It's been a volatile 2024 for cybersecurity pure-play leader Palo Alto Networks ( PANW 0.59% ) . Some bumps in the road and investor worries over an aggressive go-to-market strategy have made the stock's recent performance a bit lackluster.
But zoom out to the start of 2023, and Palo Alto's shares are up nearly 120%, crushing S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite returns as the new bull market gets rolling. Data by YCharts . Overall enterprise software spending has continued the slowdown it experienced in 2023.
For Palo Alto Networks, though, one metric might be indicating things are about to heat up again. Is it time to buy? It's time to drop a noisy financial metric The cybersecurity space is intensely competitive with seemingly innumerable software start-ups that popped up during the cloud computing revolution of the last decade. But while the security hardware and services industry favors this kind of competition (it keeps much-needed innovation moving forward, a win for business customers), the industry is moving toward "platformization.
" In other words, there's too much competition, a lot of smaller vendors are financially broken, and consolidation of the field is needed. Palo Alto Networks has turned into something of a platform since CEO Nikesh Arora took over in 2018. Businesses can now get multiple products and services in one single place.
And while this always spurs concerns about security quality, the company is a technological leader in many key product categories like s.
