SAN FRANCISCO — Palo Alto Networks this week rolled out the next phase of its Demisto security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform, which is now called Cortex XSOAR. Palo Alto Networks acquired Demisto for $560 million in March 2019.

The X in XSOAR stands for “extension” or “extra module,” said Rishi Bhargava, VP of product strategy for Cortex XSOAR, in an interview at RSA Conference. “Plus x is for the x factor,” said Bhargava, who also co-founded Demisto. “We took the core capabilities that existed in Demisto and added a new set of use cases with threat intelligence management.”

So, now in addition to the existing SOAR capabilities such as unified case management, automation, and real-time collaboration, customers can also operationalize threat feeds, Bhargava said.

“And by operationalize what I mean is the goal of threat intelligence feed consumption should be to bubble up malicious indicators, and then to be able to use them for proactive protection and retroactive search,” he explained, adding that neither of those two things happens when the process is manual. “So, feeds would come in, they would sit into a repository, and usually nobody looks at them or if somebody looks at them, they will only look at a subset.” With the new threat intelligence management module, the SOAR product ingests the threat feeds and “automatically prioritizes, scores, and then also uses the feeds to respond and proactively block [threats]," he said.

Cortex XSOAR will be generally available at the end of March.

Palo Alto Network’s product announcement at RSA coincided with the company’s quarterly earnings report, which fell short of Wall Street’s expectations and sent its stock plunging. Shares were down more than 17% by Tuesday afternoon, a day after it reported its fiscal second quarter 2020 earnings.

The company’s Q2 revenue of $816.7 million represented a 15% year-over-year increase but fell short of the expected 18% or 19% growth forecasts. “Am I disappointed with what happened with our product revenues? Yes,” said Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora on a conference call.

However, while overall second-quarter product revenue dropped 9% compared to last year, with legacy firewall product sales disappointing investors and Palo Alto Networks executives, its next-generation security services — this includes its Cortex and Prisma cloud security portfolios — grew 101% this quarter.

Arora said he expects Cortex to drive strong next-generation security sales throughout 2020. Palo Alto Networks forecasts full-year next-generation security billings to be in the range of $810 million to $820 million, growing 79% to 82% compared to full-year 2019.

“The industry analysts have been calling for this,” Arora said on the earnings call, referring to the new threat intelligence management capability in Cortex XSOAR. “So we are first in launching that capability. Purely from a mechanical perspective, every customer who is a customer of Demisto should want an upgrade to this capability. Additionally, it should open up a larger market for us with Demisto [intelligence] market, which is we think probably the same size of the SOAR market, so very excited about it.”