Palo Alto Networks pulled in $3.41 billion for the fourth quarter (Q4) of its fiscal 2026, as it announced a new acquisition in the agentic AI security space.

Revenue for the security giant grew 34% year over year (YoY) during the quarter, as remaining performance obligations grew by the same amount to surpass the $20 billion mark for the first time, coming in at $21.2 billion.

The vendor's Network Security segment generated $2.3 billion in revenues during the quarter, bolstered by a deal with an unnamed telecom provider valued at $126 million that included full network security platformization as led by security access service edge (SASE) and next-generation firewall (NGFW) services.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora tied the vendor's success to such platformization adoption and a growing vanguard of buyers spanning sovereign-first states, neoclouds, and frontier AI labs.

Aoroa also noted a “growing urgency among customers to fortify their defenses as AI fundamentally redefines the security landscape.” That urgency saw Palo Alto Networks make its fifth acquisition of 2026, snapping up AI-native IT service management (ITSM) platform Console for an undisclosed sum. Arora explained the deal would help agentify its mainline Cortex platform and “drive us faster into the AI era.”

The CEO added that the automation of cybersecurity can only work well with the right data in order, remarking that Palo Alto Networks was now a “very data-first company” due to the data lakes from sources spanning extended detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM).

“So five years from now, if we were far exceeding our expectations of ourselves, I would be able to walk into a company and say, ‘you want to replace X? Guess what? I have agents that can understand your deployment,'" Arora said. "Today, if we look at enterprise products, every enterprise product starts dumb for the next customer despite being deployed for 100,000 customers. I think AI gives us the opportunity of learning for the multiple deployments we do and the multiple customers we have and show up more intelligent for the next customer every time.”

CyberArk update

Console joins observability vendor Embrace as Palo Alto Networks' second acquisition of the quarter. Arora noted that the firm’s biggest deal to date – CyberArk, now known internally as Idira – helped yield more than 400 shared leads for Palo Alto Networks, with more than 200 net new logos added to its installed base. Idira full-year revenue surged 21% YoY $1.26 billion, while CyberArk’s certificate life cycle management business, now rolled into the Network Security business and operating under the Next-Generation Trust Security name, contributed approximately $85 million in revenue.

Arora also claimed a substantial number of clients replaced their SASE estates with Palo Alto Networks’ own brew, with such displacements increasing from $200 million at the end of Q3 to $450 million in Q4. Arora added that agentic AI traffic surged on SASE platforms ninefold over the last nine months.

Palo Alto on OT tailwinds

Palo Alto Networks is also eyeing the operational technology (OT) opportunity, which has already seen mega-deals in the space from ServiceNow, Mitsubishi Electric, and Accenture.

Arora explained OT presents an especially difficult problem because vulnerabilities may exist in systems that can't easily be patched.

“Imagine patching an oil rig out in the ocean. … It cannot be remotely patched; you'd have to go there and fix it,” Arora said. “So we have actually built a capability where we can build signatures for OT vulnerabilities and open-source vulnerabilities and deploy them in under four hours … which is a far cry from the current standard of 55 days.

“The gating factor is really the customers taking the time to understand what major changes do they need to make … they take their time to go to the deployment," Arora added. "That's why I think it's a long-term tailwind and you will start seeing that in constant sort of over-performance in the industry on a quarterly basis.”