Palo Alto Networks Tosses the Gauntlet at Check Point Software Technologies

Palo Alto Networks is offering a $2,000 PA-2000 Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliance to qualified companies who take a meeting with them to discuss their solutions.  They also have a series of Five TechBuster videos comparing their NGFW’s to Check Point's products. These videos include Episode 2,  “Check Point Firewalls Have Better Price/Performance than Palo Alto Networks", and Episode Five,  “Check Point Application Control is as Easy to use as Palo Alto Networks”.  You have to love it when the 800-pound gorillas go mano a mano.  You also wonder what SonicWall is saying on the sidelines about all this. 

http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cam/techbusters/pa-200/

According to Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks™ PA-200 is targeted at high-speed firewall deployments within distributed enterprise branch offices.  The PA-200 manages network traffic flows using dedicated computing resources for networking, security, threat prevention, and management.

Palo Alto Networks outperformed  Check Point Software Technologies on the NSS Labs 2012 Next Generation Firewall Value Map.  This report was released during RSA 2012, San Francisco.  It is available online.  The report measures Block Rate versus Price per Protected-Mbps.  SonicWall also outperformed Check Point. 

 http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/03/sonicwall-palo-alto-networks-top.html

 

What’s a little Next Generation name calling between friends? Particularly when the Palo Alto Networks founders came from Check Point.

Palo Alto Networks reported their fiscal Q1 2013 revenues during the first week of December.  Total revenue for the fiscal first quarter grew 50 percent year-over-year to $85.9 million, compared with $57.1 million in the fiscal first quarter of 2012.  They suffered a GAAP net loss for the fiscal first quarter of $3.5 million.  The market wasn’t pleased.  The stock fell below $47 shortly after the announcement after peaking around $72 in early December. 

 

It'll be a battle in  2013 in the NGFW marketplace.   SonicWall, owned by Dell,  has NGFW products that extend to the enterprise.  Fortinet has been claiming since January that they have the world’s fastest firewalls.  While Fortinet had a high Block Rate in the NSS test, their Price per Protect Mbps was the highest of any company’s product tested, with the exception of Juniper Networks.

HP Ships Virus-Infected Flash Card with ProCurve Switch - PC Market Share Data

Hewlett Packard shipped ProCurve switches with a virus-infected compact flash card that could compromise a personal computer, according to articles published last week. Hewlett-Packard released a statement that said it had "corrected potential security vulnerability."

This is kind of a “whoops” for a company the size of Hewlett-Packard that has a major investment in security. Among their products are network security appliances (the TippingPoint acquisition falls under this group), and firewalls (in the Niche portion of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls)> they also offer Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and Threat Management Systems (TMS) (Tipping Point solutions, as well). This isn’t a Meg Whitman problem. It probably provided a Maalox moment for a few more senior people in the security division.

http://www.crn.com/news/security/232900249/hp-ships-virus-infected-flash-card-with-procurve-switch.htm?cid=nl_crnup

On a more positive note, Gartner has reported that Hewlett Packard was the top PC vendor, with 15.31 million units shipped during Q1 2012. Shipments improved 3.5% year over year to 17.2%. Lenovo was second with a 13.1% market share, up 28.0% year over year. This could be a sign that HP has made the right decision by choosing not to shed the personal computer division.