Palo Alto Networks, a leading firewall security company that filed to go public in April, priced shares for its IPO this week at $34 to $37 per share.
“The company will sell 6.2 million shares, around 1.5 of which will come from existing stock holders,” reports VentureBeat. “The New York Stock Exchange will host the stock under the ticker symbol PANW.”
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld points out that Palo Alto Networks’ unique firewall technology allows companies to determine what portions of publicly available sites (for example: social networks) their employees can access.
While companies are hesitant regarding use of personal technology, they also recognize that services such as Dropbox and Facebook can add to employee productivity. To address this, Palo Alto Networks developed a firewall with the ability to block specific parts of an application, based on the policy of each individual company.
“The company coined the term ‘next generation firewall’ to describe its products,” explains Reuters in a related post. “NGFW converges multiple security functions such as firewall, intrusion prevention systems and secure Web gateways on a single platform.”
“The product is fundamentally revolutionary,” says John Kindervag, security expert at Forrester Research. “All of the big (security) vendors are afraid of Palo Alto. They built it from scratch and they did it in four years.”
“Rivals like Cisco, Check Point or Juniper Networks would beg to differ, arguing they offer similar products,” notes Reuters.
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