Palo Alto hits out at NGF confusion
Vendor claims rivals' attempts to leap on next-generation-firewall bandwagon have confused customers
Palo Alto has hit out at its competitors for muddying the waters of the next-generation firewall (NGF) market.
Earlier this month, the US-based vendor unveiled three additions to its portfolio, including its PA-5000 series of appliances aimed at the datacentre and its GlobalÂProtect software.
Palo Alto touched down in the UK in 2008 claiming its application-aware technology represented the firewall market's first innovation since the 1990s. It claims to have since amassed 35-40 active UK resellers.
Franklyn Jones, director of EMEA marketing at Palo Alto, said: "With these new products we are going deeper inside and further outside, and this gives our partners new revenue opportunities."
Many of the traditional firewall vendors have recently embraced the NGF mantra and Jones said this had come as both a blessing and curse for Palo Alto.
In October 2009, research from Gartner suggested just one per cent of the market had moved to NGFs and Jones suggested many of the traditional firewall vendors were falling short of Gartner's requirements.
"With all the talk you'd think that number would be higher," he said.
"We love the fact that more vendors are preaching the message that the market has to move to NGF, but it creates confusion. They have all taken their traditional firewall technology and tweaked it and the result is a flawed attempt to integrate new technology onto an old platform."
Jones said Palo Alto is starting to gain traction among partners previously aligned to larger competitors.
"We are seeing a shift in the market from a push to a pull mentality," he said. "End users ask their reseller ‘do you sell Palo Alto, and if not, why not?' More resellers carrying competitive products are now comfortable leading with us."
Nick Lowe, regional director for northern Europe at Check Point, hit back: "We were talking about application intelligence several years ago and I do not associate the term NGF with anyone in particular."
The Gartner research predicted that 35 per cent of the install base will have moved to NGFs by the end of 2014, 2with 60 per cent of new purchases being NGFs.