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Palo Alto Networks wants fewer tools on your security bill
The firewall maker is buying and building its way across corporate cybersecurity. Its pitch is less busywork for defenders - with a bigger share of the budget flowing to Palo Alto.
Scott Hogrefe Built a Security Brand Around the Most Useful Word in Business: Yes
He arrived before Netskope had a public story, left long enough to test another path, then came back to help turn security's oldest reflex - no - into a case for intelligent permission.
Dan Maier Makes Cybersecurity's Architecture Diagrams Speak Plain English
After more than two decades marketing cybersecurity, SaaS and AI companies, Versa Networks' CMO has made a specialty of finding the human problem inside the architecture diagram.
The Firewall Grew Up. Now Check Point Wants It to Police AI
Check Point built a $2.7 billion business by remembering what crossed the network. Its next act is harder: governing prompts, agents and cloud traffic without making security teams buy another pile of tools.
Tufin’s Bet: The Firewall Is Fine. The Policy Sprawl Is the Problem.
Big companies do not have one firewall; they have a small parliament of them. Tufin built the policy layer that gets Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point, cloud controls and SASE tools to follow the same rules.
Versa Networks Is Selling Less Network - and That’s the Point
The Santa Clara company built one operating system for the jobs enterprises once handed to a small army of routers, firewalls and cloud-security tools. The bet works when consolidation beats specialization - and when the migration team does the unglamorous teaching.
Netskope Bet the Firewall Would Move to the Cloud. Now It Has to Keep AI From Eating the Office
A decade before every board wanted an AI policy, Netskope built a cloud checkpoint for data on the move. The bet worked - but winning SASE now means fighting familiar giants, funding a private network, and making security feel faster than doing nothing.
Jeffrey Sanderson Learned the Network, Then Took On the Narrative
After decades explaining what complex networks do, the iboss CMO now has a different assignment: make cloud security legible enough to act on.
iboss
iboss is a Boston-based cloud security company that delivers a cloud-native Zero Trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. Founded in 2003 by twin brothers Paul and Peter Martini, iboss consolidates network security functions - secure web gateway, ZTNA, CASB, data loss prevention and firewall - into a single SaaS service that connects users to applications from anywhere while replacing legacy VPNs, proxy appliances and VDI. The platform is used by thousands of enterprises, government agencies and school districts, and processes over 100 billion transactions daily.
Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is a global cybersecurity company that helps organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats across networks, clouds, endpoints and identities. Founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk, it pioneered the next-generation firewall and has since expanded into an integrated security platform spanning network security (Strata), cloud security (Prisma), and AI-driven security operations (Cortex). Serving roughly 70,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including most of the Fortune 100, it is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity vendors in the world.
Fortinet
Fortinet is a global cybersecurity company founded in 2000 by brothers Ken and Michael Xie. Best known for its FortiGate firewalls and purpose-built security ASICs, Fortinet converges networking and security into a single platform - the Fortinet Security Fabric - powered by the FortiOS operating system. It serves enterprises, service providers, and governments in more than 100 countries, and in 2025 reported $6.8 billion in revenue.
Zscaler
Zscaler is a cloud-native cybersecurity company that pioneered the zero trust security model for enterprises. Its Zero Trust Exchange platform connects users, devices, and applications directly and securely over the internet - inspecting traffic in the cloud rather than backhauling it through legacy hardware appliances. Founded in 2007 and publicly traded on NASDAQ as ZS, Zscaler processes hundreds of billions of transactions daily for thousands of large organizations, and has expanded into AI-driven security operations, data protection, and digital experience monitoring.
Check Point Software Technologies
Check Point Software Technologies is an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 1993 that pioneered the modern firewall with its stateful inspection technology. Today it runs the Infinity platform - a unified, AI-powered security architecture spanning network (Quantum), cloud (CloudGuard), and workspace (Harmony) - protecting more than 100,000 organizations across roughly 60 countries. Publicly traded on NASDAQ as CHKP, it reported about $2.73 billion in 2025 revenue.
Paul Martini
Paul Martini is the CEO, chief architect and co-founder of iboss, a Boston-based cloud security company he built with his twin brother Peter starting from a San Diego garage in 2003. He holds more than 230 patents in cloud, cybersecurity and networking, and has helped push zero trust and Security Service Edge into the enterprise mainstream. Before iboss he did circuit-board and network software work at Copper Mountain Networks and SAIC.
Airgap Networks Inc. (Acquired by Zscaler)
Airgap Networks was a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company that built an agentless Zero Trust segmentation platform to stop ransomware and lateral threat movement across enterprise IT, IoT, and OT networks. Using a patented DHCP-proxy architecture, it placed every device in a 'network of one' (a /32 segment) without agents, APIs, or infrastructure upgrades, and shipped an industry-first Ransomware Kill Switch. Founded in 2019 by Ritesh Agrawal and Satish Mohan, the company raised $18.6M before being acquired by Zscaler in April 2024 to extend Zscaler's Zero Trust SASE platform with firewall-free, east-west segmentation.
Zayo Group
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.
Kunal Agarwal
Kunal Agarwal is the founder and CEO of dope.security, the 'Fly Direct' Secure Web Gateway that runs security on the endpoint instead of routing all traffic through a distant cloud data center. A self-described hacker since age 8 who once talked his way out of juvenile detention after breaking into his high school's grading system, he spent roughly a decade at Symantec and Forcepoint - rising from engineer to running Symantec's IoT business and leading product at Forcepoint - before launching dope.security in 2022. The company raised a $16M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), and Agarwal was named SC Awards 2025 Innovator of the Year.
Barracuda Networks
Barracuda Networks is a cybersecurity company based in Campbell, California that protects more than 200,000 organizations worldwide. It packages email protection, application and network security, data protection and managed detection and response into the AI-powered BarracudaONE platform, sold largely through a global network of managed service providers and channel partners.
Jay Chaudhry
Jay Chaudhry is the founder, chairman and CEO of Zscaler, the cloud security company he started in 2007 to replace corporate firewalls with a zero trust internet exchange. A serial founder of five security companies before Zscaler, he took the company public in 2018 and built it into a multi-billion-dollar pillar of the cybersecurity industry.
Jim Dolce
Jim Dolce is CEO and Chairman of Lookout, a cloud security company he has led since 2014. A four-time founder with deep roots in networking and enterprise security, Dolce built his career through a series of acquisitions - from Cascade Communications to Redstone Communications, Unisphere Networks (acquired by Juniper Networks for $500M), and Verivue (acquired by Akamai). Under his leadership, Lookout pivoted from a consumer mobile security app to a pure-play enterprise Security Service Edge platform, making the landmark CipherCloud acquisition in 2021 and divesting its consumer business in 2023 to sharpen focus on enterprise and government customers.