Company: Palo Alto Networks offers the industry's first next-generation firewall to be built from the ground up, to enable visibility into and policy control over applications running on enterprise networks and address the needs unique to today's Web 2.0 enterprise. Founded by security industry visionary Nir Zuk, one of the creators of the stateful inspection technology upon which today's multibillion dollar firewall industry is based, the company also launched with $18 million in Series B funding.

Challenge: Launch the company, its Series B funding and its flagship product, the PA-4000 Series, in June of 2007.

Strategy: For the 2007 company/product launch, the team successfully leveraged the breath of experience held by the senior management team, which included top security veterans from Check Point, NetScreen, McAfee, Blue Coat Systems, Cisco and Juniper Networks – including two of the most internationally respected pioneers in security, Co-founder and CTO Nir Zuk and Shlomo Kramer, member of the board of directors. This helped to pave the way for a successful launch and a successfully executed a pre-brief strategy to ensure coverage in key outlets the day of the announcement, followed by subsequent waves of coverage and media interest in follow-on/supporting opportunities including customer case studies (Dark Reading) and product reviews (Information Week).

Results: The launch generated more than 20 articles in key targets including Forbes, InformationWeek, Dark Reading, Network World and eWEEK, and follow-up, leadership positioning and trend pitching resulted in interviews with and coverage in the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Computerworld.

Within two months, launch buzz prompted several industry acknowledgements and accolades including Network World's "10 Security Start-ups to Watch" and "10 Tech Start-ups that Should Matter" in '08," CRN's "8 of the Channel's Hottest Security Offerings, and eWEEK's "10 Companies That Could Get Acquired."