Palo Alto Networks (TICKER: PANW) Palo Alto Networks Inc Panw Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
August 18, 2023 4:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Walter Pritchard - SVP, IR
Nikesh Arora - Chairman and CEO
Dipak Golechha - CFO
Lee Klarich - Chief Product Officer
Anand Oswal - Zero Trust Network Security
Ankur Shah - Prisma Cloud
Gonen Fink - Cortex
BJ Jenkins - President
Conference Call Participants
Matt Hedberg - RBC
Saket Kalia - Barclays
Rob Owens - Piper Sandler
Brad Zelnick - Deutsche Bank
Andrew Nowinski - Wells Fargo
Brian Essex - JPMorgan
Jonathan Ho - William Blair
Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs
Roger Boyd - UBS
Michael Turits - KeyBanc
Patrick Colville - Scotiabank
Tal Liani - Bank of America
Joe Gallo - Jefferies
Adam Borg - Stifel
Walter Pritchard
Good day, everyone, and welcome to Palo Alto Networks Fiscal Fourth
Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Walter Pritchard, Senior
Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please
note that this call is being recorded today, Friday, August 18, 2023 at
1:30 Pacific Time.
With me on today's call to discuss fourth quarter results are Nikesh
Arora, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Dipak Golechha,
our Chief Financial Officer. Following the Q4 session, we will take
questions on our results in the 2024 guidance with Lee Klarich, our
Chief Product Officer, also joining us. We will then continue with the
forward-looking portion of our program. For this, Lee, along with
several of his product leaders and BJ Jenkins, our President BJ
Jenkins, our President, will present along with Dipak and Nikesh with
additional Q&A session to follow.
You can find the press release and other information to supplement
today's discussion on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com.
While there, please click on the link for Events & Presentations to
find the fourth quarter 2023 earnings presentation and supplemental
information. Following the event, we will post the full set of slides,
including the forward-looking portion of our program.
During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking
statements and projections regarding the company's business operations
and financial performance. These statements made today are subject to a
number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results
to differ from these forward-looking statements. Please review our
press release and recent SEC filings for a description of these risks
and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update any
forward-looking statements made in the presentations today.
We will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures. These measures
should not be considered as a substitute for financial measures
prepared in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP
financial metrics and reconciliations are in the press release and the
appendix of the investor presentation. Unless specifically noted
otherwise, all results and comparisons are on a fiscal year-over-year
basis. We also note that management is participating in the Goldman
Sachs Conference on September 7.
With that, I'll now turn the call over to Nikesh.
Nikesh Arora
Thank you, Walter, and good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for spending your Friday afternoon or perhaps some part of
your Friday evening with us. Our choice of Friday has definitely made
us the topic de jure these past two weeks and has made for some very
interesting reading of all the analyst notes. We apologize to people
who are inconvenienced but as we had mentioned in our press release, we
wanted to give ample time to analysts to have one-on-one calls with us
over the weekend, and we have a sales conference that kicks off on
Sunday. We want to make sure all of our information was disclosed out
there. So again, we apologize for the unique Friday afternoon earnings
call. But clearly, we have enjoyed the attention.
Well, let me go and just straightaway dive into our Q4 results. We
started off the year focusing on excellence and execution. We stayed
true to that and delivered strong results in Q4, capping off a strong
fiscal year 2023, where we met or exceeded our original top line
guidance and significantly exceeded our profitability and cash flow
guidance.
This year indeed required clear focus across our company, and we're all
proud that our team delivered throughout the year and especially in Q4.
Our Q4 revenue grew 26% making our -- marking our 12th consecutive
quarter of revenue growth north of 20%. Our billings grew 18% of a very
strong 44% growth in Q4 a year ago, and RPO grew 30% ahead of our
revenue growth.
Our Q4 operating margins expanded by 760 basis points, driving $1.44 in
non-GAAP earnings per share, and we achieved 39% adjusted free cash
flow margins for the year. Our performance in Q4 did not come as a
surprise to us. We've been investing in our next-generation security
portfolio for some time now to position ourselves in the leadership
position for the future of the cybersecurity market. It is this
next-gen portfolio driving -- that is our growth transformation and
enabling our leverage. Lee and his team will expand on this in the
forward-looking part of our program. We achieved several important
milestones in this quarter, especially in our software and cloud-based
businesses this year.
Our combined SASE, Cortex and cloud bookings were north of $1 billion
in Q4. Our Cortex platform surpassed $1 billion in annual bookings last
quarter, and we achieved the same milestone with SASE this quarter. We
also exceeded $500 million in Prisma Cloud ARR. These product
performances are all contributed to the strong growth we continue to
enjoy in NGS ARR.
Remember, that our NGS business is largely a capability new to us in
the last five years and is primarily cloud delivered. This quarter, we
added more new ARR than any other pure-play cybersecurity company. Our
platformization is continuing to drive large deal momentum.
One way to illustrate the traction of our next-generation security
capability across network security, cloud security and SOC automation,
so look at the makeup of some of our largest deals. When we deliver
best-of-breed products that are also integrated into platforms, we help
customers simplify their architectures, lower their cost of ownership
and benefit from differentiated cross-platform capabilities. This is a
win-win scenario. 8 out of our top 10 deals saw a significant
contribution from our next-generation security capabilities, five were
essentially next-generation security deals.
Here are some examples: one, a large industrial manufacturer signed a
transaction with a total value of $45 million. Our Prisma Access
expansion led the transaction, but also included significant
commitments to Prisma Cloud, XDR and our IoT security offerings. The
customer success with Prisma Access and our executive level engagement
were keys to winning this additional opportunity. A large professional
services firm, standardized on Prisma Access and a transaction
exceeding $40 million, securing their hundreds of thousands of users.
The completeness of our offering, particularly our strong capabilities
and private access, differentiates us from the competition by
standardizing on Prisma Access to customer consolidated legacy security
offerings from many competitors to a single solution. A large retailer
also signed a landmark transaction for more than $40 million, led by
XSIAM. In this deal, we displaced the incumbent SIEM offering and also
added our threat intelligence and attack surface management
capabilities.
Rounding out the examples, a large technology service provider chose
our XDR and XSIAM capabilities in a transaction worth over $30 million.
This deal started as an independent evaluation of replacement for both
endpoint security in their SIEM. This is the second quarter in a row
where we have signed an 8-figure deal that was driven by a unique
capability to provide both XDR and XSIAM, competing against separate
competitors in each of these categories. This sample represents the
success we see across industries and regions.
As I mentioned, a critical part of our profitable growth formula is
selling more to our largest customers. In Q4, we saw our larger deals
grow faster than our overall business. Notably, we saw the number of
deals greater than $20 million grow faster than our deals over $10
million as our go-to-market motion becomes more and more increasingly
successful in selling the platform and building the sort of trusted
relationships required to close this quarter of our business.
Now for the surprise of this quarter, starting with Cortex. There are a
number of things I'm excited about in this business as we ended this
year. We launched XSIAM to general availability last October and set an
aggressive goal of booking north of $100 million in our first year. The
year is not over yet. We have closed out the year achieving $200
million in XSIAM.
This is strong validation that our outcome-based value proposition on
XSIAM is resonating well with security organizations and also a sign
that interest in applying AI to transform security operations is very
high. Lee will talk extensively about this in our forward-looking
section.
Our customers have told us loud and clear that the legacy products
powering their SOCs are no longer working and they need to reduce their
mean time remediation by an order of magnitude. This becomes
increasingly important with the new SEC rules detailing that all public
companies will be required to report material breaches within four
business days. XSIAM is shaping up to be our fastest-growing offering
outside our original next-generation firewall releases. XSIAM
transactions are large and long term, which helped to further our goal
of evolving our customer relationships from vendor to partner.
As excited as we are about the early success of XSIAM, we are also
seeing strong growth across the entire family of Cortex products,
namely XDR, XSOAR and Expanse. We crossed the 5,000 customer milestone
in Cortex as we continue to gain share in the market and see the
opportunities for upsell to the platform. Our average Cortex deal size
grew over 50% year-over-year, reflecting our success in cross Cortex
adoption.
Moving on to the next star of the quarter, SASE. SASE continues to
become our standout offering. We're seeing strong customer awareness
and momentum following our new leadership position in the Gartner SSE
Magic Quadrant last quarter. We were recognized this quarter with a
leadership position of the Forrester Zero Trust edge wave that was
published earlier in the week, establishing Palo Alto Networks as a
clear industry leader in SASE. We also have some breaking news on
industry recognition, very excited that Palo Alto Networks has been
recognized as the only, I repeat, the only leader in Gartner's first
single vendor SASE Magic Quadrant just published on Wednesday.
Our recent acceleration and external industry recognition has
contributed to customer momentum, and we saw many new customers and
large expansion transactions in Q4. This included four transactions
over $10 million and many 7-figure deals that span numerous industries
and regions.
Not to be left behind, Prisma Cloud went past $5 million in ARR. Our
cloud security platform, where we believe all companies will eventually
to manage security across multiple cloud applications and providers
through a single platform, continues to show strength, ensuring
customers consume our capabilities after committing to the platform is
vital.
In Q4, we saw steady consumption growth with credits consumed up by
45%. We're also seeing strong growth in customer adoption of multiple
modules. This quarter, we are showing our growth in customers with five
modules more as it is starting to become a meaningful trend with
customers up 179% year-over-year. We continue to make significant
organic investments in Prisma Cloud and grow the platform through
acquisitions. We launched the CI/CD ecurity module last week based on
technology from the Cider Security acquisition.
This is our 11th module, and we continue to have the broadest cloud
native application protection platform in the industry with
capabilities spanning our customers' entire code to cloud needs. Later
in our call, you will get a chance to see our exciting developments and
glimpse into our plans for the future.
Finishing where I started, I couldn't be more proud of our performance
in Q4 and the year. Our teams helped drive steady performance, enabling
us to maintain a strong outlook through macro challenges by focusing on
crisply executing our differentiated strategy. We continue to drive
platformization and capitalize on the opportunity the changing
landscape presents for products like XSIAM. We continued with our
go-to-market transformation.
For example, we consolidated our SASE sales team into our core a year
ago, and we have seen a strong outcome as you saw with some large
transactions and opportunities across the pipeline. We have continued
to not hold back on investing in innovation to ensure we can capture
share in a market that constantly presents new opportunities. Lastly,
we successfully accelerated some of our efficiency initiatives in the
fiscal year as we saw the environment change.
I'll now pass the floor to Dipak to cover the detailed financial
results and our 2024 guidance.
Dipak Golechha
Thank you, Nikesh, and good afternoon, everyone.
Beyond providing the detailed results this quarter, I also wanted to
highlight some additional business insights through the Q4 numbers to
help you understand our results and provide context for our go-forward
plans.
As Nikesh mentioned, we saw strength across our various metrics,
starting with the top line. This was especially true in our NGS ARR and
RPO. NGS ARR grew 56%, driven by strength across our portfolio. RPO
grew 30%, well ahead of our revenue growth. Broadly, the industry has
experienced an increase in deal scrutiny as well as deal pushouts. The
environment has become more challenging this year, and we started
telling you about that at the beginning of our fiscal year.
We got ahead of this changing environment by front-loading our sales
hiring for the year, training our teams to address the tougher
procurement processes and by having our sales management teams apply
additional scrutiny to the pipeline earlier in the quarter.
As a result of these efforts, we did not see a significant impact in Q4
from unexpected deal delays. We did see, however, see two impacts on
the top line from the changing environment: first, the rising cost of
money has caused customers to hold on to their cash and more frequently
seek deferred payment terms. These deferred payment terms are delivered
in the form of annual billing plans and through our PANFS financing
capability. The percent of bookings that included deferred payments
increased approximately 45% year-over-year.
Additionally, the proportion of our bookings have included billing
plans more than doubled from Q3 to Q4. This quarter-to-quarter increase
negatively impacted our billings as compared to what we forecasted 90
days ago in our guidance. As we see this shift in billing terms, RPO is
becoming a more important leading indicator for our business as it's
not impacted by billing terms.
As a reminder, RPO represents the booked business we expect to
recognize as revenue in future periods. Also, all customers' purchases,
including in RPO, are noncancelable. Second, we have seen the market
return to a more normalized growth rate in hardware-based firewalls,
and I wanted to help further the collective understanding of this.
As many of you are aware, there have been several factors that have
impacted industry hardware revenue. These include the COVID pandemic,
the reopening-related hardware demand catch-up, post-COVID supply chain
challenges, price changes and backlog release following supply chain
easing. Despite these positive and negative fluctuation, there's a
relatively consistent level of underlying hardware growth that is in
the low to mid-single digits. And we see the industry returning to
those levels.
This return to normalized appliance growth is also happening on the
backdrop of a broader transition from hardware to software in network
security and growth in new security markets. We are unique in being
recognized as a leader across different network security form factors,
including our software-based VMs and our cloud-delivered SASE.
Our firewalls, or platform billings growth captures our business across
these form factors and grew north of 20% in the last three years.
Within this business, we have seen the mix of software increase
substantially. Over the medium term, this mix transition to software
and cloud and network security as well as the growth we are seeing in
the rest of our next-generation security portfolio are driving an
increase in our recurring revenue mix.
Our platform business model and our focus on efficiency drove
significant improvements in operating margin in fiscal year '23,
including 760 basis points of margin expansion in Q4. This higher
operating profitability, strong bookings growth and interest income
performed a baseline for our free cash flow at higher levels as we
achieved 39% adjusted free cash flow margins in fiscal year '23.
The same dynamic of higher deferred payment plans not only had an
impact on our top line, but also on our free cash flow.0 As I mentioned
in my discussion of RPO, it is noteworthy that we absorbed the impact
of the higher mix of bookings with deferred payment terms in Q4 and
fiscal year '23.
And we were still able to exceed our cash flow margin target for the
year. If you look on a multiyear basis, we've seen the proportion of
our bookings that occur with deferred payment plans increase over 4x in
the last three years, while we grew our free cash flow margins over the
same period. As I will talk about when I come back in the second half
of the program, this gives us confidence we can maintain our free cash
flow margins at a high baseline. Moving on to the rest of the results.
Product revenue grew 24% in Q4, driven by the impacts we noted last
quarter from new go-to-market motions and SKUs that contributed more
renewable software revenue to product than in the past.
Total subscription and support revenue grew 27% with subscription
revenue of $918 million, growing 31% and support revenue of $528
million, growing 20%. We saw consistent revenue growth across all our
theaters with the Americas growing 26%, EMEA was also up 26% and JPAC
growing 24%.
Gross margin for Q4 of 77.3% increased over 400 basis points
year-over-year. This caps off a year where gross margins expanded by
230 basis points as we saw a benefit from higher software mix and some
scale synergies on our customer support spending. Our operating margin
expanded well over 700 basis points in Q4 and over 500 basis points for
the year.
We saw the higher gross margins and efficiency across our three
operating expense lines as we accelerated some of our efficiency
initiatives. As happy as we are about the outcomes here, we're only
part of the way through executing on these multiyear efforts. The
result of all of this is that we continue to see strong non-GAAP EPS
growth due to substantial operating leverage, which also translated to
strength in GAAP EPS, which more than doubled quarter-to-quarter.
We are now firmly GAAP profitable with GAAP net income of over $200
million in the quarter. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow
statement. We ended Q4 with cash equivalents and investments of $5.4
billion. We had our 2023 convertible notes mature on July 1, 2023, and
we settled the principal obligation with cash of $1.7 billion.
We settled the access in shares and had previously accounted for these
in our non-GAAP diluted shares outstanding. Q4 cash flow from
operations was $414 million with total adjusted free cash flow of $388
million this quarter. Stock-based compensation expense declined by 310
basis points as a percent of revenue sequentially.
On a year-over-year basis, stock-based compensation expense was down
220 basis points as a percent of revenue. 'I'd like to provide the
details of our fiscal year 2024 guidance as well as guidance for Q1
before we move on to the broader forward-looking section of the
presentation, where we will provide context for this guidance and talk
about our medium-term targets.
Overall, we are pleased we capped a strong year of growth and margins
and look forward for more to come. For the fiscal year 2024, we expect
billings to be in the range of $10.9 billion to $11 billion, an
increase of 19% to 20%. We expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $3.95
billion to $4 billion, an increase of 34% to 36%. We expect revenue to
be in the range of $8.15 billion to $8.2 billion, an increase of 18% to
19%.
For fiscal '24, we expect operating margins to be in the range of 25%
to 25.5%. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $527 million to
$540 million, an increase of 19% to 22%, and we expect adjusted free
cash flow margin to be 37% to 38%. For the first fiscal quarter of
2024, we expect billings to be in the range of $2.05 billion to $2.08
billion, an increase of 17% to 19%.
We expect revenue to be in the range of $1.82 billion to $1.85 billion,
an increase of 16% to 18%. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of
$1.15 to $1.17, an increase of 39% to 41%. Additionally, please
consider the following modeling points: first, we expect our non-GAAP
tax rate to remain at 22% for the first quarter in fiscal year 2024,
subject to the outcome of future tax legislation.
We also expect cash taxes in the range of $230 million to $280 million.
This is an increase as compared to the $150 million in cash taxes in
fiscal year 2023. For the first quarter, we expect net interest and
other income of $50 million to $55 million. We expect first quarter
diluted shares outstanding of 336 million to 339 million shares. We
expect fiscal year 2024 diluted shares outstanding of 338 million to
343 million shares. And we expect fiscal year 2024 capital expenditures
of $160 million to $170 million.
With that, I'd pass it back to Walter to start the short Q&A covering
what we had discussed up to this point. Walter?
Question-and-Answer Session
A - Walter Pritchard
Thanks, Dipak. We'll take about 15 minutes now, and we'll have a few
questions. [Operator Instructions] For the first question, we'll go to
Matt Hedberg from RBC with Rob Owens from Piper Sandler on deck. Please
go ahead, Matt.
Matt Hedberg
Great, guys. Thanks for taking my question Maybe, Nikesh, with you, the
macro. Good results in the quarter. I wonder if you could just talk a
bit more broadly about some of the broader trends that you're seeing.
There's been some other -- obviously some comments from some
competitors that are maybe a little bit different. But just broad brush
strokes on high-level demand trends.
Nikesh Arora
I think as I said, and as Dipak elaborated, look, it's -- interest
rates are higher. CFOs are scrutinizing deals, which means you have to
be better prepared to answer their question and show the business value
that you bring to them with your cybersecurity products. We are lucky
that we have been focusing on our platform strategy.
So we can usually walk in and say, here, you can consolidate the
following five, it doesn't cost you anymore, but you get a better
outcome and you get a modernized security infrastructure. So from that
perspective, that strategy of ours is resonating. But there is more
scrutiny. There are deals that go through multiple levels. There are
some that get pushed. There are some that get canceled.
And again, you just have to get more on the top of the funnel. And as
Dipak very clearly highlighted that eventually end up and there's a
conversation about saying, wait, I used to pay you upfront. And I need
to understand the cost of money. And is there a way, either my cost has
to be lower from you, so I can sort of account for the cost of money or
you've going to allow me to pay you later.
From a deferred plan perspective, those are really the two effects. And
I think the biggest -- and if I summarize Q4 for us, great execution.
There's a lot of demand out there, and the two things which are -- were
different is: one, we saw the hardware cycle start to normalize much
faster and, not like we told you so, but we've been very consistent.
I think one of you guys actually was kind enough to cut and paste every
time we talked about hardware into their note. We've been very
consistent that we think underlying hardware grows at single digits,
low single -- low to mid-single digits. So we've seen that main
reversion. Other than that, honestly, we've just got to go out there
and get more stricter on execution. That's the outcome from a macro
perspective.
Matt Hedberg
Great guys.
Walter Pritchard
Thanks Matt. Next question will be from Saket Kalia of Barclays with
Brad Zelnick from Deutsche Bank on deck. Go ahead, Saket.
Saket Kalia
Okay. Great. Thanks for taking my question here. Nice end to the year
to the team. Dipak, maybe for you. Great to see the free cash flow
margin for next year. I think a couple of things that we were all
thinking about, as we model next year were cash taxes and the deferred
payment plans that you referenced in your prepared commentary, of
course, the profitability here is well ahead also. But maybe you could
just talk us through some of the puts and takes you thought about
within that free cash flow margin guide for next year.
Dipak Golechha
Yes. So I think -- thanks for the question, Saket. I think the primary
driver really is the stronger profitability, right? So that's really
what underpins a lot of the cash flow confidence. We've also seen
benefits of higher interest rates on the cash that we have, right? And
that also helps. That's another put and take. But I would say, you're
right, we've absorbed the additional headwinds from deferred payment
terms. We've modeled in the cash taxes. And when you put all the
different puts and takes, we feel pretty confident of where we are.
Saket Kalia
Thank you.
Walter Pritchard
Sorry to skip you Rob. We're going to go back to Rob Owens at Piper
Sandler and then go to Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank. Go ahead, Rob.
Rob Owens
Thanks Walter, and you know Saket is much interesting than I am. But
want to build on that question just a little bit relative to deferred
payments. And is there discounting when you're doing these multiyear
deals? And will we actually see a longer-term economic benefit as
people start to move towards annual payments? And I guess, given the
shift in the portfolio and what you guys are selling, this should be no
surprise. So if you could just comment on if there is a broader
economic benefit to kind of moving to annual terms and understand that
we'll probably address the midterm guidance on the next portion of the
call.
Nikesh Arora
Rob, I'm going to give you a little macro flavor and then Dipak can
jump in as well. Look, on the macro front, the part I'm really excited
about that Dipak and his team have basically navigated a significant
part of our business into annual billings effectively through these
deferred payment plans, right? And we were able to hold our free cash
flow in spite of those downward sort of pressure.
And we think we're going to keep absorbing some of that as it goes. In
the end, it's an economic argument. It's like there's a cost of money.
I can take the money up front and let the customers get a discount, and
I can go try and get a return on that cash or I can let them pay when
they're ready to pay and I can extract a better economic outcome in
that context. And I think it's important to understand, given our
portfolio-based approach, our customers -- different products lend
themselves to different discussions.
On cloud, we see a lot more of the shorter duration discussions because
cloud is more of a consumptive event. On XSIAM, they want longer deals.
They don't want even 3-year deals. They only want 5-year deals and they
want price locks. So there also is a counter effect they're worried
about inflation.
So if you put it all together, as Dipak said, we're very comfortable
with the way we've modeled it. There's definitely levers that go in
different directions. And our sort of aspiration and desire and hope is
that we keep transitioning seamlessly into more and more annual
billings over time while being able to hold these metrics and these
outcomes for ourselves.
And Dipak?
Dipak Golechha
Yes. No, I think Nikesh mentioned it well. The only comment that I
would say is we're probably more focused on the economics of the actual
deferred payments versus the upfront. I understand the argument that if
you're more of a SaaS business, then you don't have to make as much
like discounts to pull the deal through. We haven't really built that
in, right? At this stage, we'll see how that goes. We're still going
through the transformation.
Nikesh Arora
And don't forget, there's still a reasonable part of our business that
still has to be paid upfront, which is the hardware business.
Walter Pritchard
Thanks Rob. We're going to take our last question in this segment from
Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank. The IR team is available to take
questions offline, and we will return at the end of this program to
take more questions from you all. Go ahead, Brad.
Brad Zelnick
Thank you so much Walter. So many questions to ask, but I'm going to
keep it high level. Nikesh, heading next week into sales kickoff,
you're going to once again rally the troops to perform even better next
year, topping a fantastic fiscal '23. What are the highest level
messages that you're going to focus on to ensure that they really step
up their game and can overachieve and do even better next year?
Nikesh Arora
Brad, sort of how I worked in sales and interacted with salespeople,
majority of my life, salespeople like to win. And I think what has
become apparent in fiscal '23 for our teams that can -- that we can win
in each of these categories. They were used to winning in firewalls. I
will tell you, our win rates have gone up tremendously in SASE. I mean
we did $1 billion in SASE this past year. Winning in XSIAM has been a
phenomenal surprise and a delight to all of us.
And literally, I'm telling you what's going to happen on Sunday, every
salesperson is going say, I want to be able to sell that product. This
product is selling with an average ACV of $1 million hasn't happened in
security before. So I think the just generating enthusiasm towards all
these capabilities and solutions is kind of a key message for our team.
There are some structural changes.
Like last year, we took the SASE team and merged that with the core
team, and you saw the outcomes. We managed to do that seamlessly
without an impact to our business, in fact grew faster. We're doing
that next year with Cortex. We're taking our Cortex team, and making
them part of core. That's why Dipak talks about these constant ability
to improve operating margins is we've hit sort of scale economics in
our business. We've hit scale. Everybody has to do these deals. It's no
longer a firewall business. So our teams want to do cross-product
deals.
So the message really is, we're winning in major categories, go out and
win those deals. The message is cross-platform is working for us. The
message is you are now empowered and trained to sell everything. And
every year, we use the opportunity to tweak certain things, which have
worked better than the others.
So I mean, honestly, like sorry to drag you out on a Friday day
afternoon, but I think it's important for a few thousand people next
week that we shared all these results with them, and we just got caught
in the trap. We're trying to get a Board meeting done and do that on
Sunday, so here we are on Friday. But all I -- if it gives you any
comfort, Dipak and me and the team are going to be working all Saturday
and Sunday as well.
Brad Zelnick
Awesome. Thank you.
Nikesh Arora
Thank you.
Walter Pritchard
Thanks, Brad. Thanks, everybody, for your questions. We will come back
at the end to do more. We're now going to move to the forward-looking
portion of our program and talk about our medium-term update.
And with that, I'll pass it back over to Nikesh.
Nikesh Arora
Well, that's a wrap on our Q4 results.
The reason we wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to enjoy our
Friday evening celebrations in the context of a long-term or midterm
outlook from us was we wanted to make sure that you see our FY '24
guidance in the context of where we believe we are in the next three to
five year journey. I think what's important to understand is that over
the last five years, the cybersecurity TAM has continued to rise. It
has grown at approximately 14%, and it has grown twice the pace at
which the IT market has grown.
Now the reasons for that are, as we get down these transformations that
are going on in the world, we get more and more reliant on e-commerce,
as we get more and more reliant on digital transformation movement is
about and possibly now with the sort of arrival of AI as a mainstream
opportunity, every one of us is trying to make sure we grab that with
both hands. So we will continue to see the pace of technology spend go
sort of up or forward.
Similarly, we're going to see that cybersecurity is going to get more
than its fair share of growth. So from an opportunity perspective from
what's going on in the market, we believe the cybersecurity market is
robust and will continue to be so in the next three to five years.
Having said that, if you look deeper, there are actually three things
going on in that market: one, there are new markets being created. If
you look at the last five years, we saw a sort of a surge in this
concept called SASE. We saw SASE come on mainstream. Everybody is out
there trying to build a SASE business. That's kind of been a big thing.
As we had anticipated and talked about five years ago, cloud continues
to become bigger and bigger. As companies go sign up with cloud service
providers, they are beginning to go move their applications from
on-prem or their hybrid cloud to the public cloud. Now it's important
to understand is that approximately 80% of the applications in the
world are actually homegrown applications, which are working on on-prem
data centers.
As we go forward, we're seeing enterprises take those applications,
reimagine them, rewrite them, rearchitect them and move them to the
public cloud. Now that work has to be done by 33 million developers
around the world, which work for these companies. As they write new
code, as they put together a code by looking at open source and having
stuff from here and there, there is this real opportunity to make sure
that, that code that is written is written in such a way that is
secure, is secured by design. So you will continue to see that cloud
security part of that market grow, but that's a market that's
effectively been created in the last five years.
Couple that with the arrival of IoT and OT as mainstream opportunities,
we've seen even that market has been sort of a new market.
Approximately it's a $30 billion market between those categories, which
has been built over the last five years, driving some of the
cybersecurity opportunity.
Outside of that, in the underlying cybersecurity market, we've also
noticed that some markets have undergone to transformation. We're
seeing a large transformation in network security as people try and
figure out how much to go in the public cloud, how much to leave in the
data center, how much hardware to deploy, how much software to deploy.
We're seeing that network security is beginning to evolve from a
hardware-only market to effectively a faster-growing software part of
the network security market. Not just that, what we're also seeing is
things like SD-WAN, which are part of the networking TAM are now moving
into cybersecurity because people want an integrated solution as a SASE
solution between SD-WAN and your security protocol. So it's
interesting. There are markets going -- undergoing inflection like
network security. The market of endpoint has gone through a huge
inflection in the last five years.
We've seen people go from endpoint protection to EDR and XDR. We've
seen an explosion, there are about 14 vendors at last count in the EDR
XDR space, but you can see clear leaders emerging, which are down to
two or three players in that space. And there's a huge inflection going
on there.
We think not just there. You're going to see a large inflection in
effectively what is a 15-year-old market called SIEM and SOC. That
market has been -- a technology that has not been evolved for the last
15 years. It's primarily been a reactive technology where if I am
breached, I need to figure out what to do, and we collect a lot of data
and analyze it. That's no longer going to work, the arrival of AI, they
have the need for automation, the need for normalized data, actually
going to force that market to inflect. And that's something we'll talk
about more.
And you saw already in our Q4 results at something like XSIAM, which is
targeted to that market, is where the real opportunity is for that
inflection to continue, for that market to go through its own
transformation. Outside of that, there are still about $30-plus billion
in sort of steady cybersecurity segments as well as about $80 million
of services, which we think will also continue to evolve in the next
three to five years.
So with that in mind, I think it's important to think about where we
were when we thought about the transformation of Palo Alto Networks
five years ago, where we said, cloud is going to be big, AI is going to
be big, and the networks are going to have to start getting reimagined
as we go towards the cloud.
So effectively, cloud was going to drive the cloud security market and
the network transformation and AI and machine learning would have to
start helping us do this transformation in the SIEM and SOC market. Now
what we saw over the last three to five years is, we at Palo Alto
Networks as well as, to some degree, different plays in the industry,
started to look at the various parts of these markets and say, like,
these things need to start getting integrated because you can't deliver
great security outcomes without these things getting integrated. So
this is the thing. We talked about this.
We were told that market does not need platforms. We were told that
integration is not key. Customers can deal with the integration. What
we want is best-of-breed products. So we decided we're going to do
both. We're going to have phenomenal success in best-of-breed
categories.
In addition, we're going to make sure our best-of-breed products were
integrated. So in these three TAMs, in these three markets of network,
cloud and SOC operation, what happened is we saw these point products,
we started to get integrated into the larger platform vision we had,
and we saw the TAM continue to grow because these are all markets which
are undergoing transformation or rapid growth.
Now where we are today, we believe this is about a $100 billion
opportunity across these three platforms. So for us, the opportunity
has grown. It's almost gone up 2x from five years ago where we believe
it's a $100 billion market today, which allows us to deliver the
superior growth you've seen and the continued consolidation in the
market that we've had at Palo Alto Networks. What's even more exciting
within these markets will continue to drive future growth. And you will
see that because of the arrival of AI, the need for more real-time
autonomous security, these markets will continue to drive opportunity.
In the same period over the last five years, as I said, we have been
able to transform Palo Alto Networks to get it to where it is today. A,
we actually proved that platforms are relevant and important in the
space of cybersecurity. Just imagine, it seems obvious now, possibly to
many of us, but five years ago, we had customers who had more
cybersecurity vendors than they had IT vendors. And it was a customer's
responsibility to take these vendors, deploy them across their
infrastructure, make them work together to deliver security outcomes.
You're expecting 2,000 customers out there in the Global 2000 or
possibly tens of thousands of customers having security experts trying
to stitch together products made by fast growth cybersecurity
companies, which are deeply technical and trying to figure out how to
correlate what one vendor saw or one set of vendors is telling you
versus another. It just seemed like a problem that could not be solved.
But over the last five years, you've seen that starting to stitch these
together, starting to take this disparate solutions for security,
trying to provide them in a common fabric has actually allowed us to
deliver better security outcomes
And we've proven that by doing that in a way, they are -- each of those
pieces work in a best-of-breed fashion are leading in their own
category. However, they're kind of better together in the platform. So
the last three years -- the last five years, as we just shared in our
Q4 results, we have been able to build a $1 billion business in
security operations under Cortex, which was 0.
We have been able to build a $1 billion SASE business in the last 12
months to be able to show that integration across this remote and
hybrid network space is actually working. Not only that, we actually
built a $500 million ARR cloud security business, proving that, again,
the ability to stitch across the entire cloud development life cycle is
useful for our customers.
So we think that we've established that these platforms are going to be
around are important and necessary, and that is the way of doing
security in the future. Not only that, we've also proven that in the
last five years that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Palo Alto
Networks, which was a single product in one lane, we had the best
firewall technology in the world as well as had amazing services that
worked in the firewall, we have been able to take that and build
multiple products across multiple security swim lanes and make them
work better together. And the only way you can do that in security is
you have to keep driving innovation.
You have to stay at the bleeding edge because you don't need your
customers to be at the bleeding edge. It is our responsibility as a
security company to make sure we take all the innovation, we distill
it, we make it work in an integrated fashion and deliver it to our
customers at the fastest pace possible because the bad actors are not
waiting, they're constantly looking for ways to get to our customers,
to get to penetrate their infrastructure and try and figure out how to
go extract data from our customers or possibly hold them with
ransomware. So we have taken what was an amazing company in one
category and actually built what we'd like to say is an innovation
engine that allows us to stay at the bleeding edge.
We've also done that, to be honest, not just by doing it ourselves
because the fact that the cybersecurity industry has 3,000 startups out
there, which are constantly funded because they're all working in a
specialist way to solve more problems, which they believe is important
for the end customer, we have to be vigilant and make sure that we
don't have any issues in either building it for our customers or
partnering or acquiring something that's out there that is important as
part of the security fabric that we need to deliver to our customers.
So as a team, we're really excited that where we are in our sort of
juncture today allows us to go forward and build an even better, larger
and a more compelling business for our shareholders. Not only that, to
deliver phenomenal security outcomes for our customers across all these
categories that we see inflecting as well as categories that we believe
will be created in the next three to five years.
So with that in mind, if you think about what's our view going forward
for the next three to five years or possibly the next decade, I said in
the last five years, we saw that huge sort of technology trends,
underlying it of cloud and AI allowed us to create the stitching to
build what I would say, the building blocks of building the world's
largest cybersecurity company actually prepares us phenomenally well
for what we think lies ahead.
What we think lies ahead is the need for security to stop bad actors
mid-flight, real-time, as it's happening. If you think about security
today, the industry is only 30% or 40% real time. You know a bad URL,
you know a bad DNS. You know how to stop your customers from something
that is bad that we know.
What we still aren't good at as an industry is being able to figure out
unknowns and stop them before they happen. To do that, it requires a
fundamentally different way of thinking about security. Something we
have been sort of leading having a point of view on. And that is the
idea of having stitched products that work from end to end.
The idea that as something is happening, you're able to analyze it real
time, on the fly and understand it's good or bad. It is reducing the
noise of security in the industry by eliminating all these super close
alerts or the bad signal to noise ratio. So to get that right or to get
security right, we will have to be more and more real time as an
industry. Now we sit at a point where everybody is talking about AI.
And actually, that is the solution. The solution is to make sure you
ingest large amounts of data, you analyze them on the fly, and you're
able to deliver superior security. Something we talked about just in
our Q4 earnings call, right before this, you saw that everything we're
doing in XSIAM is driving us to that vision. But that's not enough.
We have to make sure every platform that we have continues to grow and
continues to get more and more ubiquitous with our customers, at the
same time, also stitches these things together. So we believe in the
next five to 10 years, we're going to see this shift, which is going to
be palpable. It is going to be big. It's going to be understandable
where we have to become more and more real time.
It will no longer be about putting a bunch of sensors and thinking
about hygiene and security policies. It will be about how do you stop a
bad act. And we'll talk more about this because today, the mean time to
fix a bad act as we've talked to you about in our earnings is four to
six days. That's not acceptable. This thing will have to go down to
minutes and near real time.
So that's a big shift we see that's going to drive a lot of the
innovation in our industry. That's going to drive a lot of our strategy
and our vision because we think we're on our way to be able to deliver
that future to our customers as the world's largest cybersecurity
company. In that context, we talked about those three categories. We
think those three categories are going to continue to become bigger.
And if you look at it, the biggest opportunity is that big green circle
of security operations and automation because we think the current
paradigm is broken. The current paradigm is a reactive security
paradigm. It's the paradigm we say, let's hire three more million
people to solve security problems.
No, I don't think that's going to solve the problem. What's going to
solve the problem is, let's collect good data, let's analyze good data.
Let's find out the anomalous behavior. Let's block it while it's
happening, so our customers have a better security outcome. I think
that's where we're going to be going.
And we're going to have a phenomenal opportunity at Palo Alto Networks
to go ahead and address a $200 billion market, which is primarily going
to be a software-based market, which has its own benefits across the
board because it's a lower cost of ownership for our customers, lower
cost of integration for our customers. It's easy for us to go deploy
and keep our customers all at -- what is the best and current best in
-- sort of best-in-class capability.
So a future that is driven by software capability, a future that's
driven by software solutions with security and a future which has
integration as part of so -- as part of it as a key tenet with the
objective of delivering a real-time autonomous security outcome. So
that's where we think the world is going, that's where we'd like to be,
and we think we're best positioned in the industry to be able to
deliver that future. Not only that, to deliver great security outcomes
to our customers.
So with that in mind, how are we going to do this? What are we doing in
the next three years, how is that going to translate into numbers that
are loved by our shareholders? So it's really the five things, part of
it is something which we've been doing and some things we're going to
have to keep pivoting harder.
For example, one, we want to maintain this notion of being an evergreen
innovation company. Our biggest insight is that if you want to lead in
cybersecurity, you always have to be on the bleeding edge because the
bad actors are. You always have to be scanning the market
understanding, where the world is going, where technology is going to
see what potential security risks are going to get created in the
adoption of that technology, in the deployment of that technology to
make sure we're ahead of the curve, and we start delivering security by
design.
As in we're not going to come in and try and bolt it on afterwards as
our customers have been through the transformation, it's to work with
them, embed our architectures with customers as they go through their
innovation journey, we're in lockstep with them delivering security
innovation.
I think the second part, which we talked about is we want to make sure
that our platforms, which are now deployed in sort of different stages
or different amount of sort of capacity with our customers, they become
ubiquitous. We want to make sure that our customers have wall-to-wall
platforms that allow them to look at it as a data problem, as an AI
problem, not have to stitch our platform with five other security
solutions out there and trying to build their own outcomes because it's
impossible for every customer to go to a secure integration by
themselves.
I think the way -- the best analogy I can come up with, I think in the
next decade, we will see sort of a standard platform for security out
there, just the way we've seen platforms in CRM or we've seen platforms
in HR, as you've seen platforms and financial sort of software. We
think it's time that in the next decade, we will see a security
platform in our future, which just works for our customers, and the
customers are not spending time integrating multiple vendors trying to
stitch their own. I just think that's the only way we're going to get
to the future that we need for real-time and AI-based security.
Third, the topic du jour, everybody is talking about AI. We're talking
about AI. We are not only talking about it, we will demonstrate that we
can deliver security outcomes and the vision and the future that
security needs using AI across Palo Alto Networks, and we'll talk more
about that. Well, that's great. We can build amazing products, but also
as a company, for our shareholders, we have to make sure that we can
deliver all this innovation to our customers, both effectively; and
two, we have to make sure that it's easy to consume and deploy for our
customers.
And we're going to have to make changes as we go forward on how we
actually go deliver all the wonderful capability to all of our
customers, not just by ourselves, but actually working together with
some of the bleeding edge partners in the world who are in this
journey. Our partners are delivering these great security outcomes for
our customers. And last but not the least, and one of the key things is
we cannot do this unless and until our employees are fully bought into
our strategy, our vision, feel excited every day to come to work and
deliver a better security outcome to our customers to make them secure
and be their cybersecurity partner choice.
So with that, let's take a quick look into each of these categories to
see how we're going to get there. And it sort of boils down to these
five key strategic sort of requirements and directions from our
perspective, innovation, continued platformization, leveraging AI,
continue to transform our go-to-market capabilities. And last but not
the least, again, is to make sure our team is along with us every step
of the way.
So getting into the topic of innovation. I think I'm very proud of the
track record we have so far. We've gone from 13 products/acquisitions
that we've integrated in 2019, to delivering 74 in 2023. It sounds like
a lot, but actually, these 74 are delivered in an integrated fashion.
So it actually improves the efficiency of security for our customer. It
actually makes usability better. It actually makes it much easier for
us to deliver security outcomes. So really excited about that.
I think this whole AI revolution that we're undergoing or we're looking
at, witnessing, it's going to require us to keep investing, looking
once again as to what capability AI is going to deliver across all of
our products because we do collect the world's most amount of security
data. So we will keep driving innovation by underpinning more and more
machine learning and AI under our platforms. We'll keep looking at how
to deliver more capability with the sensors that we have out there with
our customers from an innovation perspective. We've talked about this.
We are happy to make sure that we deliver innovation and security
outcomes to our customers. It does not all have to be invented in Palo
Alto. We will constantly keep scanning the market to make sure that
there's something out there that our customers need to get and somebody
else is doing really well. It's our job to make sure we partner,
collaborate, integrate or acquire to deliver the outcome that the
customer needs from an innovation perspective.
And last but not the least, being at the bleeding edge of security.
Being one of the largest players, it is our responsibility to make sure
we're looking at all new technologies to see how they're going to
impact our customers and their states, whether it's quantum, whether
it's AI because there is a dark side to AI.
It's our job working with our partners and the industry to make sure we
deliver innovation in how to protect against AI getting abused or
misused in the market. So I strongly believe for us to deliver on the
next three to five vision of Palo Alto Networks, we are going to have
to continue to be an evergreen innovation company, which I think will
give this company longevity and sustainability forever in the future
and being the leader in cybersecurity. We talked about platformization
or you've heard that word, you will keep hearing it to the next sort of
45 minutes from our team because we believe that's the way to deliver
security, is resonating with our customers. Our customers are seeing
it.
My team is going to show you some amazing UI. I think you're going to
start seeing not only just we're talking about this sort of the next
level of platformization. You will start seeing, right after me, how we
actually bring it to life. So I cannot be more excited about some of
the work we're doing on the product side, stuff that we haven't shown
anybody yet. You are going to see it today because it's important for
us not just to talk about it, be able to show you how we're going to
deliver.
So you will see a next level of integration and how we can deliver
security outcomes. You'll see sneak peeks into how we're going to
leverage AI copilots in each of our products to create the simplicity
and usability that security has not had, to be honest, so far. So I
couldn't be more excited about how our teams are going to keep driving
more and more platformization, more and more integration, where things
of integrating best-of-breed vendors as sort of DIY or do it yourself
or do it home is going to be a thing of the past.
So moving on to leveraging AI, I talked about this. But again, clearly,
there's no Analyst Day out there today that you cannot -- you must talk
about AI. So I think the reason is different for us. As a security
company, we are always focused on figuring out how to leverage data. We
have north of 100 machine learning models that run today at Palo Alto
Networks across our products.
So this is not new news. But the way I think about it is, let's call
all of that precision AI. That's AI where I cannot afford for it to be
wrong. If it's wrong, lives matter. If it's wrong, ransomware happens,
if it's wrong, bad actors get in. So we have to be right 100% of the
time. And to me, that's the definition of precision AI.
And to deliver that future, we have to build a lot of our own models.
We have to train them. We have to collect first-party data. We have to
understand the data. Today, we collect approximately 5 petabytes of
data. Yes, 5 petabytes of data on behalf of our customers and analyze
it for them to make sure we can separate signal from noise and take
that signal and go create security outcomes for our customers.
We still have 1.5 million net new attacks every day across our 60,000
customers. So we know how to use AI, and we believe we are uniquely
positioned in the industry given our presence in end points, our
presence in firewalls, our presence in the cloud, our presence across
the entire network security stack to be able to deliver those AI-based
outcomes to our customers.
And we're doubling down, we're quadrupling down to make sure that
Precision AI is deployed across every product in Palo Alto, and we open
up the floodgates of collecting good data with our customers for them
to give them better security because we think that is the way we're
going to solve this problem, to get to real-time security. But let's
not underestimate the opportunity generative AI puts in front of us.
On a very personal basis, I believe generative AI is amazing for data
summarization, for natural language interaction, for doing all the
things where there was an information decay between our products and
our customers. We build great products.
By the time they get to our customers, there's a lot of translation
that happens between our product developers and the customer and
sometimes the breaches happen because the customers don't fully
understand our product because they cannot configure them right. All
those things can be eliminated if we can implement generative AI
effectively through our products.
So our customers can interact with our products in natural language.
They don't have to have complex security understanding to operate our
products. They don't have to have complex security understanding to fix
a problem. We can fix all of that if we, in our company, learn how to
deliver generative AI-based interfaces, generative AI-based outcomes
through our products.
And you know what, our teams are going to show you a glimpse of that.
We have been working diligently over the last five months across the
board at Palo Alto Networks. And I couldn't be more excited about some
of the stuff that you're going to see just after this from our product
teams to give you a sneak peek.
At the same time, we're going to do it in a deliberate fashion. We're
going to crawl, walk, run. We think we are on the right path. We're
going to work in lockstep with the industry. We have people analyzing
and working with almost everybody out there. We understand where the
best-in-class LLM activity is. We understand where technology is.
We also understand what might be going in the next three to six months.
So all I can say is that I think the combination of precision AI and
generative AI is going to fundamentally change the way security
outcomes are delivered to our customers because it will take away the
complexity. It will take away the confusion, the sort of usability
problems that you have with security, and it will start helping deliver
great outcomes to our customers. I think it's just going to make our
platforms amazing as we go forward.
On the go-to-market side. In the last five years, we have done a
phenomenal job, I think, of building the products that our customers
need. Yet, we have to make sure that every customer understands our
capability.
Every customer has a road map with us where we can take them to deliver
real-time security outcomes. For that, we need to skill -- upskill our
team in some areas, which we have been doing very effectively. As you
saw, our team was able to deliver some amazing results for Q4, and I
think we're going to keep doing that. We are going to go from being
just a security vendor to being a solution partner. For that, we have
to work harder with many players out there, which is something we've
geared up to do, and we're having some amazing early success. We've got
to figure out how to institutionalize that capability at Palo Alto
Networks.
And that's one thing BJ and his team are going to focus very
effectively on in the next three to five years. Not just that, as I
said, we need to figure out how to deliver architectural outcomes to
our customers. Our customers are tired of spending too much money in
cybersecurity and ending up with the same mess and saying, wait, my
security outcomes aren't getting much better, but I seem to be spending
more money. It's important for us to work with every one of them to
deliver those capabilities in a architectural way so they understand
the long-term road map because I think it's fair to say that where we
are today is not where we were five years ago.
I think we have enough confidence in our customers to partner with us
for the long term because they believe we're going to be around or
we're going to be an evergreen cybersecurity company. And last but not
the least, I think it's very important as part of our go-to-market
efforts, we have a large team that delivers customer delight.
Well, I just think we're about to see a step change in customer delight
with the application of generative AI. Again, we've been working really
hard. You'll see a bit of a glimpse of that in some of the things that
teams are going to show you. And over the next possibly three, six,
nine months, you will see more and more capability delivered to our
customers using that generative AI framework or predictive AI or
precision AI framework.
I think in the next three to five years, that is going to fundamentally
change what Palo Alto is able to do out there in the market. And as I
said, we cannot do this without the best people. Our employer brand has
become phenomenal in the last five years. As we continue to deliver
great innovation, great outcomes, people want to come work at Palo Alto
Networks. People want to be part of the success of being the
cybersecurity partner of choice for our customers. So we can only do
this, we can only deliver our strategy if we have the best team. We
continue to track the best, we continue to empower them. We continue to
make sure that they can deliver great outcomes for our customers.
We plan to keep doing that over the next three to five years because we
believe this is a mission-driven opportunity. It's an opportunity that
allows us to make the world a better place by making sure that our
customers can be secure.
So as I said, you will notice in the next three to five years, we will
continue to transform Palo Alto Networks from where we are to where we
would like to be. We will continue to focus on the demand function at
the top. We believe the market is continuing to inflect, as I said, in
the area of security operations. It's highly likely that some of the
other steady areas are going to see some inflection as well.
We're going to continue to relentlessly innovate and keep making our
platforms more ubiquitous. We're going to make sure that we can deliver
the amplification from our go-to-market teams. And also, we're going to
make sure that we have the best team in the industry to deliver
solutions to our customers.
I couldn't be more excited about the prospects of Palo Alto Network. I
couldn't be more excited that we are seeing tremendous success in our
software-driven capabilities. I think we are going to continue to be
able to transform this company from where we started as a hardware
vendor to a software-delivered security with real-time security
outcomes. I believe we will continue to be the best cybersecurity
partner of choice for our customers.
With that, I'm going to hand over to Lee because he's going to show you
some really cool stuff, which is hopefully going to excite you about
our ability to deliver the future we've talked about.
Lee Klarich
Thank you, Nikesh.
Now in a second, we're going to go into more detail on our three
leading platforms. But first, I want to share some context. After all,
we're a cybersecurity company, what's happening in the threat
landscape. And I'll just give you the really obvious answer, it's bad.
The threat landscape is intensifying. $8 trillion of cost due to
cybercrime.
Attackers are becoming very sophisticated with the tools they use,
whether that's automation, attacking the supply chain, et cetera. And
just the sheer volume is off the charts, growing about 20x since 2011
to over 1 billion new malicious programs. This is incredible. So
clearly, that is a challenge, but it's even more challenging than that.
It wasn't that long ago when it took an attacker on average about 44
days from initial compromise to exfiltration.
Now 44 days is basically the time period that an organization would
have to detect, disrupt and potentially prevent the breach from
happening. So in 44 days goes down to hours, which is what we're now
starting to see. That is a huge problem. That requires a very different
approach. But on average, the industry is able to respond and remediate
attacks in about six days. That doesn't work. And even more challenging
now with the SEC new rules of being able to disclose within four days,
none of the math adds up. Now before we get comfortable in just solving
these problems, there's one more challenge coming.
Attackers have recognized the power of AI, just as much as everyone
else has recognized the power of AI to do good things. Whether it's
fraud GPT or worm GPT or other use of AI, it is clear this is going to
become the next major tool used by attackers to launch more attacks,
more sophisticated attacks and faster attacks. So we have to innovate.
And we recognize that, Palo Alto Networks was built for innovation from
day one. And today, we have over 4,400 product, engineering and other
experts that are building and driving innovation. And you see just how
fast we've ramped that over the last several years.
In part, by being able to scale our organization across three main R&D
centers in the world. In addition to this organic innovation engine
we've built, we look at about 250 private companies every year to
identify the absolute best teams, the absolute best technology that
could become part of Palo Alto Networks in order to further drive our
innovation engine. And we combine these two together, and we will
continue to combine them together to have the best innovation
capability.
And then we combine that with AI. We recognized really how important AI
would be to our innovation. And over the last several years, we have
been infusing AI into our products in very unique ways to solve very
challenging problems that only AI can. And from this foundation, we're
only going to do more and better.
We are going to accelerate our pace of innovation even further. We are
going to leverage our proven playbook around M&A to be able to augment
what we do organically. And we are going to take our capabilities in AI
and turn that into an AI-first company. And why I'm so confident in our
ability to leverage AI is we've built the right data foundation, we've
combined that with the right architecture, and we've leveraged an
amazing set of expertise across all of that.
We collect more data per customer than anyone else, security data,
relevant data for AI. We combine that with an architecture that over
the last several years, we've been migrating every product into a
cloud-based architecture because we know that, that sets us up to use
AI in everything we do.
And today, I have a team of over 150 AI experts that I can leverage
across all three of our platforms to identify and drive even more AI
capabilities and innovation. That's how we do innovation. How the
industry does innovation is very different. The industry tends to look
at this in the context of point products. Every time there's a new
need, there is a new point product. This leads to incredible complexity
for end customers. Think about having to stitch all of this together.
Now it does create a large security market of about $210 billion, but
it means that there is an incredible opportunity for disruption. And
for a disruptive and innovative approach, which is why we've taken our
platform-oriented approach because we recognize that the only way to
achieve the real-time security outcomes that our customers need is by
integrating natively all of those capabilities into a set of very
focused platforms, around Zero Trust, code to cloud and security
operations.
In a moment, we'll go into detail on that. But last and certainly not
least point, not all platforms are created equally. I shared with you
how we think about innovation because that is so fundamental to the
outcomes of our platforms. In addition to that, our platforms are
designed to be as comprehensive as possible. It doesn't mean we do
everything, but it means that we do all of the core set of capabilities
necessary such that we can then selectively integrate and enable
third-party technology to complement the platforms.
Everything we do is integrated. It's designed to solve hard problems
through integration that cannot otherwise be solved with point
products. And that combination enables our platforms to be real time
and enable real-time security outcomes for our customers.
So with that, let's start our first deep dive with our Zero Trust
platform. It's very clear in the network security market, what's
happening. The point product approach that we've been fighting for so
long as a company is getting harder and harder to sustain. There's more
technologies, more capabilities needed. Those capabilities are needed
across a broader attack surface with the advent of hybrid cloud and
hybrid work.
The only way to solve this is with a platform. we're going to share
that in a second. In addition, the next set of trends is going to
further propel the need for platformization as passwordless becomes
common, as Quantum becomes common, as BYOD becomes enabled across
enterprises. In all of these, there's going to be a decision. Do you
want to try to enable them across 25 and 30 different standalone point
products? Or do you want to enable them in a single platform? The
answer is obvious and clear. And that is why we are well positioned to
take advantage of the opportunity in front of us across all of network
security with our Zero Trust platform.
And to go into more detail is Anand Oswal, Leader of our network
security Zero Trust platform team. Anand?
Anand Oswal
Thank you, Lee.
Before I talk about network security, let me first talk about the
evolution of network security. Today, network security has become
increasingly complex. In the past, when users were predominantly in the
office and applications in the data center, network security was
delivered by a centralized firewall. Data center virtualization and
migration to the cloud required inspection of traffic moving to the
cloud and many organizations had software firewalls. And with the
hybrid workforce and protecting remote branches, many enterprises
deployed a cloud-delivered stack, SASE.
As you can see, many organizations today have three distinct and
disparate stacks. This leads to complexity of architecture, poor
operational experience, inconsistent security and poor user experience.
What if you could take a radically different and new approach, ensuring
that any user across any location, accessing any application and data
is secured by unified security stack, which means we have one platform
with a set of security services that ensure that users across all
locations have consistent user experience.
And administrators can now author policies in a centralized manner.
This is enterprise-wide Zero Trust. Over the last five years, we've
developed a Zero Trust platform with best-in-class products, and it has
three key components: first, network secure enforcing points, hardware
firewalls, software firewalls and cloud-delivered SASE. Second,
cloud-delivered security services that run consistently across all form
factors of network security and management that provides configuration,
writing of policies, monitoring and analytics.
And each of these three components ensure that we can provide our
customers near real-time security, better operational outcomes and a
simplified and consistent user experience. Let's now talk about the
components of the platform. First, the network security enforcement
points. The foundations, hardware firewalls, software firewalls and
SASE. We're the leader in next-generation firewall now for over a
decade, a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader 11 times. And we're the only
vendor that's a leader in both SSE and SD-WAN that make up the SASE
market. We're also a leader in Zero Trust.
Next, let's talk about cloud-delivered security services. Over the
years, as Lee mentioned, the attackers have become more and more
sophisticated. The old approach of signature and databases is not
working. We've been working on using AI and the power of machine
learning to ensure that we can provide our customers with protection
against attacks that they have never seen before and ensuring that we
can provide near real-time security.
We also expanded from three services five years ago to seven, ensuring
our customers can consolidate point products onto the platform. In
addition, we've developed new services like ADEM and AIOps. ADEM, our
autonomous digital experience management provides customers segment by
segment visibility from user to application, helping them understand
exactly what's going on at every segment along the way. And with AI
operations, we can automate many of the complex tasks or customers,
ensure that they're using security with best practices, configuration
with best practices and ensuring that we are able to predict things
that may not - they have seen before.
Now as you can see, we've had some great success with different
capabilities of our platform. However, if you think about the market,
hardware firewalls to secure data centers and campuses, software
firewalls to secure cloud networks and SASE to secure hybrid works and
remote branches. These, for the most part, have acted as three distinct
markets. And customers for the most part have made independent
decisions.
I believe we're now at an inflection point. With unified management
across the entire network security estate, we will change the way how
customers buy and how customers deploy and how customers operate
network security. Let me now show you a glimpse of our unified
management, which I'm very excited about.
As you can see, we have unprecedented visibility here. Users can be
anywhere in campuses, in branches, remote workers on the go and
applications that are sitting everywhere, data centers, public cloud
SaaS. And traffic flowing through all the enforcement points, hardware
firewalls, software firewalls and SASE. And we have a complete
comprehensive view of all the threats in the entire network security
estate, the data risks, the posture and the experience.
Now the threat landscape is constantly changing. And we always have new
vulnerabilities that show up and are published offer. And many times,
network administrators want to know exactly if what happens for a
particular vulnerability, is the enterprise affected by it or not? Now
with this unified management, we can easily search for a given
vulnerability. And once we understand, like in this case, that we have
compromised by this vulnerability with a single click, we can get
remediations of best actives and make sure that we can apply these best
practices across the entire network security estate, which means our
hardware firewalls, our softer firewalls and Prisma SASE. That's the
power of having complete end-to-end visibility of the entire estate.
Now let me talk to you about our network security copilot. With the
power of generative AI, we're ensuring that customers can use our
platform to the best of its capabilities, optimizing security,
optimizing configuration and optimizing their operations. This is what
you'll see when you come to the co-pilot.
As you can see, they tell you all the activity that happened in the
last 24 hours. And now as you can see, we have 140,000 users that have
a good experience, but 10,000 users have a degraded experience. Now
rather than point and click to understand what's going on, we can
engage with the copilot with natural language and ask the co-pilot
exactly what's happening for those 10,000 users.
And behind the scenes, the power of AI and ML and getting data for all
sources, endpoint, cloud identity engine, applications, network
enforcement points, we can tell the customer that the users are having
degraded experience accessing a geo application. Not only that, we can
also give root cause, which is because they're authorization failures,
open an ITSM ticket on their behalf with all the relevant information.
Let's take an example next about a network administrator wanting to
know exactly what are the risky applications being accessed in the
organization. Again, here going through all the enforcement points,
hardware firewalls, software firewalls and SASE, we can give a
summarized view of all the six risky applications in this case. Now
once you know the risky applications, the next step would be, what is
the policy I need to apply to block access to risky application. And
using best practices, we're able to give them the right policy
configuration ask the customer to review the policy changes or apply
them. And once they apply them, it's applied across all the enforcement
points, making sure the customer is now protected.
As you can see, with the power of unified management with the power of
the copilot by changing the way network security is deployed operated
on a managed on an ongoing basis. Super exciting.
To wrap things up, we have over 1,700 customers today using our
platform. And over the next few years, we expect many more customers to
use the platform to get the power of Zero Trust, to get the power of
ensuring that they have consistency across the entire security estate
to get unprecedented visibility.
At the same time, we've seen customers use and adopt more of our
security services. In the last two years that number has increased, and
we continue to see a trend. Customers consolidating their point
products onto the platform. To make sure that they get the network
effect of data and simplify their operations.
In summary, Zero Trust can only be delivered for platform centric
approach. It's very hard to do it with point products and disparate
solutions. Customers will continue to integrate more and more of the
services onto the platform, and we'll continue to give a delightful
experience to our customers the power of AI.
With that, back over to you, Lee.
Lee Klarich
Thank you, Anand. So clearly, huge opportunity in network security Zero
Trust platform. Now turn your attention to the Cloud. Cloud is just
absolutely gone through an incredible transformation. Today, there's
over 500 million cloud native applications deployed. There's 33 million
developers that are constantly pushing new capabilities in new
applications. Nearly all enterprises are multi-cloud.
That is just an amazing starting point when you think about what is
going on. And at the same time, there's a, tremendous amount of
innovation happening, because of the cloud. And a lot of this is being
driven through the ability to leverage open source. That's being
combined with custom code. That's being combined with infrastructure as
code. All of that just enables the speed, this dynamic nature of the
cloud, and it all needs to be secured.
And very much like the rest of enterprise cyber security, the industry
approach has been a whole bunch of point product that customers are
somehow expected to stitch together. We have a different approach. We
believe that all of these capabilities should be modules natively
integrated and delivered in the platform. And when we get this right,
we can not only secure in real time, but we can then fix at source. So,
the issue doesn't happen again.
And to go into more details on how we're able to achieve that is Ankur
Shah, leader of our Prisma Cloud code-to-cloud platform. Ankur?
Ankur Shah
Thanks, Lee. Like Lee mentioned, we live in an app economy. The average
enterprise today uses over 100 applications, some for commercial and
some for internal use. With AI-led code development, I expect this
trend to continue. Before we talk about securing the apps, first, let's
talk about how these applications are assembled in the code phase,
there are some custom code, a whole bunch of open source code gets
deployed using infrastructure as code.
And ultimately, it moves through the pipeline goes into the run time
and construct what we call the application. The key thing to note here
is, that everything that happens in code phase gets multiplied in
cloud, a single infrastructure as code or open source component can get
deployed across hundreds of thousands of workloads and application
component. What is true for infrastructure and the application layer is
also true for the security risk.
A risk, like an open source vulnerability, secret, pipeline risk
introduced in the code phase, gets multiplied in the run time where -
now you have hundreds of thousands of containers and application
components running that risk. The attackers has more ways than ever
before to exploit this risk and cause a data breach. Now there are two
approaches to solving this problem. One approach is what the industry
has always done, which is to have a point product per problem.
In the code phase, there are about half a dozen different tools to scan
security posture. In the infrastructure layer, you have yet another set
of tools. And finally, in the run time, you have tools for cloud
workload protection, network security and application security. Now
this is not the right approach to solving this problem for two reasons:
number one, each of those tools lack the context. So the customers have
to stitch all of that together.
And the second thing is, like Lee described, there are 33 million
developers and a really few security professionals who understand code
and cloud. This is a battle that the security team simply can't win
with this specific approach. We believe there is a better approach. And
that's the approach that we have been steadfast in executing over the
last four years, and that is an integrated code-to-cloud platform
approach that can help customers prevent risks, and breaches in near
real time.
Prisma Cloud does that today by scanning security vulnerabilities at
each phase of the application life cycle and also have runtime
protection to prevent breaches in runtime. Our strategy is resonating
well with the customers and analyst community across different
component parts as well as the entirety of the platform. Typical
customers start their journey in the infrastructure layer, where we
have now 68% of the customers where we're securing over 4 billion cloud
assets.
Then they shift left, where they want to prevent the risk from
happening to begin with, where we have today 20% of our customers, and
we are today scanning millions of code assets. And finally, customers
want defense in depth, and they want active prevention, and protection
technology in the cloud runtime should a bad actor cause a data breach,
where today, we have 54% of the customers where we're scanning 13
million-plus containers.
Let's see the entirety of the Prisma Cloud platform with a quick demo.
What you see here is a code-to-cloud dashboard that gives the security
practitioners visibility across the entire application pipeline. What
you see here is as the code assets, and the cloud assets are growing,
so are the security risk. For example in the code phase, you're seeing
a whole bunch of security risk that Prisma Cloud has already scanned.
The typical enterprise uses multiple tools just to do the security of
the code. And on the cloud phase, you're seeing a whole bunch of
security scans that Prisma Cloud has done should things fall through
the crack and go into production. The key thing to remember here is
that risk introduced in the code phase gets multiplied in the cloud, 20
risk in the code got to be 2,000 in cloud.
Now typically, the security practitioner, it takes months and months to
resolve these 2,000 issues, because they don't have the context, don't
have the traceability to fix the root cause of the problem. Let me show
you how Prisma Cloud does that. So I clicked on the 2,000 security
risk. What you see here is a code-to-cloud security graph, where we're
tracing the 2,000 security risk back to the two problems in the code
phase.
More specifically, these are the two Log4j components that the
developers introduced that has the security risk that led to those
2,000 problems. You can see that those 2,000 risks belong to a single
application. And like I described, the customer's using multiple
applications. So now the customer has tens of thousands of different
risks. With a single click of a button, Prisma Cloud is able to fix the
root cause of the issue as you will see that momentarily.
We're able to upgrade the latest version of the Log4j, invoke the
pipeline, reduce the risk at each stage of the application life cycle.
And now you see that the 2,000 risks are reduced to zero with a single
click option. So that was the first demo. The key thing to remember
here is anytime there is a risk in the cloud, you have to trace it back
to the cloud, and we're the only platform that can do that today.
The second demo I want to show, and that's something we've been working
on, which was with the AI copilot. So let me show you how our AI
copilot experience is going to look like is going to show you all the
things that it has done for you since you last logged in. The user,
this time, I was going to ask the question around how many Log4Shell
vulnerabilities do I have in my environment?
Through a simple natural language processing, it was able to understand
the question, was able to render a similar graph. As you can see, there
are 1,000 cloud risks per Log4Shell, trace it back to the one source
problem. The user is able to interact with the copilot, get a little
bit more definition of these problems. And finally, just like you saw
in the first demo, asked the copilot to go ahead and fix all this
problem with a single click.
The key thing I want you to remember about the security copilot is that
it's a resource multiplier for you. There are not enough security
professionals and the copilot is going to help you burn down the risk,
and prevent breaches in cloud. As I wrap this, let me tell you the
opportunity ahead of us. The average customer today doubles their
credit consumption within a year and quadruples in two years by growing
from two to five to eight modules.
We have a natural land-and-expand motion with our existing customers.
When you add that with the new customers that we're going to be adding,
and enough headroom that we have with the installed base, the
opportunity in front of us is massive. The last thing I'll leave you
with is the market in front of us is huge. Prisma Cloud is the clear
leader in this space, and we have the right strategy and the vision to
win this market. Thank you all.
Lee Klarich
All right. Thank you, Ankur.
Again, clearly, huge opportunity in cloud security with our unique
approach and what we're driving, really excited with where we are and
what we're working on. And now for our third platform, our AI-driven
SecOps platform. This is a market that I believe is ready for a
fundamental transformation. Most of the technologies that companies use
are - or were developed 15, in some cases, 20 years ago. That clearly
does not work.
They were not designed for an attacker sophistication that we see
today. They were not designed for real-time detection, and automation
remediation. These tools were not designed for supply chain attacks.
These tools were not designed for the advent of attack AI being used by
our adversaries. We have to reimagine security operations from the
ground up. And in doing this, leveraging data, leveraging AI,
leveraging automation as core tightly integrated foundational aspects
to how an entire SecOps platform functions within the SOC.
And this is the journey that we've been on for the last several years.
Building this platform, refining it, developing the capabilities
necessary, and then refining it again until we reach the point where we
are today, where we have a set of leading products and an incredible
platform, delivering incredible outcomes to take advantage of this
entire security operations market in front of us.
And to share more details I'm joined from our Tel Aviv R&D center by
Gonen Fink, who leads our entire Cortex Product Organization. Gonen?
Gonen Fink
Thank you, Lee.
Let's take a deeper look at why existing SOC architecture doesn't work.
With the growth of sophisticated alerts, multiple tools were created,
each one designed to solve a specific problem. This leads to an
extremely fragmented SOC, very hard to manage. It is the customer
responsibility to integrate those tools into a human-driven workflow.
The result of that is bad security outcome, low-confidence alert,
energy shortage, unable to resolve those incidents in real time. So
what is required to deliver real-time security operation?
We need to replace this fragmented architecture with a unified single
floor architecture. We need to replace multiple products that collect
data with a single data platform and silo detection tools with an AI
engine that is trained on a full data center. And then automation
should be natively integrated into the flow rather than being placed as
an afterthought. Five years ago, we recognized the criticality of data,
AI and automation for the future of cybersecurity.
We built three amazing products. Each of them became a leader in its
respective category, and we continue to innovate in each of those
categories to maintain our leadership. This drove Cortex to become a $1
billion business for us, and it also brought us into thousands of
customers' security operation centers. Cortex XDR extended the EDR
market, and it is the best AI tool for endpoint prevention and
real-time detection of all security threats.
Cortex XSOAR is the best-in-class security tool for automated threat
response and Cortex XPAND proactively manage your attack surface and
reduce that. But to harness the full potential of AI and automation in
order to build a real-time SOC requires more than that. We need an
integrated AI-driven architecture that reimagine the legacy 20 years
old SOC architecture from the ground up.
And this is what we brought to the market with XSIAM last year. So what
happens is legacy SOC and how it has changed with XSIAM. Let's look at
that. In order to detect attacks, silent tools just get alerts. But we
are living in a dynamic world, unfortunately, looking at anomalies or
alert in isolation might be suspicious, but there are many of them.
Each of them we'll look at the world from a very narrow standpoint. And
the result is that high volume of alerts that overwhelm the SOC.
This means that SOC gives up on reviewing all of those alerts. And
eventually, the SOC is missing the important ones. With XSIAM customer
no longer needs to review low confidence alert and try to connect the
dots themselves. XSIAM collect a large amount of data and uses AI to
analyze low confidence signals, stitch them together with raw data and
get enough context to resolve most of them automatically, presenting
the user only with all of an incident and with a full context for each
of those incidents.
By grouping this into incidents prioritize them, restoring them, XSIAM
provides a full picture view to the analysts, and allow the analysts to
respond very quickly to the events. How do we do this management? Let
me use our new product UI to explain the key elements that
differentiate XSIAM on the rest of the products in the market. It
starts with the data. We ingest normalized stitch together petabytes of
data from dozens and hundreds of data sources to recreate the full
story of each and every event in your environment.
This stitched rich data set feed and sophisticated AI engine with over
3,000 models that produce high confidence alerts that groups those
alerts into incidents, assigns a risk score to each and every incident,
and then integrate natively built automation to resolve most of the
incidents, leaving only a small number of incidents for human review
and resolution. Like the copilots, you saw for both network security
and cloud security, our new Cortex UI, we incorporate a copilot with an
early alpha testing starting next month.
We started working with Palo Alto Network SOC as our first partner as
we design and build Cortex and XSIAM. Palo Alto is the largest security
vendor. And as such, we have a lot of assets that we need to protect.
In order to do proper job, we collect a lot of data. Over 1 trillion
events are collected every month or 75 terabytes every day. With
Cortex, Palo Alto Network's SOC can protect its network with a small
team working on startup ships, resulting with less than one minute
incident resolution. This is not heroic.
This is relying on technology and AI and automation to achieve the
right security outcomes. So when we launched XSIAM, we wanted to see
how these plays with customers. And the early indications are
remarkable. Our customers are able to ingest a lot more data than
before, which provides them with broader coverage for their attack
service. Even though they ingest a lot more data, product generates a
lot less false positive.
And those true positive alerts are being grouped together prioritized
by AI, delivering much, much superior security outcomes. Better
coverage shifting the median time to response from day to hours. As we
look forward, we see tremendous opportunity in drawing Cortex and
XSIAM. We continue to win and gain market shares with our best of breed
products, XDR, XSOAR, and Expanse, That's not a basis to upsell our
customers to the full XSIAM solution.
Each of those customers is a candidate, is becoming a prospect to move
to the full platform XSIAM. And we demonstrate this over the past 12
months in being able to convert a lot of the customer that use part of
the platform to become a full platform users. For the most exciting
part, is when we look at where we can expand XSIAM.
We believe the era of AI automation is just beginning, and XSIAM is
quickly becoming the largest security data platforms. And the
technology we build with AI automation could be the basis to expand
what we can deliver with XSIAM to new modules within the SOC, and
across the entire security landscape.
Thank you all and back to you, Lee.
Lee Klarich
Awesome. Thank you Gonen going in. Clearly, an incredible opportunity
in Cortex, and specifically with XSIAM as we think about the journey
ahead where we are going to transform security operations in just
absolutely incredible and amazing ways. And with that context across
our three platforms.
Let me now turn it over to BJ to share with you how we take all of this
wonderful stuff to market. BJ?
BJ Jenkins
Thanks, Lee. And it's great to be here with all of you. I couldn't be
more excited to talk about our go-to-market transformation that, will
allow us to take full advantage of the product innovation you heard
about. I just had my two-year anniversary of Palo Alto Networks, and
the evolution of this go-to-market organization in step with our
customer needs and product innovation has been incredible.
To understand how we can best serve our customers, we need to
understand how organizations are tackling cybersecurity challenges
today. On average, large companies have 75 plus security solutions.
This leads to fragmentation and growing complexity as customers try to
stitch together all these individual products and data. To add to this,
they are dealing with overlapping vendor solutions, that don't talk to
each other.
Many customers are buying cybersecurity in this way. They recognize how
unwieldly and ineffective it is, and they need our help. This is a call
action for our industry to do a better job at helping our customers.
And at Palo Alto Networks, we will do this through three key
go-to-market transformations. First, we are transitioning from a
transactional vendor to a true strategic partner, guiding customers on
their transformation journey.
Customers are looking to us for direction on how to secure their
enterprises and keep their employees and end user customers safe.
Second, we are transforming from selling point products to architecting
outcomes in partnership with our customer's most trusted ecosystem
solution providers. Our customer's ecosystem partners will become even
more important as we work with them, to create more value through new
services, and joint offerings.
Third, we are moving from a reactive help model where customers only
call us when they need us to a more collaborative model, where we are
proactively driving success for every customer with an in it together
mentality. Palo Alto Networks is well positioned to help our customers
through these three key shifts, and we have made significant headway on
each of these fronts.
In the past, our go-to-market motion focused on technical domain
experts, solving very specific product requirements. These
conversations often revolved around price, and they were transactional
in nature. Today, C suite executives are engaging us more and more,
they are looking to transform their entire business, understand
security strategy, and deliver better security outcomes.
We now have a seat at the table for key architectural decisions and
ongoing multiyear roadmap engagement. Our 3000 integrated sellers are
set up to scale, and have these strategic conversations with our
customers. Our ecosystem is also playing a critical role as we move
from selling products, to architecting outcomes. Five years ago, we
sold a single product, primarily hardware firewalls as part of a larger
partner delivered motion.
Most of our partners were focused on transactional fulfillment of
customer orders. Today, we are deeply embedded with strategic partners
across all routes to market and are co-leading the sales motions with
our partners to deliver joint solutions. We have a 150, $10 million
plus strategic partners today in our ecosystem. In the future, we're
going to continue to strengthen our sell together motion by building
integrated offerings with a shared focus on improving client outcomes.
Our top 30 partners will become even more important, and we're looking
to drive $10 million plus of business with them. Delivering the best
security outcomes means that our customer's post sales experience must
also undergo a shift. As I said to an in it together model, allowing
them to be successful faster and get the most value from our solutions.
Although we have consistently achieved a 90 plus percent CSAT score, we
aren't stopping there.
Continuous improvement is the goal. As part of our strategic focus on
AI, we'll leverage AI to resolve customer issues more quickly. With AI
enabled in product support, we plan to reduce our meantime to resolve
for calls by over 65%. We also plan to scale our global network of 300
plus fully certified professional service partners in order, to further
expand our ability to deploy our products with speed and agility.
And last, but not least we'll increase adoption by staying with our
customers throughout - their entire journey. We have a 600 plus person
customer success team with deep expertise, helping to build customers
for life. You've heard this from others today, but it bears repeating.
We see massive opportunity ad for Palo Alto Networks, and our
go-to-market model is transforming to meet it head on.
As you can see in the chart, we're already well on our way with our
global 2,000 customers with 54% of our customers on the journey across
all three platforms. And we have great potential to extend our breath
by selling, the full portfolio across our installed base, and our
platform depth by covering our customer's full estate.
I'll end where I started with a reflection on the opportunity, and
unprecedented ability to help our customers secure and transform their
business. Palo Alto Network platforms are the best in the industry, and
we have a world-class go to market organization uniquely positioned to
bring them to our customers and partners. Our go-to-market model is
ready to scale and deliver real time security outcomes for every
customer through the power of our platforms.
Thank you everyone and back over to you, Dipak.
Dipak Golechha
As you heard from Nikesh about our strategy, Lee and his team on
products, and BJ around go-to-market, we have the entire company
pointed in the same direction. I now wanted to bring this altogether to
help you understand why we are confident, that we can capitalize on our
opportunity and translate it into financial result that will drive
superior total shareholder return.
I will go through all four of the primary drivers of TSR, including
revenue growth, profitability, cash conversion, and capital structure.
First, on the top line, you heard about our TAM from Nikesh, we have
proven over the last five years that we target the largest and most
attractive parts of the market.
We've been able to capitalize on an expanding opportunity taking share
from within existing markets, and positioning ourselves in new markets
to drive further growth potential. Our share today stands at just 7% of
our addressable market, which is lower than the share of leaders in
many other markets outside of the cybersecurity industry.
As we plot the course to the larger term that Nikesh outlined over the
next five years, we continue to see the opportunity to gain share in
our existing markets, and continue to fuel above market growth for Palo
Alto Networks. Looking at this through the product lens, Lee and his
team outlined our platform leadership in our three areas, and showed
you the innovation plans their teams have to continue to lead our
markets.
From my seed at the company, innovation is our lifeblood, and we will
continue to spend aggressively on R&D. We do not focus on driving
leverage to the bottom line, but rather we redeploy any savings we
identify to invest in additional innovation. Our customers expect us to
continue innovating, and we have consistently shown a strong return
from these innovation investments.
This includes recognition of our innovations, such as the Gartner
single vendor SASE leadership position that we mentioned today. We
expect our innovation to show through, and financial outcomes in each
platform and the company overall. In network security, our investments
across form factors, especially software-based and cloud delivered,
enable us to further our market position and sustain our growth in
FWaaP billings.
Our market share and our software-based VM business is approximately
two times what it is in hardware. In SASE, we believe that we are the
number two player in this fast growing market. In cloud security, the
growth algorithm is leveraging products and go-to-market capabilities
to drive credit consumption ahead of the growth rate customers are
deploying public cloud. Along the way, we are confident we can increase
multi module consumption, to solidify our position as the definitive
code-to-cloud leader.
In Cortex, we have a solid business with XDR, XSOAR and Expanse,
competing an attractive individual product markets. We've seen a
shrinking number of players in the XDR market, and have steadily added
several 100 customers per quarter. Adding customers across Cortex is
important to allow us to drive larger, more strategic deals in the
future, where we can further cross sell our products, including XSIAM.
XSIAM is truly game changing innovation, where we are selling outcomes,
and I'm confident that momentum will beget momentum here, after a very
strong launch of the product in the first year. It should be clear from
BJ's presentation that we've invested in building a large dedicated
go-to-market organization, and are transforming how we engage with the
market. Transformation here has been a nonstop effort and has driven
growth - in the number of large deals each quarter.
On the back of the core tenants BJ covered, we see the opportunity to
continue to drive more strategic relationships with customers that can
result in eight, and even nine figure relationships. At the same time
that we have seen these large deal outcomes, we've consistently
improved the productivity of our core apps, as they collectively become
better at selling the broader portfolio.
As Nikesh mentioned, SASE has been a big success here. Additionally, we
have seen standout growth from new ecosystem partners, including the
cloud service providers, and global system integrators. Not only has
our business transacted through these channels increased, but more
importantly, so has our success leveraging these partners as
influences.
We have the product portfolio that makes us an attractive partner to
these players, along with the scale to make the investments to support
the success of these partners. Bringing this together on the top line,
as Nikesh noted, we're targeting growth of 17% to 19% in revenue and
billings over the next three years, which is ahead of the cybersecurity
market growth rates.
We see hardware as a percentage of our total revenue decreasing to
approximately 10% with NGS ARR exiting fiscal year '26 above 55% of our
fiscal year '26 revenue. RPO remains an important metric as it captures
the full value of our customer contracts independent of payment terms,
and we expect growth of 25% annually through fiscal year '26.
Additionally, we see about two-thirds of our revenue in fiscal year
'26, driven by current RPO entering the year highlighting the increase
in predictability of our revenue profile.
Now moving to the cost side, and first with gross margin. As I hope Lee
and BJ have impressed on upon you, we have significant advantages
inherent in building and delivering platforms. There are
characteristics of our platform business model that benefit gross
margins. A higher software mix in our network security business, helps
contribute to a higher gross margin, something we saw in fiscal year
'23.
On the cloud delivered side, most notably in SASE, and Cortex, we've
aligned with public service, providers to enable us to instantly
leverage their scale, and delivery capability as well as take advantage
of their ongoing innovations and efficiencies. As we grow, we see
improvements in our unit economics.
Lastly, in customer support, with multiple scale products in each of
our platforms and common customer support needs, we see leverage within
our platforms and across the company. Above and beyond these platform
benefits, as we talked about earlier in fiscal year '23, we accelerated
some efficiency initiatives that contributed to higher gross margins.
We also saw a normalization of the supply chain during fiscal year '23.
Starting in in '23, we have increased our investments around generative
AI to leverage this technology in customer support for efficiency, and
better medium term customer outcomes. While we see these platform
leverage, and efficiency opportunities in gross margins, we also leave
room to invest in new cloud-based offerings, which generally have
subscale gross margins in their initial phases. For this reason, we
expect to relatively steady gross margin in fiscal year '26 as compared
to fiscal year '23.
Moving on to operating expenses. We see similar benefits from being a
platform company across our major functional areas. At the top of this
list is the sales productivity improvements already discussed. It's
important to reinforce my point around the platform benefits in R&D. We
choose to redeploy those resources to ensure we are leaning into
innovation instead of driving overall financial leverage in R&D.
Our fiscal year '23 focus on accelerated efficiency did yield benefits
in terms of leverage and OpEx, and we expect to continue many of these
initiatives. One to highlight is the consolidation of sales
specialists. Similar to customer support, we also have generative AI
initiatives to both improve outcomes across sales and marketing and our
G&A functions that we expect will contribute to efficiency in fiscal
year '24 and beyond.
Translating this to operating margins, while some may see a 500 basis
point improvement in one year as a milestone achievement from our 2021
Analyst Day, we simply see - this as a new beginning as we see many
opportunities to drive this higher.
We look for non-GAAP operating margins in the range of 28% to 29% in
fiscal year '26, with a long-term opportunity for those to be in the
low to mid-30s as we further scale our platforms, and gain confidence
in the power of AI, and other business transformations. We're also
committed to growing non-GAAP EPS on a compounded rate greater than 20%
from fiscal year '23 to '26.
Moving on to cash flow. We call that in fiscal year '21, we guided to
33% free cash flow margins. In front of that guidance, we spent
considerable effort looking at our entire business end-to-end from the
point of view of cash flow, and understanding all the drivers. We have
now had two years' operating in this manner.
We're confident we can sustain our high cash conversion, focusing on
areas such as best-in-class working capital management, and low CapEx,
business models. Our top line growth and underlying improvement in
operating margin form the foundation of our strong cash generation.
There are other factors impacting cash flow, that I want to highlight,
and that we have already included in our forward-looking guidance.
First, with a rising cost of money, we have seen more customers asking
for deferred payments over the last three years, but especially in the
last 12 months. As we previously talked about. Also, our rising GAAP
profitability and some changes in U.S. tax law, we see rising tax -
cash taxes. This has all been included in our forward-looking guidance.
I want it to double click on the impact of deferred payments for a
moment. We've already seen this have a significant effect on our cash
flow. In the second half of fiscal year '20, along with the pandemic,
we launched Palo Alto Networks Financial Services, or PANFS, to ease
customers' challenges with short-term cash flow issues.
As I mentioned, with a rising cost of money in the last year, we have
seen this trend broaden. PANFS and deferred payments allow us to drive
success partnering with our customers on long-term transformation of
their security architectures while working with their cash flow
constraints. The amount of bookings with deferred payments was up 4x in
the fourth quarter as compared to three years ago.
This impacted our reported cash flow in the last three years, yet we
have maintained our strong cash generation. As we look to the next
three years, we expect this impact to continue, and have accounted for
this in our medium term targets. A byproduct of - the rise in deferred
payments is greater predictability of our cash flow over time. For
example, we now expect about a $1 billion in cash flow from deals
entered into in prior years, where payments will now come in fiscal
year '24. This $1 billion is twice what it was in contribution to our
fiscal year '23 cash flow when we entered the year.
Summarizing cash flow, I'm confident we can maintain a baseline of 37%
free cash flow margins over the next three years after accounting for
the factors I noted. This and the revenue growth targets, I covered
should keep us on the aspirational path to Rule of 60 economics in our
business. This combination of top line and cash generation puts us in a
rare peer group, and allows us the flexibility to navigate the changing
environment.
Finally, I'll cover the capital structure as the last tenant in TSR.
With all the opportunities ahead of us, organic investment in our
business to drive growth will remain our number one priority. We have
ample cash generation to make these investments. From here, we have
three capital allocation priorities. As we've done previously, we will
continue to balance these.
Our first capital allocation priority is our M&A strategy. We have
successfully acquired companies that are early leaders in adjacent, and
emerging cybersecurity markets. Many times, these are markets in which,
we've had an early organic effort, but we see external innovation that
can significantly accelerate our time to market.
We target companies - that have achieved product market fit, with teams
that can accelerate their innovation inside Palo Alto Networks. Revenue
is not a focus for us, but we do ensure that we have a solid plan to
accelerate, the trajectory of our business. We've used $2.5 billion in
cash over the last five years, pursuing the strategy successfully.
Secondly, we manage a capital structure that gives us flexibility. For
example, we use our balance sheet as a competitive advantage with
PANFS, and deferred payments. We repaid our 2023 convertible debt in
July, and have a have another convert coming due in about two years,
which we also plan to settle for cash.
Beyond enabling reasonable flexibility in our capital structure, we are
also focused on minimizing dilution and reducing our organic
stock-based compensation expense as a percent of revenue, by at least
300 basis points over the next three years. Lastly, we will use share
buybacks opportunistically, something that you have seen from us over
the last five years, as we have repurchased nearly $4 billion
cumulatively.
In concluding my section on bringing it altogether, I wanted to bring
together the financial targets I've covered. As Nikesh mentioned at the
outset, we're focused on an evergreen innovation led approach that will
continue to fuel our transformation into a software, and AI driven
cybersecurity company.
I am more excited than ever about our growth prospects over the next
several years and our plans to continue to do this profitably,
benefiting from our platform business model. I hope my excitement comes
through today, and you can clearly see that drives our confidence in
these targets from the various presentation.
With that, we'll now transition to taking your questions. And I will
hand the call back to Walter to manage this. Walter?
Question-and-Answer Session
Walter Pritchard
We'll now take questions on the entire program. We're going to start
first with Hamza Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley and go next to Andrew
Nowinski from Wells Fargo. Hamza, please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi. Apologies. Can you guys hear me? Hi [indiscernible] dialing in for
Hamza. Thank you guys so much for taking my question today and really
congrats on the great quarter. You did mention that, you know, AI is a
very large opportunity for the company going forward. And I know that
you broke down, some of the gross margins as well as, potential
operating margins impact, but could you just, let us know how we should
think about the company's investment for AI going forward? Are there
any upfront CapEx, or margin that that we should consider a little bit
more. Thank you so much.
Nikesh Arora
Hi. Yes. Thank you very much for your question. Like, it's early days
in AI, as I mentioned on the precision AI side, we have been using it.
We have been using it across our products. There's no incremental
costs. So it's embedded in our current product development
capabilities. On the generative AI side, I say you saw a sneak peek of
all the copilots.
The good news is all of those things, should generate positive outcomes
for us either in terms of incremental modules that customers would like
to buy, to enable certain functionality, or possibly reduce costs from
our capabilities, to deliver much superior customer support. So, I
think at this point in time, I would not in baking any incremental sort
of spend expectations in our forecast, as it relates to the
implementation of AI.
Dipak has given you guidance that we can continue to see operating
leverage, and operating margin, clearly some of that is driven by
expectations in AI, but I'd say we're being normal about it. We're not
overtly aggressive nor are we overtly conservative around it. And
hopefully, there'll be upside in that, if and when we start to see the
fruits of deploying it effectively across Palo Alto Networks.
Walter Pritchard
Thank you. Next we're going go to Andrew Nowinski from Wells Fargo with
Brian Essex from JPMorgan after that. Go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew Nowinski
Thanks, Walter. And congrats on a nice quarter as well. So I wanted to
ask about Zero Trust that's clearly a top priority - and really, it
seems like it's the only architecture that's capable of stopping a
sophisticated attack. And you showed how it requires hardware,
software, and SASE components. So, if we think about Zero Trust demand
continuing to ramp going forward, why would, firewall demand drop? I
think you said the 10% of total revenue in fiscal '26, if it's such a
critical component of the of your Zero Trust offering?
Nikesh Arora
It's important to understand. We didn't say it will drop 10% of
revenue. Everything else is growing really fast. I think it's important
to understand, like, it's not growing as fast as everything else. Look,
for the last five years, I've always been asked that hardware question.
I've been trying to avoid it for five years unsuccessfully. So thanks
again, Andrew, only took one question to get to it.
I think it's important to understand, as we started moving to the
cloud, people started coming to notion of software firewalls. And then
with this whole pandemic thing, remote work, and sort of distributed
network became a real thing. So what you're seeing is, that there are
different form factors, which are really good in different
circumstances.
Against the public cloud, you put a software firewall, you use VMs in
various scenarios, when throughput becomes really important hardware is
still the best option. And I don't think the whole world is going to
end up only in the public cloud. By the way, we also sell firewalls to
the cloud provider believe it or not, they need firewalls in their data
centers, because eventually the public cloud also runs in our data
center.
So, I think in that context, the demand for hardware is not going to go
away. I think what Anand showed you beautifully that you're going to
end up with all the form factors at most of our customers. And the key
is these things need to work better together. I think if you go today,
there are many customers who have a Palo Alto firewall and a firewall
from another vendor. Now if we can give them SASE, we can give them
software firewalls.
There is no reason that they should be on two hardware vendors when
they are a single software vendor, and a single SASE vendor. So, I
think the point we want to highlight here is, there is a further
consolidation opportunity in the firewall space driven by the Zero
Trust needs as well as the UI that Anand gave you a sneak peek into.
So, I think that's the way to think about it. We like hardware. It's
great.
Andrew Nowinski
Thanks.
Walter Pritchard
Great. Thanks, Andy. Next question is from Brian Essex at JPMorgan
followed by - Jonathan Ho at William Blair. Go ahead, Brian.
Brian Essex
Great. Thank you, Walter. And thanks for taking the question. And
Nikesh, thank you for making this a better Friday night than some of
those conspiracy theories floating around implied?
Nikesh Arora
We have 5,500 dialed in, Brian. That makes up, like, the last six
earnings calls we've had. So I don't know maybe there's bear here.
Brian Essex
Yes, so I just want to touch on the security copilot, Prisma Cloud
copilot XSIAM I would imagine these work best with your platform
products, but to what extent will you partner with other vendors? How
do you incentivize the use of how Alto's platform with these products
in mind. And will we get metrics to help us assess any improvement
attach rate with these, copilots and AI tools may drive and when we
might expect general availability, I know that's a lot of, but not one
topic?
Nikesh Arora
Yes. Let me tell you. I think that we've all heard of this concept
called hallucination or the idea that it doesn't give you the perfect
answer all the time, right.
Brian Essex
Yes.
Nikesh Arora
And I'd say we are working really hard to see how do, we reduce the
error rate in the answers that the copilot comes up with, because in
security, we can't afford wrong answers. So, I think our teams are
working really hard. What we've discovered in the process, is that
irrespective of which LLM you deploy, you need better knowledge
articles, you need better integration of the UI. So our teams are busy
doing a lot of non-regrettable work.
And you saw them give you some sort of glimpses into what the art of
the possible could be. I would say sometime before the end of the year,
we will start testing it with a bunch of customers to get real feedback
from customers, I think the best way to think about it is, like, the
examples you saw, it's like security is complicated. UI and security is
also complicated. If you don't know where to look, sometimes it's right
there. You just don't know where to look.
If you can ask that question, and give you the answer that improves the
productivity of all of our customers. It, improves the configuration
capability of all of our customers. It improves our ability to provide
real time customer support to our customer setting. There's lots of
advantages if done, right? And I say it's always like, people often,
overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term.
That's why we give you a three-year forecast. I think it may, we may
get the three-month or six-month wrong, or we'll not get the three or
five-year wrong. Three to five years from now, the world will be
different. UI will be 50% natural language. We'll be generating tons of
efficiency from people using AI driven tools. I think that's the
opportunity. And you don't get there if you don't work hard now.
Brian Essex
Fair enough. Thank you very much.
Walter Pritchard
Thanks, Brian. Next is Jonathan Ho from William Blair. And after that,
we're going to have Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Go ahead,
Jonathan.
Jonathan Ho
Thank you. And let me echo my congratulations as well. Just in terms of
your comments around reducing vendor sprawl and platform consolidation,
this has been a significant goal for the industry for some time. So why
do you think it will be different this time? And how can you sort of
sustain innovation across such a large set of products? Thank you.
Nikesh Arora
So, Jonathan, I think, you saw, I think Dipak, Lee, myself, all of us
have made this point, so did BJ around the fact that without
innovation, we're out we're out of the game. We launched 74 different
capabilities last year. And so, we'll probably do more next year than
74. But I think what's interesting, what you're seeing is these 74,
many of these are existing point products in the industry, which we're
re-launching by adapting them to our platforms.
And the reason it's going to work this time, Jonathan, because it's
working. Well, one of the deals we talked about, the SASE deal with a
large professional services organization, we consolidated seven
vendors, right? Our XSIAM deals, which totaled $200 million consolidate
on average three to seven vendors in the SOC. So it's working. Now the
question is, I'm already in the SOC. I've consolidated seven. I go to
my customers running to them and saying, listen.
You got these other five things hanging around. Look, I've got these
five new modules in XSIAM. Why do you want to do five new vendors, and
solutions which don't talk to each other, right? So I think what we
have in opportunities, once it's kind of like, I think you like to call
it land and expand. I think we're landing with our platforms. We used
to land with SASE. We used to land with firewalls. Now we're going to
say, listen. You have a hardware file. You have our SASE it looks
beautiful UI.
It brings it altogether when you clean up the rest of the
infrastructure. I think it's an evolution in the industry. I think,
five years ago as an idea, we're seeing it actually happen. You're
seeing us put distance between ourselves and single product vendors in
many categories, because people are seeing the power of the platform.
That's just the opportunity. And that's something BJ, Lee, Dipak, me
and the gang have to execute on, and it's just relentless execution
that's needed.
Lee Klarich
Jonathan, I'd like to add this to create my service. One is prior
attempts to do this generally required a tradeoff for the customer. It
was the capabilities that were delivered on their attempts to do a
platform where not industry leading. And so, the customer had to make a
tradeoff between, worse capabilities, but in one place, or
best-in-class capabilities, and that's a hard trade off in
cybersecurity.
That is one thing that we're not asking our customers to do. We're
making sure that everything we do is industry leading on its own. The
second thing we're doing is making sure that when we integrate it,
they're actually integrated together in solving hard problems that
can't be solved as standalone capabilities. So, we're it's not just
about consolidation, although that's a clear value. It's about
delivering technical, outcomes through the integration that cannot be
achieved otherwise.
Walter Pritchard
Great. Thank you, Jonathan. Next, we're going to go to Gabriela Borges
from Goldman Sachs. And after that, Roger Boyd from UBS. Go ahead,
Gabriela, with your question.
Gabriela Borges
Good afternoon. Thank you. My question is for BJ on the go-to-market,
and I'm looking to understand to what extent NGS cross sell is or isn't
still tied to the file of refresh cycle? And as you think about the
conversations you're having with customer and platformization, I'm
curious to what extent Microsoft is coming up in those conversations as
a potential security platform, and how you help customers think through
the advantages of standardizing on Palo Alto Networks instead of
potentially Microsoft at some point in the future with security?
BJ Jenkins
Good question. Look, I think all of this starts with what Lee ended
with is, we get to sell I think the best products in the industry, and
we deliver better customer outcomes. We have three primary
consolidation motions. One has been around, network security services
on the firewall, but also in the SASE. And actually, we have within
that now, we've landed customers with SASE, and are going back, and
getting the network firewall business.
So our core reps, tend to focus on that. They are - the account owner -
and represent the whole portfolio. The second motion is, we talked
about, code-to-cloud, and we usually land with workload protect or
posture management, and then branch out into other modules off of that
to either shift left or get a complete platform for the customer on
cloud security. With Cortex, we have three outstanding solutions that
we land with.
We either win with XDR, for customer focused on automation. XSOAR is a
great starting place for us, attack surface management with Expanse.
And, many of our first wins with XSIAM have been leveraging that
installed base, to deliver a full SOC transformation. Again, on the
surprising side, though, many of our XSIAM wins, we also didn't have an
installed base in Cortex and the customer jumped completely in. We have
specialists in those areas in both code-to-cloud and in Cortex. And so,
the core team works with those specialists, to run those consolidation
plays also.
Walter Pritchard
Great. Thanks. Next question is going to come from Roger Boyd at UBS,
followed by Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. Roger, go ahead with your
question.
Roger Boyd
Great. Thanks for the question. And a happy Friday. Nikesh, you
mentioned you're now extending the Cortex to the core sales force. I'm
wondering how you think about the repeatability of the success you've
seen with SASE? I think you mentioned last quarter, 80% pipeline
contribution from the core reps within a year of selling that product.
But if I think about SASE versus Cortex, and SASE may be benefiting by
being a little closer to the core network operation function that's
buying firewalls, how do you think about that as a challenge with the
core upselling Cortex? Any thoughts there would be great? Thanks.
Nikesh Arora
Look, the whole idea originally was to have sales specialists because
we were in the early stages of our products. We're trying to build them
out. We had lots of changes. We want to make sure they were trained and
available as extra resources. Now think about it, we did a $44 million
XSIAM deal. Everybody was involved. The core rep wasn't going to let
that deal go. That's a lot of money of commission for the core rep if
he or she can understand XSIAM.
So I'll tell you, BJ and I are going to have this wonderful sales
conference starting Sunday. I promise you, every one of those guys will
be lined up for the XSIAM session, because they want to learn more
about it because, see, this deal size, deal size is equal to dollars
for the company equal dollars for the salesperson. And they're all very
smart people. So, they're going to go gravitate towards where the real
business is.
So, I think when you can get salespeople to lean in to learn something,
it creates a great outcome. And also, guess what, I mean it's not like
people suddenly woke up yesterday and became Cortex specialist. They
used to sell cybersecurity before. They just did a good job of
embracing and getting trained. So our products are at a point where we
believe they are mature. We understand the differentiation of the
market.
There is reputation out there in the market. We have people in the back
who can stand up POCs. I think we can do this. I think we showed that
with SASE we can do this, and we can do this with Cortex. The cloud
thing is slightly different. Cloud is still early in the customer and
from an adoption perspective. It's a consumptive model.
It's an ACV ARR model. So that it lends itself to a slightly different
sales motion and there, we're not going to be in a hurry to merge that.
But I think from a Cortex perspective, it's not just merging the team.
It's opening up the floodgates for 3,000 people to sell it. That's the
way we think about it.
Walter Pritchard
Great. Thank you, Roger. Next question from Patrick Colville at
Scotiabank followed by Michael Turits at KeyBanc. Go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick, are you on? All right. We're going to go to Michael Turits at
KeyBanc and will be followed by Tal Liani at Bank of America. Go ahead,
Michael.
Michael Turits
Hi, guys. Good evening. And just a sort of question for Dipak. So you
have the 10% bogey for out there for hardware in the out year. How do
we think about product, which is a broader category at this point, both
in terms of how that ramps over the years? And what other products or
categories might fall into that? SD-WAN has been in there, portions of
the M-Series. So how should we think about that line in a dynamic way?
Dipak Golechha
So I think, obviously, we've got the technical side of Watson products.
There's VMs, there's SD-WAN. There's all of those different things that
are in there. I think a lot of it will depend on like what customers
want in terms of their network security architecture. We believe that
the software side of the product continues to grow faster.
We've been talking about that a lot. I think last quarter, we talked
about, how 30% of product revenue was software. But honestly, we're not
guiding to product anymore. And I think, the reason for that is,
because it's not as relevant, right...?
Nikesh Arora
I think, Michael, one of the things that, I think, we should tell you
is that we're in the process of reexamining how to classify the revenue
to make it much more easier for you guys to think about it, because
product was the artifact of hardware. It comes from - in 1919 or 1930.
Dipak Golechha
1970, yes.
Nikesh Arora
SEC - 1970, thank you, FASB requirement that has to be physically
tangible. And I think with the emergence of SaaS companies, it's become
sort of hard to do that. So, I think we're going to take a look at
that, and I didn't want to do it on a Friday night, and to add one more
exciting thing you guys have to think about. So as the year progresses,
we'll find a better way of letting you think about our revenue, which
is more measurable, more trackable and possibly more predictable for
you guys.
But yes, this is like a product we don't have to tell you the percent
of product that's not hardware every time to tell you how to split that
between hardware and software. I think it suffice us to say, we're
looking at it as a business across the board. We look at RPO, we look
at revenue, obviously. We look at margin. We look at free cash flow,
which our numbers we're guiding to. And that's what we manage on a sort
of day-to-day basis to run the business.
Michael Turits
Just in case, Dipak, you weren't thinking about our workload, we do
appreciate not having to rebuild the model tonight. Thanks, Nikesh.
Nikesh Arora
I was hoping one of you guys was going to show up with a glass of wine,
at least, but...
Michael Turits
I got on my T-shirt and this is as close as I'm going to get.
Nikesh Arora
All right. That's good.
Walter Pritchard
All right. Thanks, Michael, for your question. We're actually going to
go back to Patrick Colville, who I understand is now connected from
Scotiabank, and then we'll go to Tal Liani from Bank of America.
Patrick, go ahead.
Patrick Colville
Yes. Thanks, Walter. I never thought I was going to hear The Cure,
Friday I'm in Love, on an earnings call. So a really quality way to
start a Friday evening. Dipak, another one for you. I mean you've
shared lots of like juicy metrics with us. The standout metric, to me
at least, was Palo Alto guiding to, was it 17% to 19% billings CAGR to
fiscal '26. I mean, clearly, implicit in that is the firm's
consolidation message you see resonating with customers, which we see
as well. But what I wanted to ask is in that billings target, you
mentioned your M&A philosophy, but I just want to double click. Does
that billings target need a steady stream of tuck-in acquisitions to
hit it? And then also would Palo Alto ever do a transformative deal? I
mean what would kind of change your mind there to do a transformative
deal?
Nikesh Arora
Let me start with the second question first. If you don't think we've
transformed the company in the last five years, I don't know, man. I
don't know what else to do to make you happy, okay? I'm sorry. It's
Friday night, I'm going home. So I think we've been doing
transformative for the last five years, and what we've shown you is
transformative in itself. And I'm just, in part, just - I don't - look,
you don't need me to buy businesses for you.
You guys, you're shareholders, you're smart, you can do it yourself.
Unless there's a huge leverage that we can prove that something we can
take 1 plus 1 and make that two, possibly 2.5 for you guys, it's not
sensible for us to do it. And so far, we looked at everything in the
world. We look at everything every day. We see what - how things
operate. So far, we haven't felt compelled because we have a lot of
work to do ourselves.
I mean if we've been busy integrating a transformative acquisition,
we'll miss the next 5 trends because we're busy. So that's how we think
about it. It gives you some insight on how we think about it. As it
relates to tuck-in acquisitions, I think the better way to see if it
goes back to what I said. Look, there are technologies out there that
other people are working on. But we are not the only security company
in the world.
We're not working on everything. And if something becomes relevant,
something becomes an important feature that we think is needed by our
customers, and we haven't been working on it, it behooves us to go out
and partner or acquire, which is what I said. So should you expect us
to maintain a rhythm around how we acquire companies? Yes. But you
should understand, we have a five-year track record of doing that
responsibility, doing it judiciously, doing it in a way that we
integrate the acquisition, doing it in a way that would generate more
ARR.
And pretty much most of the ones we bought in the last five years have
really not contributed on day 1 to the ARR or revenue because they've
been mostly tech acquisitions. So I think that's the way to think about
it, if that helps.
Walter Pritchard
Next question from Tal Liani at Bank of America, followed by Joe Gallo
at Jefferies. Tal, go ahead with your question.
Tal Liani
I want to ask about the synergy between the various components of
next-generation security. When you talk about Prisma Cloud and Prisma
Access and Cortex and even firewalls, talk about the synergy to a
customer. Are these the same customers that they have benefits of
buying multiple solutions from you? Or are you addressing conceptually
different customers with different products and kind of addressing the
entire market?
Nikesh Arora
Tal, you get the question of the evening award. In the last 5 years, we
went out and we used our various products to do the land. We sold SASE
where it was needed. We sold hardware firewalls where it's needed. We
sold software firewalls where it was needed. 1,700 of our customers in
some way, shape or form, have all of these things. I think the next
step in our evolution is going back to them and saying, listen, you
have the hardware firewalls.
It works way better with SASE. You want to integrate this across as a
network security platform? That's where we have to show value. And you
started to see glimpses of that what I ensure you. Cloud XDR is a
combination of endpoint and firewall data. That has been now expanded
to all the data that you have in XSIAM across your entire state. So now
you're - we're offering capabilities that Splunk has.
We're offering capability that QRadar has, we're offering capability
that Chronicle and Sentinel have in XSIAM, right? So we're doing that.
To your question, you should expect us to say, listen, you have XSIAM,
if you had Prisma Cloud, it will work a lot better. If you have the
XDR, the Prisma Cloud host protection and XDR host protection should
work a lot better. So you'll start to see us selectively start to
create -- demonstrate value across our platforms.
So it's a great question, I think. But it needs to -- customers need to
be evolved to that because everybody has a bunch of products out there
and not everybody is lined up with the same day for end of life. So I
think you're right, you could see more of that from us in the next 3 to
5 years.
BJ Jenkins
I'd just add one thing. For many of the large deals that you saw in the
presentation, it's not just looked at as a solution acquisition cost.
We put together for that customer not only the solution acquisition
costs and the better security outcome you get, we talk about their
operating costs, how they have to train their people, how many people
do they need to operate these solutions in the environment and the
savings they get.
So that when they go to justify an 8-figure deal with their CFO,
they're talking about reducing capital and operating costs with better
security outcomes. And I think Lee hit on this in his earlier answer.
There hasn't been a company that's really been able to do that before
in this industry. And when you combine those two, I think it's what's
helped us in a tough economic environment to continue to close larger
and larger deals with those customers.
Walter Pritchard
Great. Thank you. Next up, we have Joe Gallo from Jefferies. And our
final question will come from Adam Borg at Stifel. Go ahead, Joe.
Joe Gallo
And great results, and I appreciate the long-term framework. Just
wanted to drill into the visibility into fiscal '24 guidance. You guys
just stood up 18% billings growth, which is incredible on a 44% comp. I
imagine that had some backlog benefit, though. Now you're guiding to an
acceleration in billings next year relative to 4Q which, as an opening
guide, we would presume to be conservative. So what underpins the
confidence in that, especially as you have hardware and duration
headwinds?
Nikesh Arora
So first of all, Joe, you did a great job on CNBC today navigating the
questions about our stock. So thank you very much. On your question,
look, we have conviction in some of the platforms, like let's start
with our favorite one today. It's like XSIAM came out of left field. It
did $200 million for us. Even we - would have been happy at $100
million for our fiscal year. It came in at $200 million.
So part of what you're seeing is that there are some products where we
have tailwinds. And I think the part we're sort of normalizing for is
the - not normalizing for, the part we sort of we said to you, the part
that we're careful about is the hardware normalization, which we've
been anticipating. We're always positively surprised every quarter, and
it finally came home in spades in Q4.
So I think the forecast we have is what we represent to our Board.
That's what we're saying we're going to go do. That's what we're
telling you. Now are we going to try and work hard to go beat it? Yes,
of course, that's what we do every time. There's lots of puts and
takes. So based on the puts and takes, based on where we are in
different products based on what plans we have to launch different
things, this is our best estimate as of now. And we're trying to give
it our best to go out and deliver it.
I think that's the best way to describe how you think about our
numbers. Yes, of course, it's hardware headwinds. There's SASE
tailwinds. I don't know if you saw, we became the only vendor in SASE
far right in a single vendor, sort of SD-WAN plus SSE. So there's some
good tailwinds we have. Customers pay attention to these kinds of
things.
Walter Pritchard
All right. Our last question from Adam Borg at Stifel. Go ahead, Adam.
Adam Borg
Awesome. Maybe just for Nikesh or BJ, just on the federal vertical talk
of some large deals in the quarter. Maybe just talk about the
opportunity that you're seeing, especially as we head into the fiscal
year-end for the government next quarter?
BJ Jenkins
Yes. I think to Nikesh's credit, even before I came on board, there was
a large investment in our federal team. And the knowledge that with
many of the federal directives, the budget being put in, and obviously,
some of the geopolitical events, it was an opportunity for the company.
And so we're seeing the benefits of many of those forward investments,
and we're going to continue to invest there. There's obviously
large-scale projects that are occurring.
We had one last year that we announced was our largest deal of the
year. There - those take a long time to mature. And we're involved in
many of them. So I feel like we have a great opportunity going forward
in that space. There are specific ones obviously out there that we're
looking to -- we've got some first orders and then gain momentum with
them, and I think we'll be talking more about that in the coming
quarters.
Walter Pritchard
All right. Thanks, Adam, for your question. With that, we're going to
close it out, and I'm going to pass it back to Nikesh for some closing
remarks.
Nikesh Arora
Thank you, Walter. I just want to take the opportunity one more time to
thank all of you. I know this was a unique one. Will you be telling
your future mentees that you're going to mentor in the analyst
community, maybe talking about that one Friday afternoon call which
Palo Alto hosted out of their sort of misdirected sense of trying to
get you guys to go do this over the weekend for us. So, we really
appreciate taking the time.
We apologize for taking up some of your Friday. We will be available
tomorrow and day after for some of you who've been kind enough to
schedule time to talk to us because we want to make sure you get all
your questions answered. It would be remiss of me not to both
acknowledge and thank our employees, which is what makes all of this
happen, and all of our partners out there who help us deliver this
capability.
And of course, I also want to thank my entire management team for
delivering a really, really good FY '23 and what has been a yet another
sort of different year. And I don't think I've had a normal year in the
last five years between the pandemic and supply chain and inflation and
money and this. So I look forward to possibly a normal year next year.
And again, once again, thank you very, very much for all your support
and your indulgence.
