Vendor lineage
Palo Alto Networks
Founded by a Check Point alumnus on the argument that port numbers had stopped meaning anything.
Nir Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005. He had been one of Check Point's first employees, then founded OneSecure, which NetScreen acquired in 2002 and Juniper acquired along with NetScreen in 2004. He left the year after and built the company that would overtake his first employer.
The founding observation was that traditional firewalls made decisions on ports and addresses, and applications had stopped respecting either. Everything tunnelled over 80 and 443, so a rule permitting web traffic permitted essentially anything, and the firewall's policy no longer described what was actually allowed.
The answer was App-ID: identify the application from the traffic itself rather than the port it arrived on, and write policy in those terms. That reframing is what the industry ended up calling the next-generation firewall, and every incumbent eventually shipped its own version - which is the clearest evidence the argument was correct.
It went public in 2012 and passed Check Point in firewall revenue around 2014, roughly nine years after being founded by someone who had helped build Check Point's first products.
Since then it has expanded by acquisition into endpoint, cloud security and security operations, and has been notably willing to buy categories rather than wait to build them - a pattern this timeline shows repeating in every generation of security vendor.