Palo Alto has a brilliant CEO. Nikesh Arora gave a masterclass in cybersecurity executive leadership with his response to Splunk's recent ad campaign against Palo Alto Networks' XSIAM. Instead of getting defensive or aggressive, he: 1. Thanked the competitor for validating their market presence 2. Shared concrete customer success metrics instead of marketing claims 3. Acknowledged Splunk's historical contributions to the industry 4. Turned "subpar" into an opportunity to discuss innovation 5. Ended with an open invitation for a head-to-head comparison Most impressive? He showed you can be competitive without being combative. This is what modern leadership looks like - confident enough to praise competitors while bold enough to challenge the status quo. 🎯 Key Lesson: In enterprise tech sales, how you compete matters as much as what you're selling. Sellers, take the lesson. This is what customers prefer to hear when they bring up a competitor.
So my team showed me this ad from Splunk today. I pondered what to do - send them a letter, defend our product and try and prove why its a good product etc. Then i figured - why not act in "founder mode" and say it like i see it. 1. Splunk is the market leader in SIEM due to its legacy in the space and long tenure, them acknowledging XSIAM as a contender for SIEM and them running ads in various languages across the world, is a sign of recognition for our team and our work - so lets start by saying THANK YOU SPLUNK for noticing us, we are coming to take our rightful share in SIEM. (Note to founders - embrace the competition and find something nice to say - if you compete in the mud, you get dirty as well). 2. One should be careful calling people names, "unproven" is a judgmental word - we are not unproven, at least not to the 60 customers who are delighted and happy to be deploying XSIAM and in some cases where we have had the privilege of replacing Splunk, with a sold book of 125 customers theres a few more to replace in that list - and we look forward to it. 3. "Subpar" is another word used - we are not subpar, and if par is what has been "state of the art" for the last 15 years, then i would rather not be par either. XSIAM is a new state of the art SIEM - which uses 2000 machine learning models to correlate data, so we can eliminate manual intervention and work to ensure we can fight new and emerging threats. We intend to define the new normal for the industry - a new "par". Lastly, i have a lot of respect for what Cisco has achieved, it defined networking, it was one of the most valuable companies in the world at one time, even today it powers a significant part of the internet around the world. Splunk, defined the notion of a SIEM, and created the first security data lake - but its time to modernize, and have an AI ready data lake - we look forward to welcoming customers on the CORTEX data lake which underpins XSIAM. and Gary Steele if you ever want to do a head to head POC on SIEM - we welcome the opportunity until then, lets play hard and play fair - not "subpar". (This was in no way AI assisted).
Thanks for sharing, Eyal, and absolutely agree with your key lesson.
CEO and Founder at Automated Dreams
2moEyal, this is a great breakdown of leadership in action! Nikesh Arora's response is a perfect blend of confidence and respect. Thanks for sharing these insights with us. 🚀