Firewall Company Palo Alto Networks Up 26% In IPO

Palo Alto Networks shares climbed 26% in its first day of trading today on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares closed at $53, up from its $42 offering price.The company offered 6.3 million shares in trading.

The price of the share were originally offered at range of $34 to $37. It was increased to a range of $38 to $40 earlier in the week.

Palo Alto Networks has a proprietary hardware and software technology that detects data threats as they come into an enterprise environment. It’s made for the new types of attacks that come through the web in the form of malware. It is designed for all the ways people access the web, either through their laptops or their mobile devices.

It goes beyond what traditional firewalls are capable of doing. Most networking technology is meant for threats that come from basic email or web browsing. But today’s threats come in the form of botnet attacks and other modern techniques such as phishing attacks.

Here’s how the company describes what they do when a botnet attacks:

Overall, to effectively block or mitigate such attacks, any threat prevention solution needs to be comprehensive without significant performance degradation. Our next-generation firewalls combine all elements of threat prevention together (URL filtering, Vulnerability-attack protection, Spyware protection, Virus protection) at hardware-accelerated speeds and provide risk mitigation for botnet-related attacks.

Palo Alto Networks competes with providers such as Barracuda Networks and McAfee.