Fortinet (TICKER: FTNT) Fortinet Inc Ftnt Barclays 2022 Global Technology Media And Telecommunications Conference
Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) Barclays 2022 Global Technology, Media and
Telecommunications Conference Call December 7, 2022 12:50 PM ET
Company Participants
Peter Salkowski - Vice President of Investor Relations
Ken Xie - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Saket Kalia - Barclays
Saket Kalia
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day 1 of the Barclays TMT
Conference. My name is Saket Kalia. I cover software here at Barclays.
Very happy to have with us the team from Fortinet. We've got Ken Xie,
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. We've also got Pete Salkowski,
Head of Investor Relations. We've got about 30 minutes together.
Maybe what we could do just to frame this is we'll spend maybe 20 or 25
minutes just with some fireside chat here with the team. And then I'd
love to make this interactive. So, if you have any questions, just pop
up your hand, we can have a mic run around and would love to make the
best use of these guys' time. So maybe with that, Ken, Peter, thank you
so much for the time.
Peter Salkowski
Okay. Thank you. Happy to be here.
Saket Kalia
Absolutely.
Peter Salkowski
Quick safe harbor?
Saket Kalia
Please do, Peter. Yes, absolutely.
Peter Salkowski
There is - look at that top on the screen. You can all read that at
your leisure, please do. Quick apologies, Keith Jensen, our CFO, is
home with flu today and so he won't make it, unfortunately, so I'm
filling in for him. And I'm not going to read that completely. You can
all read it at your leisure. It's up on our website. I'm sure in many,
many places. So we'll just turn it back to you.
Saket Kalia
Absolutely, yes. Absolutely. We wish Keith a swift recovery there.
Saket Kalia
Ken, I'd love to start with you. I was wondering if you could just talk
about some of the points from last quarter's results that you were
particularly proud of. And Peter, maybe for you, maybe you could just
help us fill in some more of the financial detail just to help level
set us all as we dig deeper into the business.
Ken Xie
Thanks. Like 3, 4 areas, we feel we're doing quite well, much better
than any other competitors. One is the SD-WAN and the OT is still
growing very, very strong. So, the SD-WAN growing like 45%
year-over-year. Now probably about 15%, 16% of the business now,
continue to grow very, very strong. I do believe SD-WAN market itself
will keeping grow like a 30% year-over-year in the next 5 to 10 years.
At the same time, we're gaining market share there because compared to
a few other competitors, whether Cisco, VMware, HPE, Palo Alto, the
AllComp acquisition and also their product also cannot integrate with
their existing products. And also kind of way behind on the function
and the performance.
OT also, I believe, will be a bigger market than SD-WAN. So we have
about 10% business in OT, grow 75% year-over-year. Also, very, very
strong growth. Eventually will be a much bigger market than SD-WAN.
Also, we started to more invest in the enterprise sales. It's quite
different than the strategy we have already there is more focused on
channel.
So, enterprise sales need direct marketing, direct sales force. So,
we're happy - like last quarter, the enterprise sales like a Fortune
2000 company almost double year-over-year. And at the same time, the
deal over $1 million grew 85% year-over-year, and the dollar value was
more than double.
So you can see a lot of bigger deal, big enterprise that in kind our -
become a focused new growth area. So, we still have a small percentage
come from enterprise, but I do see the momentum very strong and also
the pipeline also very, very strong this quarter. So, we feel it's a
pretty strong position to keeping - gaining market share.
Saket Kalia
That's great.
Peter Salkowski
Yes. I think just to add on the deals over $1 million. We had a record
quarter for deals over $5 million, which we haven't really spoken about
in the past. So, just to kind of give you a sense. And then I think the
other thing to be interesting that I think, the Street was waiting for
over the last several quarters is service revenue. You're starting to
see service revenue growth accelerate.
I think we were just over 28% this last quarter. I think our guidance
for the full-year implies about a 29%-ish growth for service revenue in
the fourth quarter. If you go back to earlier in the year, I think
there was some concern that we weren't seeing the price increases
showing up in services revenue.
As we've been trying to point out is if you look at the change in
short-term deferred, it gives you a sense of what's going to happen
eventually in the service revenue because the income statements are
backward looking, a number in terms of services. And so I think seeing
that starting to show up in the income statement, I think, is something
that I think can give people a little more comfort.
Ken Xie
Yes. One more point, really. Right now, it's the first time we called
enhanced technology, which is the FortiCare sales is about 1/3, the
first time over 30%. So that part grew 45% year-over-year, and will
continue growing because it will come from consolidation, also the
strong position in the fabric, which will automate integrate together
because most products, we have only - we traditionally call the fabric
or enhanced technology internal developed, which gave us better
integration from day 1, better automation from day 1 compared to pretty
much all the other competitors, they all come from acquisition to build
something beyond their core product. So we have all for the U.S.
integrated a lot of function, but also the fabric some additions in the
product or design most of these are internally to automate way much
better.
Saket Kalia
Well, there's a lot of fun stuff in both those comments that I would
just love to dig into, but maybe another place to dig into with you,
Ken. I mean you've been in the security industry for decades now.
You've seen different cycles come and go. And we've had a couple of
healthy years of product revenue following COVID, which kind of
supported the idea that there's been a refresh cycle or a catch-up
cycle, whatever you want to call it. I guess the question for you, Ken,
is where do you think we're at in that cycle? And how do you think it
looks going into '23 from an industry perspective?
Ken Xie
I believe '23 will go back to normal before pandemic, which the product
revenue grow probably between 10% to 20%. I'm not giving any forecast
just since we'll be going back to a little bit more normal. Because if
you look in last 2 years, there's 2 things driven some product revenue
growth. One thing is, the supply chain issue. So, we somehow managed
little bit better than other competitors because we have own
operational manufacturer, kind of more under own control and also, on
average, we keep about 6 month's inventory.
So, when the supply chain issue happen in Q2 last year, we have no
problem for Q2, Q3, which also grow like 40%, something like that. And
then Q4 is the first time - and also, we are the only security company
to disclose that we're working some backlog issues because majority
backlog also come from FortiGate.
So now the scenes are different now. So, that's why starting last
quarter, we feel the backlog information probably a little bit
misleading now too much information because the majority of backlog
I'll kind of go back to the switch and routing our AP, which is more
manual related no longer is a FortiGate. And at the same time, in the
backlog no longer growth starting to flat out or even going down now.
So that's a few - but if you look at overall space, they do have the
traditional firewall continue to refresh every 4, 5 years because just
like any other network device after 4, 5 years will be too slow. But
network security try to address the market much more beyond security -
a traditional security firewall. And it's really go to the one side,
like SD-WAN, like the 5G and also OT security. And also, go internal -
to the internal segmentation and also go to the cloud.
All this is much bigger than the refresh. So, if you refresh really not
much material to us. Even it could be a little bit slow down. We do see
in the last two recession in 2000, 2008, some customer may delay
purchase of some of the traditional firewall. But because right now,
they address so many new issues, like we say SD-WAN - actually SD-WAN
costs from I have to say about 40% to 50% cost if they deploy SD-WAN
today. And that's also - we have a press release actually this morning,
it's a study by Forrester.
That's where - there's a few big enterprise customers from their study,
they show the ROI will be 300%, the payback period to deploy our SD-WAN
solution - pretty much, yes, exactly. So, that's where it's more cost
saving for the customer even during the recession. We also can
consolidate a few different solutions into a single box. And so that's
really more benefit to the customer even during the recession. So, that
we see as a huge opportunity to continue to drive the product revenue
growth.
Saket Kalia
Got it. Got it.
Peter Salkowski
I think, Saket, the interesting thing, everybody wants to try to figure
out what product revenue growth is going to be in 2023. It's been the
number one question that I get repeatedly over the last several weeks.
I think one of the things to think about is just the operating system.
At the end of the day, what drives our - one of the things that really
drives our business is the ability to have multiple different
capabilities built into the operating system.
So, when we talk about things like single vendor SASE, which is the
press release we had about a month ago, that didn't get a lot of press
or Universal Zero Trust Network Access. What we're talking about there
is the ability to deliver in multiple different form factors, whether
it's on-prem, in a software form factor or in the cloud and across
multiple different capabilities all built into one operating system.
And so that gives us a lot of different growth drivers, whether it's
SD-WAN or OT or Zero Trust or SASE or whatever, typical firewalling, if
you will, let's go back to the basics.
The operating system is what allows us to do that and the robustness of
that operating system, the fact that it's primarily been integrated and
created in-house by our own R&D development group, which, by the way,
we have 3,000 R&D people in our company and about 2/3 of those are
software engineers writing that software, really gives us an advantage
to integrate and provide a single platform across any of those
different points of the attack surface and in whatever form factor the
customer wants.
So, what that does, the product revenue growth in '23 versus '24 versus
'25, the drivers are really that operating system and its ability to
provide those different capabilities. And the long-term drivers, which
I'm sure we'll talk about repeatedly today is convergence and
consolidation.
The concept that security and networking are getting closer together
and the concept that companies have too many point products, and they
are looking - you've heard that over the last month through all of the
different cybersecurity companies that have reported since their
October quarters, they're all talking about consolidation, right?
They're also talking about profitability and growth, which we've been
talking about for years, but you're hearing those same messages being
repeated [by others] [ph].
Saket Kalia
Yes, absolutely.
Ken Xie
Yes. One other interesting area is customer and also even partner
starting to inquire us already in the last 2 months has never happened
before, was the power consumption of the product. So, that's we're
starting like the last earnings call. I think maybe a few weeks ago,
when we started also this call, every new product what's the power
consumption. So, we will be able to save over 80% energy power
consumption coming in, that's average compared to other competitors.
So, that's where - that's on the system level. In the chip level on the
FortiASIC chip for the same secure computation compared to general
purpose CPU, that FortiASIC chip can only use like 2% to 3% of power
consumption. So that's also a lot of our service provider, cloud
provider like that idea a lot because the power consumption probably
the biggest cost for a lot of cloud computing, for a lot of other
things.
So, that's where the technology we spent more than 20 years to develop.
Eventually what we also not only increase the performance and also can
add more function at the same time as much lower power consumption. So,
that's starting to get pretty interesting for a lot of our customers.
Saket Kalia
Yes, absolutely. I mean if I kind of take what both of you have talked
about here in terms of the OS and the power consumption, really, the
way that I would summarize it would be additional value for performance
that you guys have consistently provided, right? And listen, given the
supply chain constraints, I think, industry-wide, I think that most
firewall - probably all firewall vendors, right, have responded to sort
of those increased component costs with price increases of themselves -
price adjustments.
Maybe for you, Peter. Can you just remind us what those pricing actions
have been over the last year or so? And you talked about the revenue
piece. I'm curious if you can talk just about how we should think about
trickling that - how should we - we should think about that trickling
into billings as well? Does that make sense?
Peter Salkowski
Yes. I mean - so we did 2 price increases in 2021, one in August,
beginning of August, one at the beginning of November, combined those -
we disclosed those as being in a total basis - on a gross basis of 12%.
We're probably not somewhere in the 4 - 5% to 5.5% net back to us in
terms of those price increases. We've done 3 additional price increases
in 2022, one every quarter, not as big as the first 2, but additional
price increases.
Basically - and the reason for those price increases have been to
offset cost increases, right? The expedite fees we've had to pay for
getting supply, the higher transportation costs that we've had to pay
to get things shipped to us quickly as opposed to sending them by boat
across the ocean. And so really trying to maintain our product gross
margin. And if you look at the numbers, I think we've kind of stuck in
the low 60% range, which is kind of where product margins have been for
a long time.
So, we are - we have been able to so far offset those pricing - those
cost increases with our price increases. The thing with the income
statement and kind of going back to my service comment earlier is, the
price increases for products show up immediately, right, they're sold
in periods. The service revenue or the services are sold as a
percentage of products. So, the price increases are showing up and are
getting attached to the services.
The difference is, they get deferred to the balance sheet and deferred
revenue before they ever show up in the income statement. And so,
you're starting to see the benefit this year, certainly in the second
and third quarters, you're starting to see the benefit of the price
increases showing up on the services line. But you can really see it if
you look at the short-term deferred.
If you go back to the fourth quarter of 2020, the growth in short-term
deferred on a year-over-year basis was 20.5%. Seven quarters later,
it's 31.7%. And so, you're seeing the price increases showing up on the
short-term deferred, you should start to see that flow into the income
statement at some point.
Saket Kalia
Got it. Got it. Ken, I'd actually love to - I'd love to move to the
SD-WAN market, right? Because you've obviously disrupted the SD-WAN
market by bundling this with the firewall. And I think that goes back
to the benefits of the OS that you called out earlier. Maybe the
question for you is, how much room is left for adoption there? And are
there any different approaches that you want to take with the SD-WAN
business, open ended, in 2023, if at all?
Ken Xie
The Secure SD-WAN feed out, we call the convergence of networking and
security quite well. So, SD-WAN actually is not the first networking
function we tried. We actually - 15 years ago, we also try to secure
WiFi, but at that time, maybe when the WiFi market go too quick or
we're too small, so we did not make much impact. So, we're also
starting to develop the secure SDN eventually also benefit a lot of
Secure SD-WAN.
So last, we started to release like 5, 6 years ago, and then quickly
gaining market share because whether the competitor most come from
acquisition, which is much slower on innovation other things. And also,
we have perfect timing to go to the market. So, we are large enough
starting making the impact in the space.
So, I do believe long-term wise, SD-WAN will be replaced majority of
the routing. And at the same time, we'll be continue to, like I
mentioned, grow like 30% year-over-year in the next 5 to 10 years. And
at the same time, it's moreover a fragmented market. We do believe
we're keeping - gaining market share.
So, we are now in probably #2, #3 in the space, but you can look at the
#1, #2 and other top 5. We're the only one internally developed and
internal integrate together. And it's the same OS system is the leader
in both SD-WAN market, in the network firewall market and also part of
the SASE, some other solution there.
So, it's the integrated single solution, single box single-wire
solution has a huge benefit to customer. And that we see the huge value
we can provide to customers drive a lot of strong growth. Even like
today's press release, there's a lot of customers, they see the huge
benefit of using the Fortinet SD-WAN.
Peter Salkowski
Yes. I think Ken made the comment - used the word in his comment there
that I want to reinforce and that is SASE, right? Gartner's definition
of SASE has changed over the last 4 years since they've kind of talked
about it as a definition. And about a year ago or so, they started
talking about as a hybrid cloud solution, right? Initially, they said
that all cloud delivered, and they realize that some - first of all,
the companies aren't ready to go all cloud. I don't think they ever
will.
I think it's going to be a hybrid cloud world for a really long time.
And so, Gartner changed the definition of SASE, say some of these
things need to be delivered on-premise. Some of these things can be
CASB and WAF are cloud-delivered security. So, they have to be
delivered in the cloud. But they've changed the definition again
recently to be SD-WAN plus Secure Service Edge, right?
SD-WAN is the delivery method for the data throughout the SEC,
throughout the secure service edge. And owning that real estate, call
it a bottleneck, if you will, you kind of look at it as the cloud
on-ramp, right? The SD-WAN is what's delivering the data to the cloud
and receiving the data back from the cloud. And so, owning that real
estate, kind of being in that bottleneck position gives us an
advantage. We can follow the data back to the data center out to the
cloud, wherever it goes, but we're directing the traffic.
We're controlling where the traffic is flowing. So, we think that's
really important. And then having an operating system that can provide
all of those capabilities of the SASE solution within one operating
system, not only becomes attractive to enterprise customers, it becomes
really attractive to service providers because at the end of the day,
service providers want to provide a SASE solution to their customers,
but they want to provide it from one operating system.
They don't want to have to go out and buy CASB and WAF from one vendor
and SD-WAN from another vendor. And then all the other different
components of SASE from other vendors and having to cobble it together.
They want one solution. They want one operating system. And so, having
a single vendor SASE solution, which is what we're talking about, is
extremely important to them.
Saket Kalia
So, I mean, it couldn't have teed it up as cleanly as that. I mean,
maybe for you, Ken. I mean, I think SASE's been very topical in the
industry. How do you think about Fortinet's SASE initiative in 2023? I
mean certainly, we nearly own the SD-WAN market, certainly in the
firewall. What else do you do - does Fortinet need to really have a
full SASE solution? And how do you make that more well known, I guess,
from a marketing perspective?
Ken Xie
Put it in this way, a secure service or security for a lot of service
provider will continue to be one of the biggest markets in the
cybersecurity space. But a lot of service providers, including other
telecom companies, they're a little bit behind in the last few years,
say within the traditional firewall VPN service. So, they're not - can
go up additional service like whether the CASB the sandboxing, some
WAF, some other service.
So that's traditionally like a service provider count about 30% or more
of business if you look back to 30 years ago, not - 10 years ago. So,
that's where we do believe the service provider business will keeping -
coming back, but they do need to offer additional service beyond the
traditional firewall VPN. So, SaaS is a good example.
So they are a much broader service as a service model. But for SASE
itself, I feel the technology is still not quite mature enough. So,
they need to be more distributed because if you look at some SASE
provider, they can - they have a 100 PoP worldwide. So, customers have
to forward their traffic to their PoP being processed and then sending
back. And then within their PoP, they have quite a lot of different
systems to [handle different] [ph] security functions.
Some do the traditional networking firewall VPN, some do like CASB,
some do sandboxing or WAF, it's efficient across all these multiple box
within the PoP to process all the secure computing there. So, for us, I
do believe a SASE function just like some other traditional security
service, they need to be offered in the same OS, in the same system and
to be very efficient, integrated together because a lot of different
SASE service, they are not well integrated. Like SD-WAN different box
compared to the traditional security compared to all the CASB, some
other centers, right?
So if you can integrate in the same OS and then use the same system,
they can be more distributed and be more efficient and also reduce all
the latency and better performance. But as I see today's SASE using -
provided by some SASE provider is not quite mature, they need to keep
it improving.
So, that's where starting like a few years ago, we do promoting our own
SASE should be developed in the same OS using the same system and will
be more easily to be distributed and to be managed by a lot of service
provider, even some customers they can manage some of themselves. So,
that's where we continue to invest in this area.
Like last year, we first released FortiOS 7.0. We're building out the
SASE and ZTNA. Also, this year, we keep improving the 7.2 for the OS,
out of SASE, ZTNA, all the CASB within the same OS. And some of the
function already using ASIC to accelerate, some function not yet still
using the general purpose CPU. But give us a few more years where we
have most function being accelerated by the ASIC will be much better
performance, low cost. At the same time, it will be more easy to
deploy.
So, I think the market will continue to evolve in, and I do believe
long-term service provider, including a lot of cloud providers like
whether Microsoft or Google or whatever, they can easily jump into this
market because they have the infrastructure. They own a lot of data
center, a lot of PoP. They can easily turn this on compared to some
other SASE player today.
So, they have some advantage. We are more prefer to partner with this
kind of bigger cloud provider telecom company. So, that's also instead
of competing with them for the customer, which using their
infrastructure, which they have cost relation, we would rather
promoting together the solution with them and also develop a core
technology, which we are very, very good in the grid OS, using ASIC to
accelerate and also better security service, helping them to provide
service to customers.
That's where we continue to invest a lot in this area, but will be more
integrated and more kind of use the ASIC to accelerate and eventually
more leveraged service provider instead of more approach ourselves. We
do have a lot of PoP in ourselves, but I do feel this is not a
long-term solution.
So, that's where we leverage the infrastructure from telecom, from
cloud providers will be much more efficient and also SASE has to be
more distributed and more in real time, more push towards the edge
instead of all this kind of go to the power process and back and forth,
multiple systems. So, it's kind of need to be the architecture not
mature enough.
Saket Kalia
Very interesting. We've got about 7 or 8 minutes left here. I'm going
to shift to some financial questions here. But before I do that, any
questions here from the audience? Peter, maybe for you, I want to jump
back to Q3 results where Keith also provided - Ken and Keith provided a
Q4 guide. And it certainly came through. I think we considered a bit of
macro uncertainty here. I was wondering if you could just walk us
through your approach to setting that Q4 guide anecdotally, right? And
maybe any detail you can provide just on the macro assumptions embedded
in that guide? How you thought about it, just given all the uncertainty
that we have right now?
Peter Salkowski
Yes. I mean I think the change that occurred, if you look at the
guidance we gave from a billings perspective for the fourth quarter,
it's interesting. If you look at the guidance that we gave, pretty much
every number went up in terms of revenue, margins. The only one that
really changed was billings, which is a forward-looking metric. And if
you look back to when we gave guidance for the third quarter on the
second quarter call, which would have been in August versus the
November call for the third quarter and then giving explicit guidance
for fourth quarter.
The reason billings came down slightly was really concerns about macro
in the sense that if looked just our $1 million deals, right? We just
talked about how successful we were in the third quarter, 153 deals
over $1 million. In the fourth quarter last year, it was the first time
we went over 100 deals over $1 million.
So think about that. But as we look at the fourth quarter, what we were
seeing is a lot of deals over $1 million, which is great, but at the
same time, looking at, sort of the progression of those deals through
the sales cycle, they seem to be going slower than they have been in
the past. And then having conversations with the sales - head of sales
and the sales teams, the conversation being that we're very confident
in the fact that we have these transactions in play.
We just don't know if they're going to close in the next 2 months.
right? Because to land in the fourth quarter, you got 2 months, right,
from November to the end of December. So, we took a little bit more of
a conservative approach with regards to where we think the number of
deals that will close over $1 million. And that led to, I think, a 3%
decline and what the billings guidance was.
We went back and looked because we didn't show this on the earnings
call, but went back and looked after the call and said, well, how many
deals are in the pipeline for over $1 million as of October 1, right?
Sort of a snapshot that potentially could close this quarter. They will
all close, that never happens, right? But just what's in the pipeline,
what's happening and then looked back to the same snapshot a year ago.
If you look at just the number of deals over $1 million, the number of
deals is up 50% year-over-year in terms of deals over $1 million
sitting in the pipeline as of October 1 that potentially could close.
And the billings on those deals are up 60% on a year-over-year basis.
So, we're seeing the transactions. We're involved in these as possible
deals to close, but they are getting longer scrutiny.
They are - more scrutiny, longer times to look at it. And I think
companies are just - you're not going to say, oh, we'll give you a 2%,
5% discount, and they'll close on you. That's not the way they operate.
They'll close when they're ready to close, when the customer is ready
to sign some of it. So, I think taking a more conservative approach on
that is what really led us to lower our guidance.
Saket Kalia
I think that's a really prudent approach and a really interesting
tidbit there just on the $1 million-plus deals. I mean, Peter, just to
stay with you because it's funny. It's always the forest in the trees,
right, when you're thinking about a business included. We've talked a
lot about the trees. I want zoom out in the forest a little bit, right,
and just talk about some of the medium - the medium-term financial
targets. Maybe just for the benefit of the group, can you just recap
what some of those medium-term financial targets are? And then I've got
a follow-up on the back of that here for Ken.
Peter Salkowski
Sure. So, we had an Analyst Day back in May. We reiterated these
numbers on the earnings call in November. We said the medium-term
guidance is for 2025. So, we're guiding to $10 billion in billings for
2025, $8 billion in revenue at - greater than or equal to average 25%
non-GAAP operating margin over that period of time from 2022 to 2025.
And adjusted free cash flow margin in the mid- to high 30%. Those are
the numbers we gave.
Saket Kalia
Got it. Got it. Ken, maybe for you. I'd love to think about the
profitability here. I mean, even to Peter's point, just the margin
target of 25% plus through fiscal '25. I think Fortinet has done such a
great job of actually outperforming that through this time. So, maybe
the question for you is, how are you thinking about investing in the
business and sort of balancing top line growth with margin expansion
going forward?
Ken Xie
I think we always want to keep a healthy margin. So, we feel 25% above
will be pretty healthy margin. And also company has been GAAP profit
since the IPO 13 years ago. On the other side, if you consider the
space still, however, fragmented space, we do have a very good
technology, we can keep in gaining market share. So that's what we also
need to invest in some of the growth. Like I mentioned earlier, for the
enterprise sales, sometimes they take a longer sales cycle, average
maybe take about 12 months to see some good return there.
So, that's where we need to continue to invest. That's where compared
to a few other competitor in the space, some of them probably just more
of our growth, almost no profit on the GAAP base. Some other maybe to
profit has no growth. So, we want to have a little bit both healthy
margin and maintain above market growth. So, that's the strategy we
have been doing for the last 20 years.
Saket Kalia
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We've just got another minute or so left
here. One of the questions we're trying to ask all of our companies
here at the conference, just given all the uncertainty around macro is
- and I'll - maybe Peter, I'll direct this one to is a little bit more
financial. What percent of your annual billings, revenue, whatever
metric you want to speak to comes from new logo business? And can you
talk about how that new business has performed in prior recessions?
Peter Salkowski
So, new business is about 10% in the quarter. So, I think this last
quarter, we added somewhere in the range of, I think it was 6,100 new
customers in the third quarter. Obviously, a lot of that's going to be
at the SMB level when you have that magnitude of new logos. Certainly,
some of those are going to be an enterprise level as well. They
represent about 10% of billings.
The interesting statistic from a going forward perspective, if you look
at the service revenue, for example, if you look at the percentage of
deferred revenue in the fourth quarter - the third quarter that came
from new customers, it represent - well, any - wouldn't even be new.
Any service contract that was signed in the third quarter would have
captured all of the price increases we've done over the last 5
quarters. And I said earlier, we've done 5 price increases over 5
quarters.
Only 10% of the deferred revenue that would have been signed in the
third quarter actually has all 5 price increases. So, other service
contracts that are sitting in deferred revenue that haven't come into
the income statement, either a 4, 3, 2, 1 or could have no price
increases in it yet because it takes - our average contract length is
2.5 years. So, we have contracts still sitting in deferred revenue that
don't have any price increases in them. So, as they come up for renewal
over the next 1.5 years, they'll have to catch up to those price
increases.
So, that alone should help drive our service revenue on a going-forward
basis. But to the point to your question, about 10% is from new logos.
And so that's kind of what's represented in the deferred revenue today.
Saket Kalia
Got it. Last question we got one an e-mail just through the webcast. So
- and maybe, Ken, I'll direct this to you. Particularly some of the
companies that have reported in the last week or 2 have kind of called
out weakness in small medium business or softness in small medium
business. Any comments that you've got just on the health of small
medium business?
Ken Xie
The small medium business still have a pretty small percentage have a
network security solution there. Go through our channel partner, we
still see pretty strong demand in there. Especially right now, a lot of
runs and we're starting to target some small medium business. Before
its bigger company now they're all going down. So, that's where we see
there's a pretty strong demand there.
Peter Salkowski
Understood. I think one just last comment on that because that
certainly has come up in the last couple of weeks here with some of the
companies reporting. We have a very diversified business model, right?
50% of our billings come from 100 countries, not one of which is 3% of
billings. And a lot of that is being handled by the channel, right? We
have a very diversified business model by customer segment, right, 1/3
large, 1/3 mid, and 1/3 small enterprises.
I think by the way, on the SMB one, keep in mind, we define SMB as
companies at or below $50 million in revenue. So, it's a pretty big
company. We're not talking the mom-and-pop shop in terms of that. So,
we do think there's a lot of opportunity still in the SMB business. We
provide a greater value to our customers than our competition does, and
we really leverage the channel to do a lot of that.
Saket Kalia
Couldn't think of a better place to end, guys. Ken, Peter, thank you so
much for taking the time.
Peter Salkowski
Thank you.
Saket Kalia
Thanks, Peter.
Question-and-Answer Session
