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For the last two years, Palo Alto Networks has loudly echoed the recommendation of Gartner analysts that every business should replace their conventional stateful-inspection firewalls with next-generation firewalls.

Indeed, next-generation firewalls have been picking up steam in the last year, aided by the availability of products from Palo Alto, McAfee, Blue Coat and Barracuda Networks. Despite the availability of product and the hype by vendors and analysts, next-generation firewalls pale in comparison to the total market dominated by their conventional counterparts.

Perhaps the arrival of complementary management tools is a signal that next-gen firewalls are turning the corner from curious emerging technology to a mainstay perimeter protection imperative.

Tufin Technologies provides complementary product that validates the next-gen adoption trend. Tufin is one of a handful of security companies specializing in applications that automate and manage firewall rulesets, and its TSS 6.0 sports support for Palo Alto next-gen firewalls as well as a raft of other improvements.

The improvements to Tufin’s product are many. We won’t recount them in this article. Suffice to say, they have addressed a number of common enterprise desires and concerns – automated maintenance tasks, better reporting, improved high availability functionality and support for multitenancy deployments.

But it is the Palo Alto support that stands out.

Tufin and companies like it – AlgoSec and FireMon – are based on the premise that firewall rulesets, particularly in the enterprise, are exceedingly difficult to manage. This is true. Some enterprises have thousands of rulesets that govern access control and network protocols. The vast number of rules – some active, others obsolete – impeded performance and real security. Tufin brings order to that chaos.

The order that Tufin is providing is mostly to conventional firewalls. Supporting Palo Alto’s next-gen firewall means that these new security appliances, with their ability to identify and control applications at Layer 7 of the OSI stack, have or will soon achieve critical mass and growth momentum.

The availability of products like Tufin that support next-generation firwalls is good news for solution providers. Next-gen firewalls are consolidating network security into fewer pieces of equipment, reducing the number of devices sold and supported by the channel. New applications that complement these appliances will give solution providers something else to enhance their security engagement yields.

All around, Tufin’s announcement is a positive note for the still developing next-generation firewall market.

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Lawrence M. Walsh is CEO and president of The 2112 Group, a technology business advisory service that specializes in optimizing indirect channels and partner relationships. He’s also the executive director of the Channel Vanguard Council. He is the former publisher of Channel Insider and editor of VARBusiness Magazine. You can reach him at lmwalsh@the2112group.com.

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Larry Walsh:@lmwalsh2112| Channelnomics: @channelnomics