Palo Alto Networks CEO Takes To Twitter, Blasts Unnamed Senior Employee For Exit

“His long promises of loyalty and integrity out of the window in a week,” Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said on Twitter.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora took to Twitter over the weekend to blast an unnamed senior employee for leaving the cybersecurity highflier and promoting a competitor, saying that the worker sent “long promises of loyalty and integrity out of the window in a week.”

In a Saturday afternoon tweet with the hashtag #wartimeceostories, Arora said: “2 Sr. employees being poached, one proactive, shared concerns we adapted - on teamPANW- the other hid, got deal - started promoting competition, his long promises of loyalty and integrity out of the window in a week :(. Values tested when you have a choice.”

#wartimeceostories 2 Sr. employees being poached, one proactive, shared concerns we adapted - on teamPANW- the other hid, got deal - started promoting competition, his long promises of loyalty and integrity out of the window in a week :(. Values tested when you have a choice.

— Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) March 18, 2023

CRN has reached out to Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palo Alto Networks for comment.

[RELATED: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora: Why 2023 Is The Year Of The Channel]

Palo Alto Networks CEO Takes To Twitter

Bob Venero, president and CEO of Future Tech Enterprise Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Palo Alto Networks partner, said he would have preferred that Arora singled out who exactly he was referring to in the Twitter post.

“If you are going to call somebody out don’t be ambiguous about who it is,” he said. “Now you have the Twitter community wondering who it is Nikesh is talking about. We all know people make assumptions about who it might be. You don’t want people making assumptions about the wrong person because they left the company.”

With all of the layoffs in the technology industry, Venero said there is an “abundance of qualified candidates” for both vendors and solution providers looking to drive growth.

Future Tech, for its part, plans to grow its head count by as much as 30 percent this year, said Venero, after posting more than 50 percent growth in sales in 2022.

Recent Palo Alto Networks Exits

Among the executives who have left Palo Alto Networks in the last month are senior vice presidents (SVPs) Karl Soderlund, a six-year company veteran who jumped ship to rival Zscaler, and Mathew Donoghue, who departed Palo Alto Networks after more than three years for cybersecurity observability provider Elastic.

Soderlund, who is now Zscaler’s channel chief – or more formally, the San Jose, Calif.-based security vendor’s senior vice president of worldwide partner and alliances – told CRN in a recent interview that he has “been very proud to represent Palo Alto Networks for the last six years.”

“It’s an amazing company,” he said. “We’ve had a great run together. I’ve learned a lot. And I’ll have friends for life.”

That said, Soderlund told CRN that he has “always admired Zscaler” and that about 99 percent of the business touches an ecosystem partner. “We want to scale,” he previously told CRN. “We want to get greater leverage. And we want to give partners an opportunity to increase their profitability with Zscaler.”

His Palo Alto Networks departure came just months after a December organizational shuffle among channel executives at the vendor. The shuffle resulted in Soderlund leaving his post as the worldwide channel chief and Tom Evans, the senior vice president of North American ecosystem sales, taking over as head of worldwide channel sales.

CRN has reached out to Zscaler and Elastic for comment.

Donoghue, meanwhile, left Palo Alto Networks in February. He most recently held the title of senior vice president of global marketing, according to his LinkedIn account. He is now the chief marketing officer of Mountain View, Calif.-based Elastic.

Vinay Anand, who worked at Palo Alto Networks for about a year as vice president of products for Prisma Cloud, joined NetSPI in March as chief product officer, according to his LinkedIn account.

In this role, Anand “will oversee NetSPI’s product strategy across the entire portfolio of offensive security solutions” including “Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Attack Surface Management (ASM), and Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS),” according to a statement from Minneapolis-based NetSPI.

Other executives who recently left Palo Alto Networks include Prerna Makanawala, former vice president of user experience and engineering, and Chas Larios, former senior director of marketing for Unit 42 and Cortex. Neither executive has said publicly where they are headed next.

Nikesh Arora: Wartime CEO?

Before Saturday’s “loyalty” tweet, Arora wrote about the concept of wartime CEOs on Twitter on Thursday.

“Conversation: wartime vs peacetime CEO’s. Where’s the peace been?” Arora said on Twitter. “Pandemic, Supply Chain, Ransomware, War, ChatGPT, Bank runs! Competition planning an attack on your best business. There’s been no normal. As a CEO - you are either preparing for war, averting it or in it.”

He tweeted later in the day: “Lots of questions on what a wartime CEO does (only kind). Focus on what can hurt you while the trains run on time. Too many average ideas get airtime, continue focus on game changers and let others make the trains run. More later.”

Arora’s tweets come as competition in the crowded cybersecurity market heats up.

During Palo Alto Networks’ most recent quarterly earnings call, when asked by analyst about competition in the secure access service edge (SASE) space, Arora suggested the company is pulling out ahead. “I want to see how many vendors can claim that in the last six quarters, they’ve sold a billion dollars of SASE, and who just did a $40 million deal on SASE last quarter,” he said.

Additional reporting by Steven Burke.