Agree strongly that historical integrations were great. But cortex platformization of all the things has not been well received. But PANW is doubling down on it.It&#x27;s also curious because their firewall platform seems&#x2F;feels totally separate from the rest of cortex still.I will say, they do have a ton of coverage, more so than any other single vendor I can think of.

PANW&#x27;s current strategy is &quot;platformization&quot; - to be a one-stop shop for anything cybersecurity. The CYBR acquisition fills large product holes in the current PANW portfolio, with little overlap.The $25B price doesn&#x27;t reflect a multiple on $1B, exactly. It represents potential sales of the CYBR product portfolio to current PANW customers, plus potential sales of the PANW portfolio to CYBR customers, at a multiple of ARR, negotiating a portion of which to current CYBR shareholders, which is above the market price for CYBR shares, representing the risk that such upsells may not succeed in practice.Where the acquisition gets interesting is in what CYBR&#x27;s identity products mean for PANW&#x27;s portfolio, once integrated. SOAR gets to be much more deterministic if your SIEM knows all of the system&#x27;s trusted principal identities instead of trying to piece it together based on network research, voluntary reports, and heuristics. In theory, an integrated product will deliver better security. But the question remains whether PANW will succeed at such integration or not. PANW has a long history of successful acquisitions, so, there&#x27;s that...

I would sort of naively imagine that that would work at a smaller price tag but at $25 billion it would be tough to make it pencil out.

The Silicon Valley playbook for the last few decades has just been to acquire monopolies and then exploit them.That’s illegal of course but we stopped enforcing those laws somewhere in the early 2000s so here we are.

Sure, Palo Alto can acquire Cyberark and then use its sales organization to up-sell its customers on CyberArk&#x27;s offering.I&#x27;ve seen this at Microsoft where acquiring startups that provide capabilities and then incorporating them into Azure or Defender led to the usage of those capabilities skyrocketing and those particular acquisitions (not going to specifics because NDA) ended up being profitable.

Gotta be honest, after using their products extensively compared to other offerings I don’t know if stitching together cloud companies “worked”.

I like this article about the acquisition (disclosure, I know the author).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strategyofsecurity.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-case-for-and-against-palo-alto-networks-acquiring-cyberark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strategyofsecurity.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-case-for-and-against-pa...</a>From the article:&gt; If Palo Alto Networks was going to do identity, they had to do it big.&gt; Commercially, there was no way they were going to build a successful identity business if they had just picked up a bunch of small companies and tried to put them together. They needed to bootstrap their entry into the market, so a scaled acquisition made sense.&gt; The identity market is at a completely different level of maturity compared to the situation when Palo Alto Networks built its cloud security business by stitching together smaller companies. That approach worked because the cloud security market was still forming. There essentially was no market leader to acquire.&gt; Identity has been through multiple generations of market leaders (Sun, IBM, CA, Oracle, and others. The market has already gone through multiple phases of disruption and M&amp;A. For the most part, we&#x27;ve seen it all.&gt; Currently, we&#x27;ve landed with a handful of specialist identity players — some public, some owned by private equity firms. You know them: CyberArk, Okta, SailPoint, and Ping Identity. And then there&#x27;s Microsoft. We&#x27;ll get to that.&gt; Palo Alto Networks had zero chance of competing with those four companies (plus Microsoft and the other incumbents who still hold material market share) by building, buying, and partnering their way to a coherent identity offering.&gt; If there was one market where a massive deal had to be done, identity had to be it.My read of that is basically they are buying a fast growing, big player in workforce identity that they can integrate in with their next generation security platform.

We currently use both vendors.If anything, this might make us stick with PA longer as they are the &quot;niche&quot; in our environment and presumably we will want to combine the contracts.

Same story with Cisco buying Splunk for $28 billion. Numbers makes not sense to pedestrians like me. But as always people on top think they know better (until they don&#x27;t)

There are plenty of Palo Alto customers who also use CyberArk. Perhaps the Palo Alto leadership believe vertical integration is very valuable?

Sure, they know they can 2x to 5x the revenue of Cyberark with integration to their clients&#x2F;offerings, maybe more. And build a stronger moat at the same time.

1. Similar multiples to the Wiz acquisition2. Large shared customer base,3. Most enterprises need Identity SPM which Cyberark does pretty well at.4. Vendor Rationalization is the name of the game. Security teams want to reduce spend significantly in both headcount and tooling, so PANW aquiriring Cyberark makes it easier to defend identity, cloud, networking, and other security spend as well as displace competitors. This is why platformization is becoming so popular.

Cyberark put AI into every slide in their investor deck

In 2024 Cyberark had $1 billion in revenue. Can anyone comment on how this $25B number makes sense for Palo Alto?

AFAIK since incomes are stagnant, tax revenue is very dependent on capital gains. Governments and central banks can&#x27;t afford to let the stock and real estate bubbles pop.Governments need taxes to a) keep the circus going and b) paying interests on the growing debt (a good chunk of it is held by the central bank).

Try to cash out that pile of stocks and instantly the bubble pops. The values are virtual

No, we won&#x27;t. As long as productivity continues to increase, so will market caps.Some countries are just left behind.

1. Go shopping <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.privateislandsonline.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.privateislandsonline.com</a>2. Use the remaining billions to purchase a military force3. Declare yourself sovereign4. Export your goods and services at reasonable prices.5. Be recognized by international organizations6. You&#x27;re literally a country for less than $24B

25B is the market cap of Ericsson, which is probably responsible for something like 5% of Sweden&#x27;s GDP.25B might not be a whole country, but it&#x27;s definitely a whole country&#x27;s phone network and internet infrastructure.

Which country? (Not necessarily doubting you, just curious.)

We&#x27;re going to look back at these insane buys in a few decades as unreasonable, because they simply are. You can have an entire county for $24B.

The VMWare merger is easily the worst tech disaster in my career. VMWare was the market leader basically since they started and they never really stopped innovating and making their product better (I’m talking specifically about vSphere not the desktop products).It was expensive but worth every penny in my opinion, and it was literally everywhere. In enterprise IT it was just what you did, there was never really much of a question.Nutanix will eventually eat the lunch that Broadcom doesn’t even care to try to eat.

As long as this goes better than the VMWare merger with Broadcom. What a mess (still)

The second-rate identity provider that used to be Centrify and then IDAptive and now Cyberark Identity will now become its fourth rendition in six years; meanwhile, nobody will ever create a Terraform provider for it

Let a thousand shitty obstacles to getting work done bloom.

There are market leaders in everything from DSL modems to tape drives. Most companies in 2025 don&#x27;t own hardware firewalls. You&#x27;re proving his point.

Palo Alto is a legacy dinosaur? Pretty sure they are the current market leader in both firewalls and SOAR.

Both are legacy dinosaurs, it makes sense they start eating each other.

I&#x27;m surprised Okta hasn&#x27;t expanded in this direction

It&#x27;s very hard to square the activity in the real economy vs the valuations in the stock market. As a stark example, look at the revenues of AAPL for 2019 vs 2024, then compare the market caps for EOY 2019 vs 2024. It&#x27;s astounding. What&#x27;s causing this? ZIRP, which is now gone, but lower rates ahead it seems, and the trillions in money printing. Little of the helicopter money ended up in consumers hands as evidenced by AAPL&#x27;s revenue growth. Almost all of it ended up in the hands of the investor class.

In surprise news, Israelis in the tech industry have deep roots in Israeli military intelligence.

This gives me Wiz vibes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wiz.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;wiz-joining-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wiz.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;wiz-joining-google</a>), although CyberArk is much older (though despite being old, it is still unprofitable). In both cases, it seems the product is rather simple&#x2F;basic but is being sold at insane margin to government(s).

What are you talking about? CyberArk is enterprise privileged access management. It’s not an app you install and forget about for 1-2 years. It’s certainly not something you just uninstall because you found out very basic information about the vendor on HN, because you almost assuredly run it because auditors require you to, and uninstalling it without a like replacement would be an extremely bad idea.

To that point is there an open source PIM you&#x27;d recommend?

Thank you for the heads up, I just uninstalled that app. I had it from 1 or 2 years ago and havent used it since.I feel like I&#x27;m being proven right that when selecting software, it should be open source and hosted on-site.Even if this causes problems, the alternative seems riskier.

Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B