Fortinet (TICKER: FTNT) Fortinet Inc Ftnt Management Presents 6th Annual Wells Fargo Tmt Summit Conference Transcript
Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) 6th Annual Wells Fargo TMT Summit
Conference Transcript November 29, 2022 4:50 PM ET
Executives
Michael Xie - Co-Founder and CTO
Peter Salkowski - Head, Investor Relations
Analysts
Andy Nowinski - Wells Fargo
Andy Nowinski
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Andy
Nowinski. I am a software analyst at Wells Fargo. And today, it's my
pleasure to introduce you to the team at Fortinet. So we have Michael
Xie, the Co-Founder and CTO of Fortinet; and Peter Salkowski, Head of
Investor Relations. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Michael. Thanks, Pete.
Thanks, Peter.
Peter Salkowski
Thank you.
Andy Nowinski
Well, thank you guys for joining us today. Obviously, a complete TMT
audience here. So maybe you could start off by just giving us a brief
overview of Fortinet for those that don't know what Fortinet does.
Peter Salkowski
Andy, I am going to do our Safe Harbor real quick.
Andy Nowinski
Yeah.
Peter Salkowski
I am going to do our Safe Harbor real quick...
Andy Nowinski
All right.
Peter Salkowski
... before I know that's not going to have any bearing on what you are
going to say, Michael, but I am going to do it anyway and really fast.
I'd like to remind everyone that we may make forward-looking statements
during today's fireside chat. These forward-looking statements are
subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to
differ materially from those projected in those statements.
Please refer to our SEC filings, in particular, the risk factors in our
most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the other reports we may file
from time to time with the SEC for additional information on factors
that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current
expectations.
All forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date
of this presentation, and we undertake no obligation and specifically
disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Mike?
Michael Xie
All right. Thank you, Peter. So, Andy, thank you. It's a privilege to
be here. And I think just a quick version, Fortinet is a leading
cybersecurity company. We started out 22 years ago in 2000 and we
headquartered in -- at the Silicon Valley.
So today, obviously, we are public. Our symbol is FTNT. We have a
global footprint, offer a broad portfolio for cybersecurity and our
customers from SMB to large enterprise and carrier as well.
So myself, Michael Xie, I am a Co-Founder and I am the CTO for the
company for the past 23 years. So it's been a great journey and so I
think maybe you just -- I want to outline a couple of things. When we
started out, we had a couple of visions.
One is we think the cybersecurity company should define their problems
based on what their customer needs and particularly in our industry, we
help our customers to find the threats and as threats constantly
evolve, so basically our business evolves based on that as well. So I
think over the years, I think, we may talk about that. We see how the
technology evolve from the very early firewall driven centric business
to today's platform driven broad portfolio.
And I think the second piece is also as another vision we started out
is we always believe the cybersecurity should not become a cyber
slowdown, because we see a lot of the solutions out there, they are not
fast enough, it's low latency, it's low throughput.
So we have been very unique in that way we design our own ASIC chips.
We do a lot of things in hardware in addition to other software
designs. We build a place to be the fastest firewall in the world.
That's about it, Andy.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Andy Nowinski
It's a good overview. It certainly is a difficult balance when you are
trying to keep an organization safe and protect them from threats and
also not slow the organization down and give them a -- not get in the
way of productivity. So having that custom ASIC, I think, is something
that you have developed that enables that better performance versus the
competition?
Michael Xie
Yes. We -- I think the company culture wise, we are -- I mean since the
start, we are a very technology-centric company and innovation has
always been one of our key focuses. So the first part is we basically
we speak with our customers and partners. We define the problem and
then how to solve that.
I think, so we have like a large team building our products and
solutions. I think one indicator, it may not be the only one, is like
just look at the number of patents. I think we have a slide in our
investor package that we listed the patents for us and competitors.
We are probably having more than the next couple of guys combined. So I
think it's not the only indicator, but it's basically showing the
culture wise we really encourage our employees to focus on innovation
and solving problems.
Andy Nowinski
Another, I think, a really interesting point on Fortinet, you talked
about having a 20-year tenure in the industry. So you have been around
in this industry for a long time where firewalls are really the only --
the first line of defense and the only line of defense 20 years ago.
Obviously, the company has largely evolved, but when you think about a
tightening macro environment and how things -- our priorities may be
shifting within security, why does Fortinet continue to deliver record
level growth in firewalls over the last 18 months when more
applications are moving to the cloud, more applications are moving
outside the data center, yet you still manage to drive record levels of
growth during that timeframe?
Michael Xie
Yeah. So I think there are obviously several aspects of the business
that's important to drive that growth and I will try to first address
the technology side. So being in the industry for more than 20 years,
what we find 6is the -- in our industry it's interesting, it's like the
arms race between the what we call the bad guys.
It could be originally in the -- when we started out, it could be the
cyber hobbyist providing the viruses just to get their name out to
international crime syndicates with the ransomware or skimming of the
credit card number and to like some very advanced hacking teams that's
possibly backed by maybe even nation, state background.
So I think with that sort of diverse threats, like, the landscape and
the -- it's also the ever expanding threat surface that a lot of the
enterprise customers today as they used to have on-prem network, but
now they are expanding to the cloud.
Also, there's kind of IoT devices. You may not know this. And also in
the OT world, a lot of the manufacturing and oil, gas, they have a lot
of these devices traditionally mechanical, but they are all controlled
by computer. So it's ever increasing threat landscape in the tech
surface. So all these needs some kind of effective protection.
So I think for us, we -- from day one, when we started the company, we
realized at that time, if you go back 23 years, the firewall company at
that time focused mostly on safety inspection when the content payload
starts to carry attacks, they say, okay, it's not my problem, right? I
have my firewall.
But at Fortinet, we started off by saying we are a cybersecurity
company, and if the threat changes, we are going to evolve our
technology to stop that. So we started out by -- we are the first one
who came out with the UTM firewall, the next-gen firewall, and then,
gradually, as the attack surface extends to the cloud, to the OT, we
just basically expanded the portfolio to cover.
So for example, for the last five years to 10 years, a significant
driver was SD-WAN, a lot of customers, they started to have branch
offices, they build up the overlay between the branch and HQ. So we
evolve the technology and SD-WAN is part of our standard offerings and
Gartner also recognized that by putting us into the Leaders Quadrant
for SD-WAN, as well as the network firewall.
So I mean, moving forward, we are also seeing lot of the advanced
threats like APT, we call it advanced persistent threat, APT. So
there's different technology on that as well, which requires newer
platform based defense mechanism, like, Zero Trust technologies, and
like OT would bring a total different aspect of those challenges to us.
But I mean, technology is one side, but maybe I will let Peter comment
on the sales and finance discipline that we put in to help accompany
the growth.
Peter Salkowski
Yeah. I think that, I mean, what Michael is basically saying, in a
nutshell, it's a very complicated industry with a lot of different and
the bad guys are always finding new ways to be bad guys and finding
different ways into different companies situations.
I think the foresight that Michael and his brother, Ken, who's our CEO,
had in creating Fortinet 22 years ago is that, having the robustness in
the operating system and the ability to run that operating system on
custom ASICs that allow us to add more value to our product has
differentiated us from the rest of the market.
You say a lot of things are going to the cloud. There's a lot of cloud
spending. We are platform agnostic. We don't really care where you need
to protect it. We would rather just protect it. And so our operating
system works in the cloud, just like everybody else's operating system,
but it also works on premise.
And so it's all about protecting the entire infrastructure, not just
one part of the infrastructure and I think the challenge that companies
have is if they use a vendor in the cloud for one thing and they use a
different vendor on-premise, if they make any changes to the security
rules in either one of those locations and it's not running on the same
operating system, they are going to leave themselves vulnerable.
So you want to have a holistic solution. Our operating system is really
our secret sauce. The ability to add additional functionality is very
important. But to your point, even on the macro side or on the cloud
side is Fortinet or security is a must have, right? You have to have
it. It's not something you can put off and wait until next year to buy
and so I think that's really important.
There's other drivers or differentiations in our business and not just
the operating system, but we are a very diversified business, 70% of
our revenue comes from outside of the United States. We grew up as an
international based business. We have got 40% of our total business in
the North America, which includes the U.S. and the Americas actually
includes South America, 40% in Europe and 20% in Asia Pac.
And so it's a very diversified business. Half our business is from 100
countries, no one of which is more than 3% of my billings. We are
diversified by customer segment. We are diversified by product. So,
again, we can provide your security in any one of those locations,
geographies, premise, cloud, whatever and provide you a robust
solution, because of the way they started this company 20 years ago.
Andy Nowinski
That's great. Certainly, the sophistication of cyber attacks has
massively changed and increased over the last, call it, 10 years to 15
years and Fortinet has evolved as well. But I think one of the other
changes that we have noticed with Fortinet is if you look even last
quarter, you had 153 deals over $1 million. That was up 84%
year-over-year. So you are not just selling to the smaller customers.
What do you think is driving just the growth in these massive $1
million deals?
Michael Xie
So I think from our -- because of the global footprint, right? We --
traditionally we do really well in the SMB and the commercial and we
started to get a harder push into the enterprise, because we have the
enterprise-ready platform.
And I think a lot of the enterprises, they find our messaging for
consolidation resonating with their CISO and CIO teams. It's -- in the
past, we can see customers buying -- the firewall-centric customers
buying a lot of the firewalls and managed firewall only.
But as you mentioned, over the last few years, because of the threat
landscape change, what we find is relying on the firewall only will not
give enough protection for today's distributing larger enterprise.
So what we found is that a lot of these enterprises, they started to
actually understand the story and then they started to buy different
components, it's a firewall, but then it's not traditionally just
on-prem, but also there's VM, in the cloud or in the private cloud,
data center.
And then on top of that they have -- if they have perhaps an SD branch,
they can have networking components in that to help with the visibility
of the devices, and then, if there's a same and sure and all kind of
central management and visibility components.
So we see a lot of deals where the customers, they come in and buy 20,
30 different products, and then they love it because in the past, they
have to buy that from 20, 30 different companies, meaning they have to
get their CISO team trained on all these different user interfaces,
come online and automation, it's a nightmare.
And so I think essentially over the past few years, the consolidation
message starts to resonate with the more and more enterprises, they
come in and buy, for example, a complete solution from us, where we
design them organically, usually from the very beginning to
interoperate with each other and we call that platform Security Fabric.
So essentially, the center piece is still the multifunction firewall
carry a lot of the features, the traditional SSL, SD-WAN and like the
-- but also it includes components in the cloud, for example, like the
SASE component, so we can secure the OT platform, if that customer has
a component, as well as I think the more recent is the ZTNA, the Zero
Trust architecture.
So I think in the end, the value is we provide the customer with a
single pane of glass, like, visibility. They see all these components
like your alert and traps in one screen and then they can easily manage
them to discover and mitigate the threats.
Peter Salkowski
I would add, additional to the consolidation message of really kind of
bringing products and vendors together into a single operating system,
which again goes back to the value of our operating system is the
concept of convergence.
And I think what you are seeing and what you have seen over the last
five years is companies are reconfiguring their networks to do more
cloud capabilities and then if you think about, go back five years, 10
years ago, cloud wasn't a big part of their business. They set their
networks up a certain way and now they need to change that.
As they are changing and reconfiguring their networks to be more cloud
centric, or in this case, work-from-anywhere centric, given that we are
all kind of working from other places these days, they are rethinking
their security. They have to build their security now to deal with that
new networking configuration, really kind of -- some of it goes back to
Zero Trust, just don't trust anybody in your network when you are doing
it.
But what they are really saying is, look, our security operating system
and our networking operating system used to be separate buying centers
and those two buying centers are coming closer together and
communicating more today than they ever have.
And in doing so, the networking guys have always been -- they basically
have been worried about how do I move data as fast as possible and as
low cost as possible and the security guys have to worry about
everything else.
They have to worry about the sender, the recipient, the content, the
device, all of these other things, which again goes back to why the
ASIC strategy is so important, because you have to do so much compute
capabilities that the security guys -- the network guys will get mad at
the security guys, because the security guys would slow them down and
the security guys will get mad at the networking guys, because the
networking guys didn't care about anything what was moving around and
paying attention to it.
Those two groups are coming closer together and they are converging.
SD-WAN is an example of that conversion. We call it Secure SD-WAN,
because it's built into our operating system and sold with our
firewalls. So you get security and networking functionality built into
a single unit. A lot of our security competitors don't have that
networking capability or understanding. We have built both of that into
our operating system.
Another point to make though, because I think, we somehow get -- well,
I know why, we get pigeon holed into being a hardware company, 60% of
our revenue today is services. I would call it a hybrid SaaS model and
the only reason it's down to 60% is because over the last couple of
years with COVID and supply chain and everything else that's been going
on, we have had some price increases to offset cost increases that we
have been dealing with.
The percentage or mix of product versus services prior to COVID was 65%
services, 35% product. Less last quarter, it was 60% services, 40%
product. Over time, the services will catch up to the price increases.
Right now, they are dropped on the balance sheet in our deferred
revenue. As that happens over time, you are going to see our services
go back to that 65% at an 85% gross margin and so there's value in
those services that we can't lose sight of even though I know a lot of
people and we do as well talk a lot about the hardware.
Andy Nowinski
That makes sense. So you have got the trends of convergence between
network and security driving demand. You have got the need for
consolidation to ripping out point products and consolidating to a
single platform and then you have also got an increasingly
sophisticated threat landscape driving demand. I mean that certainly
doesn't sell itself or sell your products yourself. So have you made
any changes as well to your sales force that can continue driving these
large million dollar deals, have you had to make any changes from that
end?
Michael Xie
Yeah. Of course. So I think both on the sales and marketing side. For
marketing, you guys probably know that we started to sponsor the
Fortinet Championship, the PGA event since last year in Napa,
California.
So I think one thing is on the lead gen, I mean, there's like a ton of
numbers that just basically showing like these marketing helps. But
also I think on the branding side, I mean, I play golf as a hobby, but
I think I have met more people know about us from the golf than from
the cybersecurity side. So it's a very just powerful like marketing
method.
And I think on the sales side, obviously, I think, since a couple of
years ago when we saw the opportunity, we started really invested into
hiring a lot of salespeople. But I think at the end, it's not just
hiring them, but also be able to tell the story, right?
And then I think, particularly in our industry, this is a challenge, a
lot of times, people just think it's one and plus another one, then you
get two. But in our consolidation story, a lot of times, you have got
one plus one, but you get more than two as a result.
So I will give you one example of that. Like for example, a lot of
people, they want the segmentation story in their offices, they want
the firewall with the switches and access points. Now these, you can
individually procure from different companies.
However, when they do from us, our salespeople can tell them how easy
it is to set it up so that they can segment their office network
dynamically almost with no additional steps from just managing some
policies. While in the old days, like if you are familiar with the like
the NAC concept from Cisco.
I remember they did a demo a few years back requires like six different
components and there's a lot of CDs and downloads. So it's -- I think
at the end, the consolidation can produce more productivity for the
customers.
And then, I think, from a sales and marketing perspective, the
challenge has always been how to demo that and then tell the story.
Once we can get a story out, and then our cost rate is really, really
high.
Peter Salkowski
And to give a sense, I joined in January of 2018, I think, we had about
5,000 people at the time. This last quarter, we ended with 13,000
worldwide employees, 70% of which are outside of the United States.
I think the other thing to think about in terms of the business, to
your point, on the $1 million-plus deals. In 2018, we looked at,
because we are -- there was a change in 2017 that occurred in this
business and that is we moved into the Leader Quadrant for enterprise
firewalls for the first time in the company's history. We had always
been a leader in the UTM Magic Quadrant, which was a separate quadrant
at the time and that was sort of synonymous with SMB and small and
medium-sized businesses.
When we moved into the enterprise business in 2017 -- July of 2017, we
started using that as a calling card. You could go into an enterprise
customer, or at least get invited into an RFP now because you were in
the Leader Quadrant. And so in 2018, we really started to push that
message.
But we looked at how many companies an individual enterprise sales rep
was assigned to and it came down to 65:1. I am like, okay, that's not
an enterprise sales force. We need to do something about that.
But we also had growth in margin profitability targets out there out to
2022, that said, we would grow in sort of the 15% to 20% range, and we
would grow our margins from what we are mid-teens at the time to 25% by
2022 and that it would grow at about 150 basis points to 200 basis
points a year.
So we couldn't go out and hire all enterprise salespeople at once. We
hired them over time. If you look today, that ratio is about 14:1
enterprise salespeople to companies. That should be in the single
digits and so we will continue to hire more people, but -- and grow
that enterprise or that large business.
But what's really interesting, though, is we have a -- we have a small-
and medium-sized enterprise business. We have a two tier distribution
model. We sell the distributors. They sell the resellers who sell to
the customers.
That reseller or that channel relationship is extremely important to
us, because a lot of our small- and medium-sized business dealings and
deals, we don't touch, right? They just go through the channel. It's a
run rate sort of business.
We hear a lot of chatter about it back in 2020 when COVID first hit.
Everyone was worried about small- and medium-sized businesses going out
of business and it's third of Fortinet's business, therefore, they are
going to fall apart. It didn't happen.
The small- and medium-sized businesses continue to need security. They
continue to buy security. We are hearing that rumbling again today with
macro concerns that you have this SMB exposure.
That has been a strong run rate cash cow business for us since I have
been there for the five years, and we have been using that cash to fund
our enterprise business and hire more enterprise salespeople within the
growth and profitability parameters that we provided to the street.
Andy Nowinski
So it sounds like, I mean, the Fortinet Championship was an amazing
event. You have got a lot more marketing spend around that, bringing
more awareness to Fortinet, hiring a lot more salespeople. But if you
look back over the last, call it, two years, three years, the firewall
market certainly looks like it's gone from a four-horse race down to a
two-horse race and Cisco and Check Point are clearly underperforming
relative to Fortinet and Palo Alto. Do you think that could be just,
number one, I guess, why do you think they have been ceding market
share to Fortinet and do you think that's also maybe fueling some of
that record growth you have seen over the last 18 months?
Michael Xie
Yeah. So I think the -- one of the changes I noticed before the
Fortinet Championship is a lot of time I walk in the room with our
salespeople and customers, the first question is like, we call the
Forti who question, like, who are you guys? And then so I think after
that, the PGA event, I think, we are hearing less and less of those. So
the brand name is out there, and then, obviously, there's still a lot
of work to explain the technology advantages.
And I think over the years, I think, there are a few drivers on the
firewall. One is the continued expanding threat surface. There's a lot
of the assets when the customer didn't think a firewall was even
needed, right, the smaller offices, home offices, but today, I think,
if there's critical assets or computing devices, those would be as
precious as the computers in the HQ or in the data center because with
SD-WAN or VPN, they are all connected.
And I think the second driver is basically, I think, on networking
side, the speed is still ever increasing. So going back when we started
off we were designing for like 10, 100, those are megabits per second
devices and now it's like 400 gigabits, right?
So like it's kind of like Moore's Law. So we are seeing that every
maybe five years or six years, we have to redesign our ASICs, so
basically provides 5 times, 6 times more performance than the last one.
So I think that also helps to drive the demand.
And then the -- well, the third one is, obviously, the hackers, they
change their tactics and then basically requiring a different
architecture. I think that continues to drive the demand. So basically,
over the years, we are building the features like SD-WAN and Zero
Trust. Those are not traditional firewall features.
But because we take a holistic approach, basically how we design the
product to help the customer and now this kind of become part of the
features and I think our customer realized the value in that. So that
helps the adoption and continued consolidation.
Peter Salkowski
I think there's one more driver that's been occurring recently and that
is insurance companies. Cyber insurance is very difficult to get. We
met with -- our CFO met with a cyber insurance company that does cyber
and basically, he told -- the insurance company told them that they
turn down 95% of the policy request they receive for cyber insurance.
That's not a cyber insurance business by the way.
It's not -- but they can't -- they are trying to understand the risk of
-- they really -- a lot of the insurance companies got hurt in the
early days of ransomware because they didn't understand how to
completely monetize or calculate what their risks were.
And the bad guys were basically going into systems, looking up your
cyber insurance, seeing what your limit was and then coming back and
saying, oh, your limit is $1 million, guess what our ransom is and the
insurance companies were paying it out.
So cyber insurance right now is a lot of insurance companies are
looking at what their risks are. They are dictating to companies that
they have to have, not the company specifically, but the types of
security. You need to have endpoint security. You need to have this.
So they are starting to dictate what companies have to do. So Boards
are being creating -- committees and Boards are being created just to
study cyber because of that risk for different enterprises. So I think
that's going to help drive it.
Go back to your question about the Magic Quadrant and the market share.
If you look five years ago, who -- what companies were in the leader
quadrant and where they were five years ago for enterprise firewalls
and who's there today, Palo and Fortinet has moved up into the right
and we have actually moved further up to the right than they have and
Cisco, Check Point and others are slowly dropping away to the left. So
you are right, it is becoming a two-horse race.
But that's -- but more importantly, if you look at from a third-party
perspective from just Magic Quadrants, we are in seven or eight
different Gartner Magic Quadrants, two of leader, SD-WAN and firewall.
We are in six other -- five or six other ones, we are in one of the
other quadrants. We are in another eight market guides, which are
either products that are on their way to become a Magic Quadrant or on
their way down from becoming a Magic Quadrant.
But why I point that out is that's 15 different research reports that
Gartner publishes that we are mentioned in and with one operating
system. The same operating system across all 15 products. It goes back
to the consolidation conversation a minute ago.
If you think about how many unique companies are listed in those
different Gartner products, uniquely, it's probably 100 companies. I
don't have to take a lot of market share from all of them. I just have
to take a little market share from all of them and I am going to be the
only one that goes across all 15 products because of our operating
system and Michael's vision of putting that into a platform and making
that work.
Andy Nowinski
That was a great overview. So let's just drill down into it into one of
the areas of your operating system. So SD-WAN has been a big driver.
You said it's part of the firewall, it's part of the operating system.
So if you buy a firewall from Fortinet, you get SD-WAN with it. I think
the way I think of SD-WAN has always been, it's really just like a
Google Maps where it's finding the most efficient route from point A to
point B over the broader Internet, so you don't have to buy expensive
private links. Yet at the start of the pandemic, when everyone was
working remotely and SD-WAN was clearly seeing an uptick, we are three
years past that now and you are still seeing 45% growth in SD-WAN
business. So I am just curious like what's sustaining that demand, it's
-- we are already past the obvious catalyst of the pandemic, how are
you maintaining that strong growth?
Michael Xie
I think there's maybe a few ways to look at that. I think from SD-WAN
perspective, we find there's a pretty good market for enterprises with
very distributed workforce around world and then they can set up,
there's like underlay and overlay, help them to basically get the
quality of the traditionally very expensive MPLS services from the
carrier.
So I think the whole sort of industry is shifting towards adopting
SD-WAN. I think we are still in the curve that there's like more and
more adoption and we are in a unique place, like, we are building the
security SD-WAN where the customer adopting that solution will be --
get both security, as well as the top notch SD-WAN.
But I think before I forget, there's actually one more very important
aspect which is the -- well, it's -- you may not see it as a
sustainability aspect, because we have the purpose-built ASIC device,
it's very power efficient.
So in fact, recently, a lot of the large enterprise and carriers, they
pointed to us by deploying our solutions both in the on-prem locations
in the cloud, because they can run ASIC-based, a very powerful device,
they are seeing the power usage, including data center and the on-prem,
our solution is a fraction of what the traditional software only based
solution. So I mean there's -- I don't think we are reaching the end of
the SD-WAN growth curve. I think we are in the middle of it. There's
still a ton of opportunities out there.
Andy Nowinski
That's great.
Peter Salkowski
I think the energy consumption was 80% less than a common CPU in terms
of our ASICs -- our dedicated ASICs.
Andy Nowinski
Okay. Another interesting growth driver on OT security, you briefly
touched on it earlier, OT security securing devices that might not be
able to support a software agent I think it's really difficult, it has
to be done from a network device or within the network. You had 75%
year-over-year growth in OT security last quarter, I am just curious,
if a customer wants to buy Fortinet OT security, what are they
purchasing?
Michael Xie
So it's -- I think it's -- conception is similar to the IT side. It's
basically the platform. It usually involves one or another form of the
firewall. But sometimes it operates in a slightly different way in the
OT environment and then it could involve in like the switch components.
And they have physical challenges, a lot of the times, it's wide
temperature range, 40 below temperature up to maybe 70 degrees, 80
degrees and with a strong SOR [ph], the moisture requirements.
And then I think in the software wise, they need specialized software,
understanding like things like Modbus, kind of difficult to decide for
OT protocols as well as the central pieces of control, how you contain
the threats, discover like a SIM or like SOR like solution. I mean it's
not so different from the composition of the solution, but then,
usually, each piece carries a slightly different flavor to specifically
address OT challenges.
Andy Nowinski
So you have got a SIM software and a more durable firewall and it
sounds like a network switch that people would have to deploy to get
your OT security?
Michael Xie
Those are the most commonly seen ones, yeah.
Peter Salkowski
I know we are running out of time real quick. When I got there in
January of 2018, I know Ken was talking about OT back then. We are
building OT capabilities to do that security five years, six years ago.
And so it's just now that, that market is starting to ramp up as more
of these things are getting connected, some of it's a 5G world, so more
things are getting connected and they need to be protected. And so it's
something we have been focusing on, again, building into our operating
system for years.
Andy Nowinski
All right. Well, we are running out of time. So what would you leave
the audience with in terms of what you are most excited about in 2023?
Michael Xie
I want to just quickly touch on one of the topics that dear to my heart
is the sustainability efforts that we put in. So at Fortinet we have
formed the Board level committee, we call the Social Responsibility
Committee and I volunteer to lead that committee.
Basically, we have overwhelming responses from our employees to putting
a lot of initiatives through our sustainability aspects. For example,
we pledged the greenhouse gas emission, zero carbon for Scope 1 and 2
by 2030 and we also work with our suppliers on human rights policies
and then we work on our packaging to make sure we got rid of those
plastics and we replace them with the biodegradable packaging, so that
they don't leave like long lasting garbage to the planet.
Also, I think I touched earlier our ASIC design and we have a lot of
technologies and innovations came from our employees help not just for
us, but also for our customers to reduce the carbon output.
And then, I think, eventually, we have a lot of initiatives on these
and we see that as one of the core strategies that we are going to
carry forward, not just grow the business, but also grow it social
responsibility.
Andy Nowinski
That's great. On behalf of everyone at Wells Fargo thank you so much
for coming to the conference and sharing your thoughts today.
Michael Xie
Thank you, Andrew.
Peter Salkowski
Yeah. Thank you.
