Palo Alto Networks Inc. (NYSE:PANW) and Proofpoint™ (PFPT) announced a partnership to provide customers with extended protection

Palo Alto Networks Inc. (NYSE:PANW) and Proofpoint™ (PFPT) announced a partnership whereby the companies will team up to provide customers with extended protection from and intelligence into the sophisticated attacks targeting users, data and content via email and social media.

The combination of Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection™ (TAP), Proofpoint SocialPatrol™ and Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform helps customers prevent known and unknown threats before they can infiltrate systems and be used to steal confidential data.

The combination of Proofpoint TAP™ and Palo Alto Networks WildFire™, a key component of the Palo Alto Networks security platform, ensures that potentially malicious email attachments are delivered to both companies’ cloud-based malware analysis offerings. This enables the creation of automated protection in alignment across the Proofpoint email gateway and the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform, which delivers network, cloud and endpoint security.

The joint development also combines WildFire’s ability to analyze potentially malicious links with Proofpoint SocialPatrol’s ability to scan and, if necessary, remove malicious links throughout an organization’s social presence, including on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

In both cases, Palo Alto Networks WildFire will automatically generate new protections and distribute them to all WildFire subscribers globally.

Threat intelligence from both Proofpoint TAP and Palo Alto Networks WildFire is collected, organized, and made available to customers through the Proofpoint TAP dashboard and through Proofpoint Threat Response, providing security teams a consolidated view across multiple control points.

Palo Alto Equity Analysis

Palo Alto Networks Inc. (NYSE:PANW) opened trading today as $113.60 and is trading in the range of 113.33-124.00 today. Palo Alto’s current market cap stands at $9.76 billion.

Compared to other peers in the Networking & Communication Devices sector, Palo Alto has outperformed in terms of quarterly revenue growth year over year at 0.55 vs. the industry average of 0.23.

Palo Alto is currently covered by 38 Wall Street analysts. The mean target price is $209.66 according to First Call. This presents a solid upside to the current price of the equity. The Mean Recommendation sits at 1.8 which is based on 15 Strong Buy, 18 Buy and 5 Hold ratings.

The most recent analyst actions consisted of Northland Capital initiating the stock on January 21^st and Argus initiating coverage with an upgrade rating back in November.

The current quarter EPS consensus estimate is 0.39 with revenue estimates of 318.09M. Sales are expected to grow at a 46.10% rate. Palo Alto reported actual earnings last quarter of 0.35 which beat the .32 consensus estimate, a 9.40% surprise.

Corporate Profile

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. provides enterprise security platform to enterprises, service providers, and government entities worldwide. Its platform includes Next-Generation Firewall that delivers application, user, and content visibility and control, as well as protection against network-based cyber threats; and Threat Intelligence Cloud that offers central intelligence capabilities, as well as automated delivery of preventative measures against cyber attacks. The company provides firewall appliances; Panorama, a centralized security management solution for the control of appliances deployed on an end-customer’s network as a virtual or a physical appliance; and Virtual System Upgrades, which are available as extensions to the virtual system capacity that ships with the appliance.