Palo Alto Networks celebrated a successful quarter by buying security vendor Crypsis Group for $265 million.

"Crypsis will bring strong incident response, forensics, and consulting capabilities to our XDR portfolio," said Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora, on the company's earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

Crypsis serves more than 1,700 organizations across the health care, financial services, retail, e-commerce, and energy industries. With its integration into Palo Alto's Cortex offering, Arora said Palo Alto will integrate those services into its Cortex platform to be better positioned to predict, prevent, and mitigate cyberattacks.

The Crypsis team, including  CEO Bret Padres, will be joining Palo Alto's Cortex team.

Palo Alto's Next-Generation Security (NGS) group, which includes the Cortex and Prisma portfolios, continued to see strong gains during the company's fourth fiscal quarter of 2020, with the vendor's Cortex XDR platform now the fastest-growing product.

"NGS is growing faster than any of the single product new public companies in the space," Arora said.

Prisma Access, Palo Alto's secure access service edge (SASE) platform, also proved to be a bright spot for the company during the quarter as enterprises continue to grapple with pandemic-related work-from-home orders. Palo Alto gave Prisma Access a boost earlier this year with the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million.

"Combined with our recent CloudGenix acquisition, this is the most comprehensive SASE solution in the market," boasted Arora, adding that the combined offering achieved a reported $90 million in billings during the quarter.

Palo Alto's NGS group will be at the forefront of a software security push by the company over the next year.

"The work-from-home transition has created a challenge in the industry around hardware, and we expect this trend to continue," Arora explained. "We have been shifting our customers to software delivered security, and we plan to continue doing so. We expect most of our growth to come from software and services."

Palo Alto's software push is nothing new, but looking at the company's billings it's clear software has become the company's core revenue driver. While Q4 product revenues remained flat compared to the prior quarter, subscription revenues grew 33% to $389.8 million, while support revenue was up 23% to $255 million.

Palo Alto's Q4 earnings echoed its previous quarters, posting better than expected billings and revenues.

"We had an extremely strong finish to our fiscal year, with fiscal Q4 billings of $1.39 billion, an increase of 32% year over year," said Palo Alto Networks CFO Luis Visoso, who recently joined Palo Alto Networks.

Meanwhile, the vendor posted revenues of $950.4 million for the quarter, up 18% year over year. Full-year revenues were up by a similar margin to $3.4 billion.

Looking ahead, Visoso projects the company will see billings of approximately $1 billion and revenues between $915 million and $925 million for its first fiscal quarter of 2021.

For the full fiscal year, Visoso anticipates Palo Alto will see billings "grow in the mid-teens and revenue to grow in the high-teens, with product revenue flat to slightly down year over year."