Nikesh Arora, an Indian businessman who was the president and COO of SoftBank Group, has now been appointed as the CEO and chairman of ‘Palo Alto Networks’, the global cybersecurity leader.
Arora has replaced Mark McLaughlin who has been the head for nearly seven years and has played a major role in its difficult stage of growth. The past CEO will now become the board’s vice chairman. He said he wanted to step down as CEO so that he could spend more time with his family.
McLaughlin, in this context, expressed,”Over the course of several quarters, I have been discussing succession planning with the Board and I couldn’t be more pleased that we have found a leader in Nikesh.”
Nikesh Arora has worked with SoftBank as well as with Google. He served at SoftBank from 2014 until 2016, when he resigned from his position due to negative comments from shareholders over his investments. During the two years of his presence in the Bank, Arora had made contacts with many investors for the purpose of new investments including Snapdeal and Ola.
Before SoftBank, he served at Google as the chief business officer, where he played a significant part in growing Google’s search business from $2 billion to over $60 billion in revenues, and now he is all set to join the Palo Alto Networks.
Looking fwd to working with the Palo Alto Networks team. Mark, Nir, Lee, Rajiv, Rene and many others have built a unique company. Feel honored to become a part of it. https://t.co/vM07vameE3
— Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) June 2, 2018
The cybersecurity company’s stocks have gone up by 44 percent giving the company a market value of more than $19 billion. The third-quarter revenue of the company amounts to $567.1 million, which beats the analysts’ average estimate of $546.1 million. Now, let’s look forward to what Nikesh Arora brings in for Palo Alto Networks.