Palo Alto Networks Partners with Infosys to Create a Unified, Platform-Based Selling Experience
This video features Meerah Rajavel, Board Member, Chief Information Officer, Palo Alto Networks and Wing Yu, SVP, IT, GTM and Customer Experience, Palo Alto Networks. The video showcases how Palo Alto Networks partnered with Infosys to create a unified, platform-based selling experience for their internal sales teams, channel partners, distributors and customers. The video highlights some of the key achievements of the “Hercules” project, including:
- Increased Sales Productivity: The transformation delivered an 8-10% boost in sales team productivity, demonstrating significant operational benefits.
- Enhanced Deal Velocity: The platform streamlined processes, leading to faster deal cycles and improved customer service.
- Unified Data Foundation: Infosys’s expertise helped establish a robust data foundation, critical for merging Palo Alto Network’s hardware and software businesses.
- Scalable, End-to-End Architecture: The platform leverages Salesforce and integrates with complementary technologies, ensuring long-term scalability.
- Platformization Initiatives: Looking ahead, Palo Alto Networks plans to leverage this program to facilitate platformization initiatives, offering a streamlined sales process for complex multi-product orders.
Meerah Rajavel, Board Member, Chief Information Officer, Palo Alto Networks: The Hercules program is very important to us because it is the foundation of our go-to market platform. We have made a bold step of looking at all the way from our coding process to our billing and revenue process as a single, the foundation pipeline of the company. So, when we embarked on that program, we really focused on thinking from a first principal a point of view, the process, what we need to think about, how we should think about the data, how we should think about the user experience. All those informed us what kind of technology capabilities we should build. But it's not just about the technology capabilities. It's also about making sure it's landing in the right way with our sales organizations, landing in the right way with our distribution partners, with our you know, our channel partners. And our success matrix is we really wanted to give back 8 to 10% productivity back to our sales organization. That's a material impact for us. Number two, we also want to make sure there is a speed component to it, which means more to increase our deal velocity, reduce the cycle time.
Wing Yu, SVP, IT, GTM and Customer Experience, Palo Alto Networks: Yeah, I would say that the Infosys team really worked as one team with the Palo Alto team. We worked together, seamlessly. Working from the very beginning, from project inception, all the way through to implementation. This is a very, very complex project. We have over 2000 user stories spanning 20 different core and business processes. And so, as we're running through the solution design through to epic and story building to design development, testing and finally implementation, the team really worked together as one. So, it was a great partnership. We really worked together well. And when we needed more people, we were able to flex up, with some additional help from the Infosys team, both here in the US and in India. So, we really came together as one team again to get that done. We're a wall to our Salesforce platform, customer. And we also added some additional technologies to ensure that we can scale effectively. So it was a very complex end-to-end process and working with Infosys, we were able to kind of tackle the complexity together, working towards the end-to-end architecture, making sure that we had a good end-to-end design.
Meerah Rajavel, Board Member, Chief Information Officer, Palo Alto Networks: Today we are a company that provide the security platform for many of our customers, and we are a multi-product, multi-platform company, and it is super important this becomes the foundation instead of multiple places where the sales team need to go. It's a singular place where they can construct great deals with a great value for our customers. Also, a good margin for the company. I think when we are thinking about achieving the outcomes that we need to achieve, we know what the North Star is we want to go for, but we also know that you can't do it all by ourselves for a couple of reasons. One, the capacity we didn’t have. Two, it’s also we have a point of view from our own company. It will be good to have partners who have done it in other places. Or bring a point of view from other implementations, and we want to be open to those ideas as well. And that's kind of a place where we have partnered with Infosys! They were our implementation partner both from an engineering capability point of view, quality point of view, and to some extent even the process design point of view as well. They have been put hand-in-hand with us and how we, you know, imagine the product and how we built the product and how we really launched the product and making sure it's not just the launch and go on, but it is actually sinking in with our team. And it's delivering the value that are looking to deliver.
Wing Yu, SVP, IT, GTM and Customer Experience, Palo Alto Networks: This is all running on Hercules. Now we can do the, innovation that we have sought to do, like running platformization initiatives, which means that we can sell multiple lines of products to our largest customers, in one single quote, one single set of orders, and, revenue recognition process. So, this is kind of the next stage for us is to drive platformization, really continue to drive down the deal. Friction for our feel and ultimately providing a great customer experience. So lots more innovation to come and look forward to partnering with, Infosys in the future.
