Silicon Valley star Nikesh Arora has landed a new gig.
Arora, a former executive at both SoftBank and Google, has joined Palo Alto Networks as CEO and chairman.
Palo Alto Networks‘ current CEO and chairman, Mark McLaughlin, will become the board’s vice chairman.
Arora was most recently the president and chief operating officer at SoftBank where he was originally slated to succeed CEO Masayoshi Son. He resigned after less than two years in June 2016 though over a disagreement over when that replacement would happen.
Before that stint, Arora served as Google’s chief business officer for three years, until July 2014, and worked in various senior leadership roles since he joined in 2004.
Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity company, has been on a tear this year: The stock is up 44 percent, giving the company a market value of more than $19 billion.
“I have been discussing succession planning with the Board and I couldn’t be more pleased that we have found a leader in Nikesh who is ideally suited to take the company on the next leg of its journey,” McLaughlin said in a company press release.
