How Palo Alto Drives 52% More $10M Deals with Platformization & Partnerships
Hi, it's Roman from Partner Insight. Welcome to my newsletter on winning Cloud GTM and partnership strategies.
Today I'll unpack Palo Alto Networks' remarkable platformization and partnership strategies that are delivering impressive results: 1,150 platform deals across their top 5000 customers and a 52% jump in $10M+ transactions year-over-year. We will also discuss 5 critical sales alignments that top companies use to drive cloud marketplace growth.
💡 Before we dive in: Join us for an exclusive online event on March 13 featuring Google Cloud Marketplace leaders, top industry analyst Jay McBain, and leading ISVs sharing marketplace growth strategies for 2025:
Online Event: “Accelerate Growth on Google Cloud Marketplace in 2025” on March 13th
Google Cloud Marketplace continue to accelerate, driving billions in transaction value and consistent triple-digit annual growth. But which strategies will unlock your share of this expansion?
Our event "Accelerate Growth with Google Cloud Marketplace in 2025" brings together marketplace's most influential voices:
Dai Vu (Managing Director, Cloud Marketplace & ISV GTM Initiatives at Google Cloud) driving Google Cloud Marketplace's triple-digit growth trajectory
Jay McBain (Chief Analyst - Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems, Canalys) whose marketplace growth predictions have become "north stars" for the tech industry
Two Expert Panels on Co-Sell & Channel Ecosystem, with leading ISVs, Google Cloud executives and channel partners sharing battle-tested acceleration tactics
What You'll Learn:
Strategies to stand out among thousands of marketplace offerings
How to leverage Google Cloud's explosive marketplace momentum for your business
Proven co-selling tactics that generate real pipeline and sales
Channel partner strategies as marketplaces evolve (with >50% of marketplace sales projected through partners by 2027)
Operational playbooks that transform listings into revenue faster
Building on our previous successful events, this Google Cloud-focused event promises even deeper strategic insights to help you grow faster in 2025 with marketplaces.
To bring this event to you for free, we've partnered with Tackle. Tackle is the leading solution built to help enterprise software companies generate revenue through a data-driven Cloud GTM channel.
Tackle has processed over 12 billion in revenue through the cloud marketplaces and works with more than 450 software companies, including Salesforce, Wiz, Auth0, CrowdStrike, HashiCorp, Drata, New Relic, Snyk, and many more at every stage.
Now, our Palo Alto playbook analysis (long read):
How Palo Alto Networks Drives 52% More $10M Deals Through Platformization & Partnerships
One year ago, Palo Alto Networks bet big on "platformization". Today, they've delivered 1,150 platform deals across their top 5000 customers, with transactions exceeding $10M up 52% year-over-year. A catalyst behind this growth? A systematic approach to partnerships. Let's break it down.
AI Is Rewiring Enterprise Security Needs
Palo Alto is positioning itself at the intersection of two major market shifts: the rise of AI and the cloud transformation of enterprise IT.
"Customer imperatives around AI are driving accelerated cloud adoption and infrastructure investment, which is supporting strong cybersecurity demand," explained Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora during their Q2 2025 earnings call.
This AI-driven transformation is reshaping how companies approach security—and Palo Alto is capitalizing on this shift.
As Arora explained, "To fully harness the power of AI, customers must unshackle their data from disparate legacy systems and providers and open up broader access, and lean into the cloud."
This vision explains why the company made platformization their core focus, and why Arora candidly admits, "I wish we had made this move earlier."
Numbers Tell the Story: Platformization Delivers
One year into their platformization strategy, the recent quarter results speak for themselves:
74 accounts with transactions over $5M (up 25% year-over-year)
32 accounts with deals exceeding $10M (up 52%)
Overall revenue growth of 14%, outperforming both top and bottom-line expectations
21% jump in remaining performance obligations (RPO) to $13 billion
These metrics validate that platformization isn't just a marketing strategy—it's driving business growth.
What Is Platformization, Exactly?
At Palo Alto Networks, platformization isn't simply bundling products. It's about customers adopting complete security platforms rather than point solutions.
Their formal definition however centers on significant investment thresholds across product categories:
Network Security: Active ELA contracts or >$1M SASE ARR
Cloud Security: >$1M ARR
Security Operations: Active XSIAM contracts or substantial QRadar SIEM ARR with Cortex XDR/XSOAR
Most customers start with network security, but the cross-platform momentum is accelerating rapidly. "Our number of two-platform customers grew over 50% in Q2, and we're seeing the number of three-platform customers up three times year over year," noted Arora.
What's particularly telling is that close to one-third of Palo Alto's sales reps have already participated in platformization deal wins in the past 12 months, showing strong internal adoption and push of this approach.
Ecosystem Partners: The Accelerator
A key element of Palo Alto's platformization success is their ecosystem partnerships. "Many of our large platformization deals have been pursued and closed with global system integrators," explained CFO Dipak Golechha. These partnerships create a virtuous cycle where "partners collectively are putting more resources behind platformization."
The IBM Alliance Success Story
The IBM partnership exemplifies Palo Alto's alliance strategy in action:
UK Home Office: A joint "very large modernization contract"
Asian bank expansion: A former QRadar customer where Palo Alto increased ARR five-fold (!!!)
"This has been a spectacular partner for us... not just our relationship with IBM, our go-to-market partnership together," Arora commented. He noted that IBM's existing customer relationships have "translated into very, very large opportunities for us."
Cloud Marketplace Momentum: Recognizing Excellence
Cloud marketplaces have become another critical channel, with Palo Alto consistently earning recognition, such as:
Google Cloud: Global Technology Partner (2024) of the Year & Partner of the Year - Marketplace - Security (2024)
AWS Marketplace: Partner of the Year (2023) & Marketplace Partner finalist (2024)
These accolades highlight how effectively Palo Alto is leveraging cloud marketplaces, hyperscaler enterprise relationships, and customer cloud commitments to accelerate deals.
AI Inside and Out: Driving Efficiency and New Revenue
Beyond partnerships, Palo Alto is driving impressive efficiency improvements from AI adoption while also capturing AI-related security opportunities:
Internal support copilot is now used in 85% of network security cases, reducing resolution time by ~50%
"One of our first AI-based initiatives was focused on our employee-facing processes...We are on track to reduce this contract labor by about 50% as we close out fiscal 2025" - CEO
First seven-figure software firewall transaction specifically for AI agent security in Q2
"Later in Q2, we leveraged this capability to secure AI agents as many of our customers look forward toward the value propositions of agents but need to secure them as they would need to secure any other user or application. This capability helped drive our first seven-figure firewall," explained Arora.
Key Lessons for Alliance Leaders
What can other alliance and partnership leaders learn from Palo Alto's platformization approach?
Define clear success metrics: Palo Alto uses specific ARR thresholds to measure platformization, making it easy to track progress and align partners.
Engage GSIs strategically: System integrators bring relationships that can unlock significant deals in large enterprises and expand platform adoption.
Maximize cloud marketplace potential: Cloud marketplaces provide access to committed cloud spend, accelerate transactions, and reduce procurement friction.
Build internal champions: With a third of sales reps already winning platform deals, internal adoption becomes self-reinforcing—creating a powerful go-to-market engine.
Looking forward, as cybersecurity challenges grow more complex in the AI era, Palo Alto's platformization strategy—powered by ecosystem partnerships—offers a blueprint for how technology companies can drive larger deals and deeper customer relationships.
Marketplace Revenue Playbook: 5 Sales Alignments to Drive Growth
5 critical steps to align your sales org with cloud marketplaces (that hyperscalers are quietly evaluating you on).
Behind the impressive growth numbers of cloud marketplaces (now on track to reach US$85 billion by 2028, up from US$16 billion in 2023 - Canalys) lies a hidden reality:
To achieve strong traction on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces, you need to make an internal commitment and align your sales organizations with marketplaces.
This directly impacts how successful you will be in prime co-selling opportunities.
5 key alignment areas that matter most:
1️⃣ Add marketplace into forecast calls
Work with sales leadership to include marketplace deals in core sales forecasting and reviews.
When the CRO and VPs review the marketplace pipeline, it sends a clear signal of institutional commitment. Now marketplaces aren't "nice to have" but a strategic channel.
2️⃣ Integrate into sales methodology
Collaborate with sales enablement to embed marketplace qualification questions directly into your company's existing sales framework.
Speak their language, and break down how the marketplace helps on each stage of their sales cycle. Create simple decision trees that help reps identify marketplace opportunities early in the sales cycle.
Check my previous post on creating common language with MEDDIC.
3️⃣ Make compensation neutral
Ensure your sales reps earn exactly the same commission regardless of whether deals close direct or via marketplace.
This simple policy removes the biggest barrier to adoption. As Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO emphasized, "What matters is how people get paid when you get 14 layers down at street level."
4️⃣ Enable all transaction types
Don't limit marketplaces to just new business. Often putting renewals through the marketplace increases deal sizes dramatically. Sometimes marketplaces is the only thing that differentiates successful renewal from cancelation.
Partner with your upsell and channel teams to create standard processes for all transaction types through marketplace.
This comprehensive approach dramatically expands your marketplace traction and potential.
5️⃣ Pre-authorize key channel partners
Identify your top channel partners and authorize them to resell through marketplace private offers. Create standardized training to make this seamless for partners rather than handling each deal as a one-off exception.
The most successful companies don't treat marketplace as a separate motion but integrate it deeply into their existing sales processes.
Why? According to BCG, companies spend >10% of IT budgets via marketplaces, and 2/3 expect this to increase.
Forrester's analysis reveals a more fundamental shift: Over 50% of $1M+ B2B deals will be sold via self-serve digital channels like marketplaces in 2025.
Which of these 5 alignment areas are your biggest opportunity?
How Does Your Cloud GTM Compare? Take the 2025 Marketplace & Co-Sell Survey
I’d like to invite you to our Cloud Marketplace & Co-Sell research in partnership with Clazar! We’re benchmarking cloud marketplace and co-sell best practices—and we need your insights to help the entire Cloud GTM community learn from each other.
Marketplace strategies are evolving fast, but key questions remain:
Which strategies actually drive revenue?
What sets top performers apart?
What does "success" really look like?
Most importantly—how can we all learn from each other to replicate what works best?
We’re looking for insights from GTM and cloud sales leaders driving marketplace efforts in their businesses. If this is you, please take a 5-minute survey and help to shape the future of cloud sales strategies.
Your benefits:
$25 Starbucks gift card (for qualified replies)
Early access to detailed findings
Benchmark your performance against industry leaders
Shape the future of marketplace GTM strategies
Your insights will remain confidential. All data will be anonymized and presented only in aggregate form.
Thank you for contributing to this important research—we can’t wait to share the results with you!