IBM and Palo Alto Partner on AI-Powered Security

The Six Five team discusses IBM and Palo Alto Partner on AI-powered security.

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: IBM announced a partnership to offer AI Power Securities with Palo Alto. Palo Alto, if you’re not following, and you can check out Will Townsend and Krista Macomber, Shira Rubinoff on our team. They do the deep cybersecurity stuff. And I always say cyber is, it’s a little beyond my remit, but I look at it on a holistic level and I do believe it is one of the most important trends right now is AI proliferates cybersecurity will be a massive opportunity. That’s why we’ve invested big. That was why we did the Tech Strong deal. That’s why you and I both hired analysts and put a lot of focus on this particular space.

But this, basically partnership, has a combination of using each other’s technologies. And IBM does something that most people don’t really realize unless they have huge businesses on the consulting side to stand up technology from partners, whether that’s SAP or Salesforce or ServiceNow or in this case cybersecurity partnership. So IBM is going to train 1,000 of its security consultants on the migration adoption deployment of Palo Alto Networks. And the vice versa though, Palo Alto is also going to acquire a part of IBM. It’s what’s called their true radar software as a service asset.

And then they’re going to do seamless partnerships. So they’re basically taking a piece of their software out of their portfolio, putting it with Palo Alto, and then they’re going to use their sales muscle to actually sell it together. And this is something IBM is doing a lot of over the last few years. It’s divesting things and then specializing and focusing. And this is something I’ve really appreciated about what Arvind has done to get that company back on track. So what is really going on here? Well, with AI and hybrid cloud being the two megatrends that are in focus for them, IBM and this partnership is allowing them to focus on it, but focus on it through the lens of what their strength is. Being the top partner, this is going to bring a lot of revenue because Palo Alto is going to push a lot of business towards IBM. So this is a really good solid engagement for the hybrid cloud customers that Palo Alto is going to have. They’re going to need implementation. They can focus on the subscription and software from Palo Alto. They focus on the implementation by IBM.

And so the other thing that I think is really important is the embedding of Watsonx and basically building LLM to improve and optimize what Palo Alto network is doing. And then finally, the identity stuff related to Hashi Corp, Hashi Corp, Hashi, Hashi. Anyways, this is also going to just close the loop on some of what’s needed there. There’s a quick one, Pat, but my take is positive. It fits the MO of IBM and how they’re focusing and how they’re strong in security, but they’re focusing on being strong where they’re strong. And of course Palo Alto is a rocket ship in cybersecurity, one of the most prolific right now. And so it just further cements IBM’s progress.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, this one is an interesting one. It was not expected, but maybe it should be. I mean, IBM is focused on the hybrid multi-cloud and AI, and to do that, you’ve got to double down on the data security and also the identity part because the identity part can go cross-cloud and data security is data security. So listen, I like the fact that I don’t know if this is necessarily a focus move, but I like this move on the surface. Again, I’ve got Will Townsend to do the double click, but I like it so far.