In the pantheon of firewall vendors stand the titans of the security industry: Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, McAfee. Relatively smaller but highly competitive in this crowd are the likes of SonicWall, Fortinet, Watchguard and Astaro. But a new name may soon be added to this prestigious list: Palo Alto Networks.

Earlier this week while walking the casino floor at Palazzo in Las Vegas, I was stopped by a group of security solution providers (teach me to take off my badge when I leave the convention area) who wanted to know my thoughts on Palo Alto Networks.

Now, this isn’t the first time that people have asked me about Palo Alto Networks, but previous inquires were mostly from analysts and curiosity seekers. This was the first time that VARs and solution providers made unsolicited inquiries, and they weren’t the last. Before I left the McAfee Focus conference, two more solution providers asked about Palo Alto Networks.

From its inception in 2005, Palo Alto Networks (which is actually based in Sunnyvale, Calif.) has been seen as an innovative and potentially disruptive security company. It’s firewalls differ from conventional stateful inspection and proxy firewalls in that they are application aware. That means they can recognize the type of traffic passing through the firewall regardless of the port its traversing.

Now this sounds a bit like Web filtering, and that’s because it is very similar. In fact the solution providers at the McAfee conference in Vegas say they’re displacing Websense and Blue Coat Web filters with Palo Alto Networks since they can provide customers with both filtering and technology in one solution.

While impressive and potentially disruptive, Palo Alto Networks has had its struggles. Partners have been slow to adopt the technology as part of their practices. Competing vendors have been aggressively blocking Palo Alto Network’s route to markets. And, of course, the recession didn’t help.

But as the economy climbs out of the recession, businesses are beginning to look for new technologies to counter the growing threats caused by misused and unauthorized applications. There’s even some talk that major analysts are beginning to recommend Palo Alto Network’s approach as a must-have technology to other security vendors.

Perhaps this buzz for Palo Alto Networks amid the sound and fury of the McAfee conference is a sign that this company and this technology’s time has finally come.