Palo Alto and NTT DATA Build a $1B Security Alliance Without Exclusivity

Palo Alto Networks and NTT DATA have signed a multiyear global alliance targeting $1 billion in joint business by the end of 2029. The arrangement is explicitly nonexclusive: NTT DATA will continue reselling rivals, including CrowdStrike’s Falcon, even as it gains a tighter go-to-market and engineering relationship with Palo Alto.

The headline figure is a sales target, not a single company’s reported revenue. It covers contracts and orders booked across both companies over three years, spanning products, subscriptions and services. That definition makes the alliance a combined commercial push between a security-platform vendor and a systems integrator with consulting, engineering and managed-services customers.

The deal reaches beyond resale

The alliance adds a dedicated go-to-market model, a shared engineering roadmap and early access for NTT DATA to Palo Alto Networks platform features before release. Palo Alto Networks is also assigning forward-deployed engineers, placing technical support alongside the commercial arrangement rather than treating it as a conventional resale agreement.

The companies say their first joint offerings will land in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and the public sector. Those are the initial markets where the partners will have to turn their shared product and service plans into the contracts counted toward the target.

Six security offers, one operating model

• Autonomous security operations
• Identity security
• AI governance
• Multicloud posture management
• Firewall modernization
• Zero-trust and secure-edge architecture

The breadth of that menu is important to the partnership’s structure. Palo Alto Networks supplies the platforms, while NTT DATA can package them with its consulting, engineering and managed services. The arrangement builds on a joint managed cybersecurity service the companies launched in 2024, but adds a formal commercial model and shared product-planning work.

Open distribution is the constraint and the advantage

The nonexclusive structure separates this alliance from a locked-in distribution bet. NTT DATA can keep selling CrowdStrike Falcon while receiving Palo Alto’s early platform access and engineering support. For customers, that preserves NTT DATA’s ability to offer competing platforms; for Palo Alto, it means the $1 billion ambition depends on winning work within an integrator portfolio that remains open to alternatives.

That is the practical tension in the announcement. The partners have committed to deeper coordination around sales, engineering and services, but not to exclusivity. Their target is therefore a measure of whether that closer operating model can generate enough joint contracts and orders by 2029 while NTT DATA continues to carry rival security products.