Palo Alto Networks today announced that Lane Bess has joined the company as CEO. Bess brings more than 25 years of experience and a proven track record in sales, marketing and executive management of rapidly growing, publicly traded and privately held companies serving the enterprise and consumer markets.
As Executive Vice President for Global Sales at Trend Micro, Bess helped expand the company’s worldwide business beyond the $1 Billion milestone. During his six years at Trend Micro, Bess also served as President, North America, where he led the company to achieve number one status as voted by the security channel. As General Manager of Trend’s consumer business, Bess increased the company’s market share to become #2 in the competitive US market.
Earlier in his career, Bess held global sales and marketing leadership positions at NCR Corporation and AT&T Corporation. At AT&T, he was responsible for the launch of the AT&T’s business and consumer internet services.
"Innovation in firewalls has been stagnant despite the fact that it is one of the security industry’s largest sectors. Leading installed vendors patched decade-old technology in an attempt to make them fit in the Web 2.0 world, but they simply failed to provide the level of application visibility and control companies need today," said Bess. "Nir Zuk and his peers at Palo Alto Networks understand these requirements better than any other company, and the rapid sales of their next-generation firewall are a proof point. I’m thrilled to be joining the team and look forward to further developing and executing the company’s strategic growth plan."
"Palo Alto Networks’ products fill a previously unmet need enterprises have for optimizing their user-driven, application-rich environments – giving employees access to the tools they want to use, but doing so in a safer, more productive way," said Asheem Chandna, Palo Alto Networks board member and Partner, Greylock Partners. "Customers and the industry have responded strongly, and Lane’s background will no doubt enable Palo Alto to further capitalize on its global opportunity. We’re excited to have him on board."
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks™ enables visibility and policy control of applications running on enterprise networks. Based on innovative App-ID™ application classification technology, the Palo Alto Networks PA-4000 Series next-generation firewall accurately identifies applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or even SSL encryption – at 10Gbps with no performance degradation. Enterprises can now set and enforce application usage policies to meet compliance requirements, improve threat mitigation and lower operational costs. The Palo Alto Networks team includes security and networking industry veterans from Check Point, NetScreen, McAfee, Cisco, Juniper and Blue Coat. It is backed by investors Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
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Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Logo, App-ID, FlashMatch and PAN-OS are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
