Fortinet (TICKER: FTNT) Fortinet Inc Ftnt Management Presents Goldman Sachs Communacopia Technology Conference Call
Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology
Conference Call September 5, 2023 6:05 PM ET
Company Participants
Keith Jensen - Chief Financial Officer
John Maddison - Chief Marketing Officer and EVP, Product Strategy
Conference Call Participants
Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs
Gabriela Borges
All right, I think we can go ahead and kick it off. Thank you for
joining us in this afternoon's Fortinet session. I'm Gabriella Borges.
I lead the emerging software vertical here at Goldman. And I'm
delighted to have the Fortinet team with me on stage, on my far right
Keith Johnson, CFO. And in the middle is John Maddison, Chief Marketing
Officer and EVP of Product Strategy. Thank you, gentlemen, for being
here. We appreciate it.
Keith Jensen
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Gabriela Borges
So John, I want to start on one of the themes that's consistently
coming up, both in your conversations and in the broader industry,
which is consolidation. And for the last decade, we've consistently
heard that there is a trend towards consolidation. My question for you
is, what's different today versus 10 years ago, when you first joined
Fortinet? Are you actually seeing a changed momentum or is it more of a
continuation of a trend?
John Maddison
Yes, we're definitely seeing customers absolutely more interested in
consolidation or platform approach. But I think it's different across
the different marketplaces. So for network security, for example,
there's definitely more convergence, the new name for that convergence
is SASE, one of the popular buzz terms, and customers are definitely
wanting that platform approach there for cybersecurity, it's more of a
consolidation of vendors, they need individual components to work
better together. So you can put automation for OT security, for
example, that you need to make sure your networking and IT systems are
OT aware, operational technology aware. And then for the cloud, it's
more about making sure your systems are cloud native, versus just
transporting stuff from the data center. So I think that consolidation
is different depending on which marketplace you're in.
Gabriela Borges
That makes sense. And I think one of the more interesting convergences
is between classic networking security and classic networking. And many
investors, I think, have spent time understanding Fortinet's
differentiation on the network security side. What I'd love to hear you
talk about is why you are different on the networking side and some of
the core networking IP that you've built, that allow you to really be
strongly positioned from a competitive standpoint, as the networking
TAM becomes the secure networking TAM.
John Maddison
Yes. So if you look at networking, that marketplace has already
consolidated over the last 10 years, you could probably name five
vendors where in cybersecurity you could probably name 100 vendors. For
us when the company was founded 23 years ago, the goal was to focus on
secure networking and secure networking is all networking that's not
just relying on the IP address or a MAC address to connect things like
a next-gen firewall looks at content, it looks at the user, it looks at
the application. The same with secure SD-WAN, the same with SASE and
zero trust, it looks at the posture of the end device. It's same with
secure wireless LAN. And so we believe, if you look at those
marketplaces right now there are about 35% of the overall networking
marketplace is secure networking. By 2030, secure networking will have
overtaken what we call basic networking like routing or datacenter
switching. So back 23 years ago when our founder didn't really know
things about SASE and zero-trust and things were coming. But definitely
his vision about relying on more than just the IP connection to make a
connection is very important to make that networking secure.
Gabriela Borges
What is the barrier to entry for the Ciscos, the Aristas, the
traditional networking companies on the access point and switching and
routing side? What is the barrier to entry for those companies to
invest in security because they do talk about it in their R&D roadmaps?
John Maddison
Yes, well, I think you need to have it architected right into your
systems, I think you can acquire things and try and bolt it on. But
that becomes very hard. And so even though we acquire small pieces of
technology, most of our development is organic. Because you have to
make sure it's built right in the ASIC, right in the security stack,
right in the management console. And when you try and take two
products, and integrate all those things together, it becomes very
hard, very hard indeed.
Gabriela Borges
That makes sense. So I'm going to ask a little bit about how you think
about the value creation in secure networking from software versus
hardware. And the baseline that we have is when we think about the
firewall market, you sell a hardware appliance, and then you sell this
really rich mix of attach subscriptions and services on top of the
firewall. And that leads to the business model that you have today. If
I think about the classic networking market, it's been much more
hardware based but not the same type of services as a software
attached. As you see convergence, do you think or are you seeing
evidence that you can actually sell a similar mix of software on top of
things like SD-WAN and secure routers, relative to the mix that you
already realized in firewalls.
John Maddison
Yes, I think long term, traditionally, I think a firewall marketplace
has been very, very hardware centric, then you add some services around
support, then you add some security services depending on the use case,
if it's a perimeter firewall, you may add more of a security stack
versus a segmentation firewall, which is more stable firewalling. I
think in the future that you'll add SaaS for that stack on top, and
that SaaS could be management services. Or it could be SSE services,
which is the kind of the secure web gateway or CASB. And so in the
future, that SASE, which consists of a cloud component, or as a service
component, it will consist of a hardware component, it consists of a
software component, it will consist of an agent that sits at the
endpoint to provide agents for zero-trust for SSE, EPP and EDR going
forward. So we believe it's a very hybrid world going forward of not
just cloud, not just hardware, not just agents, and not just software
as a service, it's going to be all these components brought together.
So the mix of service and hardware will change as we go forward.
Keith Jensen
I think what John is suggesting is that you may see the hardware mix
actually start to decline. And the services mix actually increase when
you look at the entire book of business. But maybe John can also talk a
little bit about maybe clarifying in terms of the type of use case
where you would see Fortinet selling a switch or selling an access
point, as opposed to a traditional switch company. Do you see us going
toe to toe with the large switch companies on big deployments? Or
should we talk more about secure SD-WAN and things of that nature?
John Maddison
Well, I think we define secure connectivity, which is wireless LAN, and
LAN, but only in the campus. And in the branch, in the factories or OT
environments, in the data center, it's still going to be that large
switching. So secure connectivity for us is any wireless LAN or LAN
that you can make secure by making sure that every port, every wireless
LAN has the ability to apply security to it, which is becoming really
important inside Operational Technology environments where you can't
put software, you can't put agents on controllers, all you can do is
make sure the switch and the Wi Fi and the firewall have the OT
visibility and capability. And so again, for us secure networking means
that security is totally integrated inside the switch, either the SASE
and the cloud or the firewall.
Gabriela Borges
The nice segue into some of the product development that you're doing
on the SASE side. So when we met about a year ago, we talked a little
bit about the room for integration to be truly outstanding on single
vendor SASE and Gartner came out recently and named Fortinet as a
challenger in the single vendor SASE magic quadrant. So help us
understand from a technical standpoint, what is the next big or minor
improvements that you need to achieve in your SASE solution to get to
the next stage of integration?
John Maddison
Again, I think it's, we had acquired a SASE vendor maybe four years
ago. And we found out how hard it is to integrate a completely
different platform from an existing platform. And so we kind of almost
rebooted maybe three years ago, two and a half years ago, to make sure
we built it organically by taking the same software and security stack
that's in our appliance, and building it out as a service in the cloud,
that's available also as cloud native. And once you have that
foundation in place, it's much easier to integrate. For example, inside
our body SASE console, we're able to connect our SD-WAN by a click of a
button. That's almost impossible with any other solution, especially if
they were different solutions. So the long term for SASE and that's why
Gartner called it purposely single vendor SASE, because you needed all
the components yourself, and they needed to be integrated, they give
highest marks in that magic quadrant to the integration of the two. So
yes, we still building out - there's always going to be features as
needed on SD-WAN on single, secure services edge. But the most
development will be making sure it's integrated under a single console.
Another ability for us to apply the same security stack in the cloud,
in the data center or on the SD-WAN edge is also very important. So
integration between the two is the most important thing going forward.
Gabriela Borges
So what are some examples if one or two of the features that are next
on the roadmap that will get you further up the Magic Quadrant?
John Maddison
Well, there's one zero trust, okay, everyone talks about ZTNA, zero
trust, everyone has apparently zero trust. There's another error. I
think Gartner will try and sort out in the future. Because right now
everyone's zero trust is remote access, replacing VPN. That's all
they've done. And they'll give mostly internet access. A few try
private access, but it's very hard. In the future universal ZTNA means
your ZTNA works off the network, on the network, and for all your
devices, and IoT, across any application. And by the way, as a company,
we've been rolling out ZTNA for the last year and a half internally,
and it takes a lot of time, a lot of dedication to each use on each
application. So we feel once that integration is there and ready, from
a SASE perspective, the ability to then add things like ZTNA, zero
trust, the ability to add digital experience monitoring, which will be
a critical for the digital realm going forward is much easier, versus
again trying to just add on point products into point solutions.
Gabriela Borges
Absolutely. I want to ask about SASE as a product cycle. And when you
think about where you're spending time with customers today, is it fair
to say that next generation or more advanced SASE architectural
adoption is happening more in large customers, give us a sense for if
you were to think about your installed base, where you're seeing the
most traction with SASE today?
John Maddison
Well, if you look at SASE, if you go back maybe even a couple of years,
you would have five vendors there, you would have somebody does SD-WAN,
maybe back then it was even a router still, you'd have somebody doing
the CASB. You have somebody's doing the Secure Gateway, sometimes in
the data center. And you'd have somebody doing a VPN back then or ZTNA,
I suppose those five vendors, I think initially will turn into to two
vendors, they'll turn into the SSE vendor, and the SD-WAN vendor, then
eventually they'll turn into the SASE vendor. But I think that SASE
vendor will start in the mid-market, small enterprise, and then work
its way up into large enterprise over the next five years. As always,
there's very large companies and very siloed approaches. And again,
this single vendor SASE Magic Quadrant from Gartner was actually the
first time I've seen Gartner take two magic quadrants and try and merge
into one, the first time I've seen them take two buying centers, CISO
and CIO completely different, and try and merge them into one. So it's
going to be very interesting in the very large enterprise what their
belief in single vendor SASE, and how fast they get down that track,
midmarket convinced already.
Gabriela Borges
So maybe we then talk about the go-to-market piece of it. So the
success that you're having, or that it sounds like you're having with
the mid-market today, does that involve building champions across more
than just the Classic Network Security champion?
John Maddison
Yes, it does. But it also involves us training ourselves and people to
make sure they can sell across both. So I think sales enablement is
absolutely critical function for the large platform vendors, the
consolidators. I don't know so about Gartner too much, but we're in
nine Gartner Magic Quadrant. That's a lot of different markets across a
lot of different buying centers. So we have to make sure that all our
salespeople are enabled to sell across all these different buying
centers. But it does involve building champions that are okay with
convergence and consolidation. Like some customers, they just want to
carry on the stuff they are doing, because that's easier. But I think
they'll get forced by sometimes economics to push it and converge
together.
Gabriela Borges
So then similar question for Keith, please.
Keith Jensen
I was just going to add to John's comment, I think the internal
champions, when we talk to customers now whether it's a CIO or CISO, I
think the one logical place where seeing the champions of all this from
the success of the SD-WAN implementations, the MPLS savings, the ROI is
so attractive. It's clearly a talked about inside of organizations
across the CIO and the CISO. And I think the success in SD-WAN then
gives us the opportunity to come in and have the conversation about how
to move that to SSE, and how to move that to SASE.
Gabriela Borges
Okay, so interesting. So is it fair to say that as you move up to
larger customers, you will have already made progress or already have a
playbook for engaging with both the CIO and the CISO?
John Maddison
Yes, because we also have a security operations portfolio that we've
been selling, as well as our secure networking portfolio, as well as
our OT portfolio. And so we already have those contacts, for them for
the customer. I think what I'm seeing right now is starting to make
more platform decisions, which are a bit longer term, because they have
to say I'm taking four or five vendors and making a platform of it. And
they have to get the timing correct. But they want to architect that
platform.
Gabriela Borges
So it also leads into a third piece of security, which is cloud, maybe
help contextualize cloud security for us in the context of SASE and
network? Is there that -- how do you cross sell cloud into your
existing installed base? Do you feel like you already have the
relationships and the buying motion to be able to do that?
John Maddison
Yes, so first, we differentiate security for the cloud versus security
from the cloud. So security from the cloud, we have obviously SASE but
we have 15 other products, which we would take from the cloud. Our EDR
product is cloud based, our new network detection and response is cloud
based. So there's all security from the cloud, which in our mind is a
bit different in security for the cloud, where you're taking your
products and putting them in the cloud, to protect cloud workloads. We
think long term that's got to be close to the cloud and hyper scalers.
Because they, some of them definitely want to own. They own their
platform. And they want to own more than the platform. So we've got to
be careful and work with them closely to see what they're really
focused on, what value we can bring, I think long term lot of the cloud
security or security for the cloud today is just like the things that
have been taken out of the data center and just planted in there.
But it doesn't do any good. It's not as efficient as it should be. So
long term, you need to make those cloud native, but also across all the
clouds, so that they work just the same. But within those environments.
To differentiate to be cloud native, you need to be as easy to operate
as the native cloud, say firewall or WAF. But be able to work just as
well on the other clouds as well. So that to me is going to be a
battlefront, a lot of people saying, well, maybe I should be the
platform vendor inside the cloud. Well, good luck.
Gabriela Borges
When you look at your cloud portfolio today, is there a way to think
about how the mix evolves between something like virtual firewall
versus cloud workload protection, or cloud security posture management?
Are there pieces that you feel I'm missing today and other pieces that
you feel are particularly strong?
John Maddison
No, we really want to be very strong in firewall, because the whole
firewall marketplace has become more distributed. And so what used to
be a very defined use case in the data center of perimeter firewall,
and a segmentation firewall is now probably 12 use cases. And one of
the use cases I think everyone missed was the distributive firewall
that sits on the edge, sit at the branch, sits at the campus now sits
at factory, which is also the platform we use for SD-WAN. But there's
also other types of, and all those, by the way are hardware firewalls,
perimeter of the branch and the perimeter of the data center, no
different, you're not taking a piece of software to do that. And then
there's other kind of smaller marketplaces firewall as a service, there
is a bit more of a SaaS delivery, there is virtual firewall there is
container firewall, native firewall ruggedized. I mean, it goes on.
So final marketplace is become more distributed across more of the
infrastructure. So for us, that kind of cloud firewall and the native
cloud, native firewall is a very important part of our overall file
structure. We want a single console across. So you have a single
control point, a single policy. And so that along with web application
firewall, and some of the other components that are important to us,
this is not just a cloud piece, it's something that sits across all the
infrastructure, I was speaking to a customer, and we were trying to
work out how many firewall vendors they had ended up with eight, when I
went through all the use case. And they just, that's not going to work
for them. They want two or three of the most preferably one across the
main areas.
Gabriela Borges
And so is there any reason, Fortinet can't consolidate those eight
firewalls?
John Maddison
No reason at all.
Gabriela Borges
Okay.
Keith Jensen
I think also, the question was about other cloud products and services.
And we defaulted into what's the logical place, which is cloud VMs or
primary firewall VMs. And John did a very good job of going beyond
that. But John, if you look at the other pillars what are some of the
other software cloud products that stand out to you in terms of the
growth opportunities and the growth that we've seen today?
John Maddison
Wel again, is a security for the cloud, so I'm just not talking about
our SaaS stuff, okay. So there's a lot of that I couldn't be here all
day talking about those things. But security for the cloud is mainly
focused on protecting access into the cloud through the firewall, is
then focused on making sure we protect the applications through our web
application firewall. And this mainly focused on our workload
protection for our EDR product. Those are the three areas we're really
focused on.
Gabriela Borges
It's a good opportunity for me to ask on a virtual firewall in
particular, which is one of the logical use cases that you're seeing
for virtual firewall today. And how do customers use Fortinet virtual
firewall, alongside perhaps, firewall functionality provided by the
hyperscale provider that's inbuilt.
John Maddison
The initial application of a virtual firewall was east west and the
data center then expanded to just being inside the marketplace as a
virtual firewall inside the cloud. I do think long term that's going to
make its way into more of a native installation or a native product.
But I also think some of these things lend themselves better to also on
demand capabilities. So flex what we call flex capability where you can
consume different products as a service as you go, because that's the
way they do it inside the cloud. So it's not just the product itself is
everything around it, whether be sitting in marketplace or the
application or to be able to switch it on in office, or as much
capacity as they want. So again, I think, as we go forward, more and
more people either you deliver that cloud native functionality,
whatever products may be as the same as the cloud native functionality
inside the cloud, or I'm going to use the cloud. As simple as that.
Gabriela Borges
So I want to come back to the product questions. We're going to change
gears for a few minutes and talk about the model and the demand
environment for that part. So, Keith, when we've looked at periods of
network security normalization in the past, it typically takes more
than one quarter to level set. And so help us understand some of the
changes you're making to your assumptions for forecasting in the back
half. And help us understand why seasonal 3Q billings guidance make
sense in the context of some of the volatility that you saw on the back
half of June and having to potentially make changes to how you're
sanitizing the pipeline and some of the salesforce productivity
metrics?
Keith Jensen
Yes, I think that we have spent several years developing a set of KPIs
and metrics that we use to help set guidance. And until the second
quarter of this year, I was very proud of the results that we had.
Obviously, that wasn't the case in the second quarter, because things
shifted on us. We saw contract duration become somewhat different; we
saw our close rates become different. We saw the pipeline coverage take
on a different level of importance, perhaps on the quality of the
pipeline. And there are some hygiene things in our side in terms of how
we go about deal inspection and predicting things. And so I think that
to answer your question is clearly what basically we did was take
everything that we've done up until the second quarter this year, all
that, all those data points and metrics and said they're no longer of
use to us in the current environment. Rather, what we're looking at is
what we saw on the second quarter for those KPIs around close rates
around pushes, et cetera. And saying we expect for guidance setting
purposes that that will repeat itself in the third quarter, we'll get
the same characteristics in the third quarters, we've got in the second
quarter.
And we'll continue with that until we see something that changes, I
think, a way of sanity checking the results of that. That approach, if
you look at the seasonality from the second quarter, the third quarter,
typically our growth between the two quarters is low to mid-single
digits. And if you look at through Q2 to Q3 this year, you'll see that
that's exactly where we ended up in embedded in that as a couple of
points of benefit from the backlog. So I think from a sanity check
viewpoint, what that really means is the guidance for the third quarter
does indeed reflect the same characteristics that we saw on the third
quarter. We then carry that on into the fourth quarter with the same
methodology with one additional adjustment, which was to take down any
sort of backlog or pardon me any sort of budgetary flush that we might
see in the fourth quarter. So I think in terms of where we've gone for
the second half of this year, in terms of the key metrics that are used
for our guidance setting process, I think we've taken a prudent
approach to it.
Gabriela Borges
So we experienced this dynamic across broader software companies last
year, where, as the buying environment got more challenging, it became
or they became more dispersion in salesforce productivity and
salesforce performance where companies have to do more to help their
salespeople navigate a tougher buying environment. What are some of the
things that you're working with the salesforce on today to help them
navigate a tougher buying environment?
Keith Jensen
Yes, I think, well, John can talk about training for SASE in a moment.
But I think you've seen inside of our organization; I think you've seen
the management team become much more engaged with the end user. It's
not the channel partner so much as are the resellers, but rather being
on the road, and actually spending time with our large enterprise
customers and prospects to provide support to the sales team and be
very clear to them that we will support them. We've also been very
clear with the sales team that in areas of extended payment terms with
a very strong balance sheet. And areas of discounting begin with very
strong balance sheet, very strong margins. There are opportunities
there that they can leverage arrows in their quiver, if you will, that
they can use as they need to get deals across the finish line. We've
also offered up some more targeted incentives for our channel team. We
think that incentivizing the channel team can have a fairly quick
return if you will, have done successfully. Whereas making large
changes to the sales organization maybe is a longer term project that
you probably have to be more patient with. But maybe John can talk
about some of the training.
John Maddison
Yes, definitely training for the sales and definitely the channel as
well, I was member maybe 18 months ago, and I was in the sales meeting
like this. And they asked how many people know what SASE stands for?
Okay. I guess the same question here. How many people know what SASE
stands for? It's similar reaction. So it's a dominant, so I think for
us, the training is very important because it's hard when one of our
sales people going up against CrowdStrike, EDR solution and going up
against maybe Cisco for SD-WAN Z scalar versus Z, you are going across
a lot of different marketplaces so you have to change the sales name.
They haven't got weeks and weeks, weeks to spend offline training. So
we develop some new sales enablement tools, which allowed ourselves
people to kind of quickly onboard the most important parameters.
So one of our, and one of the tests wasn't oh, yes, they've ticked box,
they've taken the training, it was to do the pitch back to us on the
video, and then actually grade the video to see if they passed or not.
So, because of so many errors, you have to change some of your sales
enablement techniques in the channel, a lot of demand there was for the
channel to be able to do some hands on. And so we had to introduce some
capabilities where they could do some hands on training. Again, the
channel didn't have a week to send them off to training on the product,
but they wanted a high level view of the consoles, and other places.
And so it definitely made us change a bit the way we do sales
enablement and channel training because of the extent of the product,
but also the depth you need to train them on in each of these areas.
Gabriela Borges
Keith, I'm hoping you can comment on some of the industry headlines on
some of the near term changes you've made in realignment in your sales
force around a reduction in force.
Keith Jensen
Yes, I think the, we have probably looking at the sales organization,
you'll probably see something on the order of 2% or 3% of the
organization will make some sort of career move during the second ,
probably during the third quarter of this year. For context, I think
that everybody's aware that say 2022, and maybe partially `21, they
were very strong periods of time, it was difficult to hire, there was a
lot of success in the sales organization, a lot of growth in the
organization. And in that environment maybe you don't go through the
normal hygiene that you normally do in terms of looking at bottom
performers, because it's so difficult to replace, if you fast forward
to where we are today in terms of 2023. This seems like the appropriate
time for us to be looking at the chip people that are having more
performance challenges, if you will, working with them where
appropriate, perhaps providing some additional support, but in other
cases, perhaps it's more appropriate that they exit the business. And I
think that's what you're referring here. And that's why we say that's
probably impacting something on the order of 2% to 3% of salesforce.
Gabriela Borges
And did I catch a comment right? Did you say that there is the
potential for larger changes to the salesforce over the long term?
Keith Jensen
No, I don't think that was, no, I did not mean to say that.
Gabriela Borges
Okay, thank you for clarifying. Okay, the month of July, August and
beginning of September, any color on what you're hearing on the ground,
and particularly on trends on willingness to invest into close deal
pipeline, relative to what you saw in the last two weeks of June?
Keith Jensen
I think the we're still a tech company, the third month of the quarter
is still the make or break month. So what we'll see at the things that
we've put in place, really pay the dividends that we want and we expect
them to pay as we go forward.
Gabriela Borges
Fair enough. Okay. I'm going to pause for a moment, questions from the
audience. Please, I can repeat your question.
Unidentified Analyst
Hello, okay. John, actually want to kind of go back to a previous
comment you made around how the mid-market has convinced convergence to
active SD-WAN SASE is kind of where to go. I'm curious to see what
proof point you guys have to kind of give you conviction around that
statement, and maybe help me understand why Fortinet has some other
conversion vendor would be best suited there. Thank you.
John Maddison
Yes, so I still see today Fortune 100, large enterprises still making
individual point product decisions, even though they understand that
the platform is the way they want to go. You still make the decisions.
But I'll see midmarket kind of smaller enterprises, not making the
decision and waiting till they get a platform in place. So they'll
renew some part of it for a year till they get to the point where they
can replace everything. So I just see just a different behavior. But I
also see it coming more products and moving up market as you go
forward.
Gabriela Borges
John, I'd welcome your thoughts on how you see Microsoft as a
competitive in long term.
John Maddison
Yes. So Microsoft obviously stated they want to be in the security
business, and every quarter, they seem to have another $5 billion for
the revenue. I think it's; I think they, sure they're a competitor and
a partner at the same time. So I mentioned those nine Gartner Magic
Quadrants we're in, they are in six Gartner Magic Quadrant, but they're
in yes, they're in endpoints, and they're in SIM, but otherwise,
they're different magic quadrants. And so like our networking, core
networking, they are not inside there. So we see them as the ability to
partner with them. We've got, I don't know 25 different integrations
with Defender, or Active Directory, or Sentinel or whatever. We're very
aware that they want to try and own as much as they can, I remember in
a previous company, they completely destroyed the antivirus marketplace
for endpoint because they own the platform. And that's what they can do
when they've got power. That's why I kind of look at saying, well, you
really want to be the platform vendor inside as your, good luck.
Okay, so you have to understand where they're going to be strong off
their platform. They're nowhere near as powerful. Like they announced
their SSE, which I don't think really sits on the platform is kind of a
bridge into their platform. But there's going to be nowhere near as
powerful there because they haven't got the platform leverage. Yes,
they can do big EAS and things like that. But we definitely see them as
a competitor and a partner as we go forward. I think some of their
announce, that SSE announcement was overhyped. What is it? It's
something with their old product, they've kind of reenable to provide
access. But there's no SD-WAN capability, there's no additional
monitoring all these capabilities that you need to be a network vendor.
So until they announced we're going to be a secure networking vendor, I
see them mainly as a partner pro competitor.
Gabriela Borges
How do you think about the strategic importance of network versus
identity? And the reason I ask is, in a more distributed world, where
IP addresses are less helpful? Do you see policy being enforced more
from the identity layer versus the classic network infrastructure
layer?
John Maddison
Well, it goes back to that SASE question where a lot of identity
vendors sell were SASE. And so we have our own identity systems, we
have our own authentication, token systems, privileged access
management, we also will work with all the identity vendors as well.
And so having a platform is great. But having a platform that's open
and integrated with not only alliance partners, but our competitors, is
also very important. Because we know our customers make decisions, they
made a decision about an endpoint vendor EDR. And it's a big decision
for them, they're not going to change and rip it out just because you
come along on the platform. So we have to make sure one of the most
important integrations going forward is the integration to the EDR
vendor, and the ZTNA policy engine. It's absolutely critical. So if
we're not the endpoint vendor, we need to make sure we can integrate
into the EDR vendors. And I think a lot of people kind of mistake that
for, there's a lot of platform vendors out there. Yes, we can do
everything. Just use everything from us. We know that's not going to be
true long term. Okay, people make other decisions as well. And we've
got over 500 integrations into our platform, over 350 integration
partners, including our competition.
Gabriela Borges
Good stuff. John, thank you for the technicalities help. Thank you for
the caller and all. And we appreciate your time. Thanks, everyone for
joining us.
John Maddison
Thanks.
Keith Jensen
Thank you.
