Cybersecurity & Digital Trust▲impact 4
Palo Alto CEO Held Talks with Okta and Datadog Before CyberArk Deal
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora held acquisition talks with both Okta and Datadog before landing a $25 billion deal for CyberArk, and is now circling Cribl and ClickHouse as his next targets, The Information reported on Wednesday. Between late 2024 and early 2025, Arora met with Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, and discussions progressed to product complementarity but stalled over price disagreements. Okta, valued at roughly $13.5 billion at the start of last year, has since climbed around 30% to a market cap near $23 billion. In spring 2025, Arora approached Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel with a hypothetical acquisition when Datadog was valued at more than $40 billion, but Pomel was not receptive and no formal offer was made; Datadog's market cap has since roughly doubled to more than $80 billion. With both paths closed, Arora executed fallback moves: Palo Alto agreed in July 2025 to acquire CyberArk, and in January 2026 paid $3.35 billion for Chronosphere, a smaller Datadog rival. Together, those two acquisitions contributed $338 million of the $3 billion in revenue Palo Alto generated in the April quarter. Arora's accelerating dealmaking reflects a conviction that AI is fundamentally changing the threat landscape, with AI agents capable of executing cyberattacks humans never could, making continuous monitoring a boardroom priority.