. So that's great. So Palo Alto Networks, most people know as one of the leaders in the cybersecurity space. As a leader, you're probably ahead of all the trends or seeing all those things. Can you talk about some of the security trends you guys are seeing and how those trends can impact our customers or maybe how we can solve them together? Yeah, for sure. I think we're probably seeing three or four major trends, and they all impact the benefit that we can provide customers, I mean, both of our organizations. And probably the first three are things that people have heard about in the last few years, and the fourth is something that's fairly new. So the first thing is really that we're continuing to see evolving threats. I do a lot of executive briefings, and I'd love to someday have a presentation that doesn't start with all the bad news and all the malware and all the ransomware that's happening. But the fact is that that continues to grow in size. I think it also, and maybe even more importantly, has been growing in complexity and velocity. So in terms of size, we saw probably a 300% increase in breaches from last year to this year. And from a velocity standpoint, successful breaches have gone from 44 days down to five hours. And so what's really important is the customers are leveraging advanced security and just really leaning in on new technologies. So they're not having to rely on just port and protocol and legacy security tools. The second thing that I think we see a lot in terms of a trend is just growing complexity, operational complexity, infrastructure complexity. And this is not surprising because organically, customers have been moving from physical data centers to private cloud and virtualization to public cloud and now AI. And so as customers have been moving through that journey, a typical customer tends to bolt on solutions one at a time. And I think the latest statistic is that an average customer uses 80 tools from 30 different security vendors. Wow. And so this is just a issue that has just happened over time. And so I think both of us, we work really hard to provide customers with a platform. And so customers who are willing to go on a journey with both of us together really can benefit and consolidate down to maybe not one or two vendors, but even if they get down from 80 tools to 40 tools, that's significant. You've mentioned AI a couple of times, and nowadays you cannot get away with an interview about asking that AI question. So Nutanix has an enterprise AI solution. How is Palo Alto Networks using either AI in your security stack or how are you securing AI solutions? The growing adoption of AI is probably a bigger trend than the other two I just mentioned. You know, what I like to do is often explain why we do what we do first. And in the context of AI, we believe that AI will probably have a profound impact on businesses and their productivity, innovation, competitiveness. And it's really, as a leader in security in the world, it's almost a moral obligation for us to make sure that customers are moving safely and securely forward with those projects. And so really what we're doing is we're leveraging AI in a few different ways. One is we're protecting AI. The second thing is we're really leveraging AI to provide new solutions for our customers. First area in terms of protecting AI is we're seeing an explosion of AI adoption. I think the statistic is that probably in the last year, we've seen an increase in around 400%. And according to a research analyst I just read, they said that they expect 100,000 AI applications being developed in the next 12 months. And so the problem is that your average customer doesn't have visibility into these new AI ecosystems. You can ask any security professional, visibility is the key to success. And so number one, we want to make sure that we're giving customers visibility into these new AI ecosystems and tech stacks. And number two, legacy security tools often aren't catching these new AI-specific threats. So things like model DOS attacks and prompt injections and other things that we didn't even know about a year ago. This is really why we announced about a year ago, we have a new platform that is specific to protecting AI threats. We really have an entire new platform available to our customers that is securing things like users of AI, AI applications, AI models, and now even AI agents. And the second thing that we're seeing is I mentioned the explosion of, you know, continuing explosion of AI threats or, you know, normal threats, if you will. And really the reason for that is that the bad guys are also leveraging AI for their attacks. And so there's this notion where if you're a customer, you need to really be fighting AI with AI. And so what we're trying to do as a, again, market leader for network security, you know, we just turned 20 years old this year. And what we want to be doing is making sure that customers are leveraging the same technology that they're familiar with today. So our firewalls and our other network security solutions, and extending that into these new AI ecosystems and ensuring that they're able to fend off against these new AI specific threats. And I think really, if a customer is willing, again, to go on a journey with the two of us together, then they can see that additional benefit and that new advanced protection. And again, as you are extending into AI and we're extending that into applications security, it's really a perfect partnership. Excellent. Yeah. So that's a great explanation. And we, you know, we love partnering with Palo Alto Networks as one of the leading cyber security companies. And you guys are always on the forefront of everything security. And I think that the complementary nature of security on our platform is perfect. And partnership has been amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you, Adrian. Have a good rest of the show.
