Fortinet (TICKER: FTNT) Fortinet Inc Ftnt Management Presents Ubs 2021 Global Tmt Conference Transcript
Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) UBS 2021 Global TMT Conference December 7,
2021 3:00 PM ET
Company Participants
John Maddison - CMO & Executive VP of Products
Keith Jensen - CFO & CAO
Peter Salkowski - VP of IR
Conference Call Participants
Roger Boyd - UBS
Roger Boyd
Okay. Well, thank you for joining us here at the 2021 UBS TMT
Conference. I'm Roger Boyd, I cover cybersecurity software here at UBS.
It's my pleasure to introduce the management team from Fortinet this
afternoon. We're very happy to be hosting Keith Jensen, Chief Financial
Officer; John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer; and VP of Investor
Relations, Peter Salkowski. Gentlemen, thanks for joining. I think,
Peter, we're going to pass it you to do some safe harbor.
Peter Salkowski
Yes. Thank you, Roger. Very quickly, 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 could cause actual results to differ materially from those
projected in these statements. Please refer to our SEC filings, in
particular, the risk factors in our most recent Form 10-K and Forms
10-Q and other reports that we may file from time to time with the SEC
for additional information on factors that may cause actual results to
differ materially from those 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. And with
that, back to you, Roger.
Roger Boyd
Sounds good. Well, thank you all for being here. To jump in, 2021 has
been quite dear for Fortinet, quarter after quarter of pretty strong
and impressive growth. Can we just start with maybe your opinion on the
overall strength in the cybersecurity market and what you're seeing in
terms of tailwinds across breach activity and architectural shifts,
regulation and how those maybe impacted your growth this year?
Keith Jensen
Yes, maybe I'll just offer a few quick comments, and then I'll come
back to it. Look, I think the Q3 results across the board in the
industry were very strong and that, obviously, followed a strong Q2 and
a strong Q1. And so I think, Roger, your comment is very spot on. It's
been a very good year.
I think we expected it coming into the year for a lot of reason,
whether it was return to office, which sort of happens or it didn't
happen, stimulus, a bunch of -- a number of other factors in terms of
that.
We thought the threat landscape was elevated coming into the year, some
conversations around that, but I think we thought that was more around
supply chain hacks. And certainly, ransomware has come on to the scene
in a very, very dramatic way.
I do think that much of that falls into what we call digital
transformation. And for us, we've talked about 3 very specific areas:
convergence, networking and security; consolidation, which is the
platform as opposed to pure point solution; strategy and then the
threat environment.
And I think that -- I don't think that anything has really changed in
that as we've gone through the last 9 months nor as we look forward to
what we may see in 2022.
John Maddison
Yes, yes. So this is, I think, my 20th year in cybersecurity, can't
tell, obviously. But I don't think the -- I mean, the drivers of
cybersecurity haven't really changed in the last 20 years. So you only
have -- you have the threat landscape, then you have the infrastructure
changes, then you have regulatory incompliance.
And all those -- at different times, maybe one is larger than the
other. I think right now, all 3 are going really strong. So we've seen
the threat landscape with much more sophisticated threats on the front
end. We see infrastructure continue to change, obviously, with work
from anywhere.
People are investing more in the digital acceleration of networks,
applications continue to move. Even OT is opening up to make sure
everything is connected. And so I just think everything. So we looked
at the TAM, we've just gone to look at the total just in the
marketplace based on our pretty broad product portfolio. And it went to
about $175 billion in like 2025, up about $20 billion. So there's
definitely an increase in spending from our customers as they try and
converge networking and security, as they put long-term plans in work
from home, as they try to secure their OT environments.
And we don't specify the billings and the growth rate of all our
products, but just about every category of product from endpoint to
SD-WAN, to web application to firewalls or cloud grew in Q3 and so far
this year.
Roger Boyd
Makes perfect sense. That's very helpful. Keith, one topic you brought
up last quarter was the latest Gartner acronym, the CSMA or
Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture, can you just talk a little bit about
what that means and your interpretation there and really how that plays
into the Fortinet portfolio?
Keith Jensen
Yes. I'll talk a bit the plain English version of it and then have
somebody who's more privy in English than I am perhaps. Look, we think
that's Gartner coming to us in this particular instance with our fabric
platform strategy. It's always been a conversation -- for a long time a
conversation point from us about the best-of-breed and the cost that's
associated with that and the performance challenges and the lack of
automation that comes with that.
And we felt that a platform, if it was broad enough and it was
integrated, meaning typically building yourself as opposed to buying
it, solved much of that. And then now Gartner arrived on the scene with
a fancier name perhaps for it.
John Maddison
Yes. It's always funny when the Gartner acronyms and people attach
themselves to it and then they kind of redefine them slightly, whatever
it may be. I think the Gartner Mesh, they kind of started talking about
a year ago. And I think when they speak to customers, especially CISOs,
the biggest struggle they have is making everything work together.
I don't think the industry is that great at working together,
publishing APIs, making sure threat intelligence can be transported and
making sure policy, and so the Gartner Mesh specifies the ability to
connect products peer-to-peer rather than going through a central
location.
It says if you've got an endpoint, then you must be able to talk to the
network and must be able to talk to the cloud. This is a concept that
we've been working on for 10 years-plus, we call it the Fabric. It's
very hard to build by acquiring a lot of companies and trying to bolt
it together. That's very hard to do. So we build most of it
organically. We did smaller acquisitions of IP, but the small companies
that we can bring in and integrate more quickly. But the overall goal
-- in fact, Gartner did a survey around the Mesh and they asked
customers, I think, right now, 25% of customers were thinking about
this meshing platform. This will increase to 80% in the next 2, 3
years.
And the reasons were, yes, I've saved some money. I've saved -- I don't
have to train everyone across 20 platforms. But the real reason they
want to do it is to make sure the security cost is better, to make sure
they can gain transfer policy but also build that automation.
So I think the Gartner Mesh, you never know with these acronyms,
sometimes they come and go pretty quickly, sometimes they stay around a
long time. I think this one is resonating very well with the C-suite
and our customers.
Roger Boyd
Yes. Perfect. Okay. Another kind of topic around the demand
environment. Fortinet typically seize, call it, the top 5 verticals
that you sell into most frequently. And over the course of the year,
you've noted the nontraditional verticals sort of upticking in demand,
verticals like manufacturing and energy.
Can you just talk about how that trends played out throughout the year?
And what that sort of means from a higher-level demand perspective in
terms of the broadening of cybersecurity?
Keith Jensen
Yes. I think that what you're referring to we've talked about this at
some of our Analyst Days. The 5 largest industries for us have been
very consistent: financial services, government -- worldwide
government, service providers, retail and technology. And it just
always seems to be right around 65% of the business.
And then everything else, those industries I talked about a little bit
with manufacturing, consultation, utilities and so forth is all at
about 35%. And we started to see -- earlier in the year, we're looking
at some very strong growth numbers. And obviously, we're really pleased
with the consistency of the growth, but we're looking for
outperformers.
And what we saw was that other group, right? And that other group that
we talked about, and we -- I think we attribute that to ransomware and
a little bit to OT, to be honest with you. And maybe those are
industries that did not view themselves at the forefront of the attack
surface from the bad guys.
The financial services, obviously; health care, obviously, but things
like manufacturing and so forth. And maybe they were historically more
air gap than they are now. But I think when ransomware arrived on the
scene, those other industries realized that they were very much on the
radar screen to be attacked.
And then it extended not just those verticals when we think about it in
the U.S., but we see it worldwide and we see it across all sizes. We've
got a business that's 1/3 small, 1/3 mid and 1/3 large, and to really
see that all those industries and all those sectors, if you will,
geographically or in terms of size, were all ramping up their spending.
And I do think that maybe that some of that is because they spent a
little bit less historically than maybe some of those high-profile
verticals had. As we look forward, I don't know that there's something
that we see that's really going to change the growth in those
industries. Ransomware is still here. Bitcoin and cyber currencies are
still perhaps enabling some of that.
Ransomware is becoming run more and more like a business, for lack of a
better term. They seemed -- the bad guys seemed well-positioned to
continue with their attacks for the foreseeable future. And there's
really no particular industry that's eliminated from being a victim.
Roger Boyd
Yes. Okay. That makes perfect sense, yes. You mentioned the convergence
in networking and security. And I think that your company is probably
the most evident of that happening. In the latest quarter, you talked
about 50% growth in FortiGate and non-FortiGate. Can you just talk
about the typical upsell motion, land-and-expand opportunity with the
FortiGate platform coming from -- landing with the firewall and
expanding to other areas of the platform, specifically around branch?
John Maddison
Yes. I think the basis of the company for the last 20 years has been
this convergence we refer to as security of networking. And the concept
is that traditional networking, whether it be routers or switches or
WiFi, have no awareness of devices and users and applications and
content and location, which is why it's such a big issue. That's why
security is such a big issue, and it's so hard to kind of bolt on
security onto networking.
And so our goal as a company, our mission is to drive security into
networking, switching, SD-WAN, Zero Trust, both the devices and users.
So that when you're making decisions about providing access to
applications, you have the awareness around content and users and
location and applications.
And so that drives everything we do from a product perspective. And
what happens initially is maybe we sell a firewall into a company, but
we build it such that you can switch on application awareness through
SD-WAN or content awareness through a next-gen firewall or user
awareness through Zero Trust or device awareness through NAC. And so
our systems are built to run -- they run very fast, but they're also
built to run 10 to 12 to 15 different applications as well.
And I still don't think most customers, they kind of build -- they put
point products in. I think they're just beginning to realize that they
need to build these use cases like work-from-anywhere or Zero Trust
across the platform. As we see that, they'll start to realize and
switch more of these capabilities on in our firewall.
I think the biggest one we've seen in the last 2 or 3 years has been
SD-WAN. Before that, it obviously was upgrade from firewall to next-gen
firewall. I think as we go forward, what you'll see is Zero Trust being
another big one for us as we upgrade. The ability to integrate endpoint
through XDR and network connectivity, the application journey through
WAF.
And so there's lots of different applications we feel to be switched
on, but I think the important point is, they can be switched on as a
use case across multiple products versus just at one thing.
Roger Boyd
Got it. Maybe jumping into one of those use cases. SD-WAN has been a
powerful business driver for you over the course of the year. It's now,
call it, 14% of overall billings and growing pretty significantly
throughout the year. Where do you think we are in the adoption curve on
this technology?
How much opportunity is left? And how has that maybe accelerated or
changed over the past 2 years as we've adapted to more remote work and
pandemics and all that?
John Maddison
Yes. It's a good point. I think a lot of people thought because of the
pandemic and people work from anywhere, work from home, especially,
that SD-WAN would slow down. We haven't seen a slowdown. If you look at
some of the market stats, it's been growing at 30% still. I still think
it's got a long way to go.
And I also think of the several generations, the initial SD-WAN
Generation 1 was just doing applications routing. We came along and
said, "Hey, you can't just do -- you can't just open up the WAN edge
and not have security." So we have secured SD-WAN.
I think we're also seeing a lot of our retail customers and
manufacturing customers now roll out SD-Branch, where you've got 5G
connectivity, you've got WiFi controls built in, you've got switching.
And then as we go forward, what you'll see is that SD-WAN be the
on-ramp to the cloud applications.
It already is to some degree, but a lot smaller when run into the cloud
applications. And so we think there's multiple markets in SD-WAN which
are running forward, which will be -- which will add to the market
value. We've also -- the reason we invested a lot in SD-WAN because
it's a foundational component. However, when you do it going forward,
you want to route the users and devices to the applications in the most
efficient way.
And so to us, it's not even just a branch technology with new campus,
for your data center, for your cloud connectivity. So we see a long
runway for SD-WAN, again, not just for branches but across the whole
enterprise network.
Roger Boyd
Yes. Okay. Another use case you're sort of talking more frequently
about is operational technology, IT or OT convergence. And I think in
the third quarter, that use case saw billings up 77% and 80% in the
quarter, representing, call it, mid-single digits of total billings.
Can you talk about the demand environment for OT projects, specifically
after events like Colonial Pipeline? And then really, what parts of the
Fortinet platform are helping meet these use cases?
John Maddison
Yes. So the Colonial Pipeline was a good example of remote access
because people were recovering. So that's why all these OT environments
were opening up to give remote access, to give OEM vendors access. And
just almost most of them of the air gap is completely gone and it's
just become part of the -- it's integrated into the IT network.
And so for us -- and that's why for us, we think networks are hybrid
for a long time. So let's say you're doing some compute for an OT
network. We can't send that back to the cloud to be secure. You've got
to do the security there. And so that's why it's really important for
us to be in the physical world, to be in the endpoint, to be in the
access, to be in the WAN, to be in the cloud because otherwise, you
can't protect these OT networks.
And I think the OT organizations -- I call it more of a horizontal --
across those 3 or 4 different verticals have realized they need to put
some big investments. For us, it's a perfect fit of a platform. I think
it provides us endpoint capability, visibility, segmentation, some
advanced detection and response. And so some of the SIEM capabilities,
for example, analytics. And so for us, the OT world is a perfect fit
for our platform, not all the platforms sometimes, but that's how --
where we're seeing, I think, a big uptake is because yes, we do certain
versions of our products which are ruggedized but really, what they're
trying to build is an integration between the IT world and the OT
world, and our platform absolutely does that.
Keith Jensen
Yes. It's interesting. As early as early 2019, we were talking about OT
and IoT as maybe a fourth driver of the business. And we certainly
expected it, but we were waiting for it, so to speak. We're waiting for
it to arrive. And I think it has definitely arrived in 2021. There's no
doubt about that.
Roger Boyd
Yes. Clearly, clearly. And then there's all this talk of federal
cybersecurity modernization. At the same time, we've now passed
infrastructure bill. Is that a needle-driver to maybe accelerate that
OT business as well? Or how do you think about that? And I guess maybe
with federal specifically, how big of an opportunity is that for you?
And then also, thinking about that trickling down to state and local,
which is also a needle-mover for you as well.
Keith Jensen
Yes. When we talk about our federal business, we make a point of
emphasis that it's a worldwide number. So international governments,
U.S. Fed as well as state and local. And inside of that, the U.S. Fed
is not a large portion of our business. So from an opportunity
viewpoint, that part of it is, I think, very, very large.
Roger, you made the point, though, as the funding moves out into a
sled, if you will, state and local government's indication, we do, do
very, very well in those verticals. And we would expect that, that's
been a -- we're certainly seeing that move -- that money, if you will,
those funds move through those other parts of the government now even
before the new bills came into existence.
I think, importantly, it continues to elevate the conversation around
cybersecurity. And you start to see the federal government doing
things, whether it's maybe funding it or the other side of the
conversation, whether it's meeting with foreign leaders or what have
you, it continues to put cybersecurity on the front page, if you will,
and keep people's focus on the fact that they need to secure
themselves.
Roger Boyd
Got it. Okay. Maybe a broader question. How does Fortinet think about
the shift towards more consumption-based models and ratable pricing?
And if we're going to nitpick, I mean, the product line is growing very
well. Maybe the subscription line is delivering solid 20% growth, but
maybe hasn't inflected in the same way you've seen product revenue
growth. Just in general, how do you think about as an industry moving
towards more ratable OpEx models?
Keith Jensen
I'll just give a little clarification on the revenue recognition. Of
course, the product is recognized first and then you attach the service
contracts, give it a 2.5-year contract term, it's going to be amortized
over that. So it should -- it's building up a nice backlog.
And I think if you look at the backlog growth, you start to get some
indications of what may happen on the services part of the business.
But beyond the accounting conversation, I think John has more to say
about where the market is going.
John Maddison
Yes. The deferred revenue on the platform.
Keith Jensen
Sorry, deferred revenue. Thank you.
John Maddison
Yes. So we have -- obviously, we have the subscription services that we
apply to the products. I think what's changing, and it's been changing
for a while but kind of slowly, is that customers want more of a
subscription model per user or per device. It's interesting because
each cybersecurity product area monetizes in different ways.
So traditionally, network compliance look is looking for throughput, so
they charge performance and throughput. Endpoints has been per device.
The cloud has mainly been around per user. And so we see all these
things coming together. We announced a thing called FortiTrust, which
allows a per user pricing for a specific use case like Zero Trust.
Because the other piece of it is, I can't give you a licensing model if
I've got 3 different ones that I need to bring together. So for us,
FortiTrust, which is starting to roll out in Q1 of this year, will
bring together those different licensing model into a per user
subscription model. I still think it's going to be kind of a slow ramp
across that as customers roll out the use cases which are relevant to
that type of model.
Peter Salkowski
I think it's also important to point out that service revenue is twice
as big as product revenue. It's a bigger number to be growing off of.
So the fact that it still grew 24% in the quarter is still pretty
substantial.
Roger Boyd
It's good distinction. Yes. Maybe the topic that most of investors want
to hear most about, supply chain. You've done a fairly good job of
talking through these constraints in the first half of this year and
the third quarter, and talking about your relative strength there in
terms of your ability to carry inventory and the power you have with
contract manufacturers. Can you just talk about that degree of control
you have whatever the situation may be relative to your competitors and
maybe how that has changed over the last 6 months or so?
Keith Jensen
Yes. I do think those parts of our business model and maybe 4 or 5
different things that may be a little bit different that give us an
advantage in those, not to suggest it's not challenging. I think the
operations and manufacturing team has done a fantastic job with the
continuing evolutions of challenges throughout COVID.
But I think one thing I would point to is that the number of firewall
shipments now, I think about 38% of all firewalls have a Fortinet label
on them. And I do think that gives us some leverage, if you will, with
component suppliers and the chip manufacturers.
I mean we're exponentially higher than any of our competitors. I think
at the same time, our ASIC approach to life, where it's proprietary,
we're building it ourselves, designing it ourselves, we're not in the
market competing with as many common CPUs as perhaps some of our
competitors might be.
We do manage the channel perhaps or the supply chain a little more
actively than some of our competitors. So one, I think there are some
who are probably much more just-in-time focus as a strategy and have
been for probably a couple of decades. We're probably at the other end
of the spectrum where, historically, our CEO has made a real point to
make sure that we have plenty of inventory on hand. And I think that
positioned us fairly well from what we started to see at the beginning
of this year in terms of the pandemic than having those inventory
stores, if you will, to draw down on them.
The -- I think the other opportunities I think within that is that we
have multiple contract manufacturers. And they're not also necessarily
making the same model, but they are using the same components. And so
we do have some ability to move some of the components between contract
manufacturers.
We also have a comparatively long list of products, particularly the
firewall models. And some of them are close enough together that if
you're running short of supply on 1 series, maybe you can move them up
to the next or down 1 or even an earlier version of the product. So I
think that's given us a little more flexibility.
And all of that, all those levers are being pulled. I would go back to
our operations team and just say, they've just done a great job at this
point in managing their way through an extremely dynamic time.
Roger Boyd
Got it. Okay. And then the other distinction there, as you noted,
coming out of 3Q carrying a backlog and there's this debate amongst
investors over whether you're seeing demand being pulled ahead or
double-ordering or advanced ordering, you've been pretty clear on that
hasn't -- that, that hasn't been showing up in the P&L today. Can you
just talk a little bit about what the backlog -- the growth of the
backlog means to you? That hasn't historically been a number you've
tracked. And what that could mean maybe heading into calendar '22 in
terms of revenue visibility?
Keith Jensen
Yes. I do believe that a higher backlog gives more visibility and maybe
that's where we end up. But to back up a little bit, on the earnings
call, we talked about -- we had a very, very strong quarter, obviously,
in the third quarter. And while backlog picked up, internal
conversation was, "Well, was it enough of a tick-up to really add value
to the conversation and meeting with investors and shareholders and so
forth?"
And I think we said at that time, probably not. We gave some color that
it was largely related to access points and switches, and we've not
seen much in the way of firewall backlogs. But we did also say that as
we moved into the fourth quarter, we expected that we were going to
continue to see challenges with switches and access points, and that
certainly has been the case. And then we also expected to see some of
the backlog there for the firewall trying to creep in a little bit
more.
And it's quite possible that we -- well, not possible, we will
definitely revisit the conversation internally as part of the fourth
quarter results and whether or not we want to talk about backlog
externally. And if so, we'll give you some context around that, what do
we think about orders being canceled or not canceled, and when they're
being fulfilled.
I think if you look at customer segments a little bit and what we are
seeing currently, I think that's forced a closer collaboration between
our sales team and the large enterprises. So the large enterprise
customers that have deployment schedules that may extend out well into
2022 and perhaps in some cases, in 2023, I don't know that we really
pay close attention to that.
Those orders came when those orders came. But now we're seeing that the
conversation between our enterprise salespeople and our customers are
more around alliance, we will place the order now even though we don't
want the product until the second quarter of next year or the third
quarter of next year.
So it's giving us more collaboration and more visibility on the
deployment schedules. In terms of, did we win on business, say, in the
third quarter because we had more product available than others? I
would offer -- again, if you look at the enterprise customers,
particularly those that have a single-firewall-vendor strategy, it's
very unlikely they're going to go lift and shift to the architecture on
something like that.
For those that have a dual firewall strategy, and maybe there's a new
use case that's come on the scene, I do think you would have a
competitive advantage there, obviously, if you have the product. If
you're in a displacement of the enterprise, and you -- I don't think it
really helps you if you're still in the POC phase -- or pardon me, in
RFP space. But if you're in the POC phase and you're getting towards
the end of wrapping that up and you've done well in the POC phase, and
they typically do, and you have inventory, then I think it does help
you.
Now the last group of customers I'd say is the SMB. Maybe this kind of
goes back to some of the benefit we saw in these other verticals who
all of a sudden felt threatened and they're smaller companies. They
probably need a security solution right now, right? There's no waiting
around for it. They may have been a little bit light on it. And if you
can come in with a performance and price advantage together with
availability, I think that does have to give you an advantage.
We made -- we offered a metric that we added over 6,000 new logos in
the third quarter, which was the second quarter in a row. And before, I
probably would say 5,000 new logos is a good number for us in the
quarter. So I think there's -- those data points start holding
together.
That said, lastly on it, new logos, as important as they are because
you have the expansion opportunity in the very, very low double digits
percentage of our business. Think in low teens, if you will. So even
though we added new logos, I don't think it had a big impact on the
actual billings in the quarter.
Roger Boyd
Very helpful color. Maybe jumping back to the bigger picture topics.
You've been pretty vocal about how you view the SASE market unfolding
across cloud services, service providers and enterprise DIY. Can you
remind us of your vision there? And you have been investing in the OPAQ
acquisition that you did about a year ago. Can you just talk a little
bit about any updates there? Yes.
John Maddison
Yes. It comes back to our SD-WAN strategy because SD-WAN is the
foundation. Once that's in place, then you can add components to it.
And so Zero Trust will be a component of that to protect new users, NAC
for devices and then to protect the cloud edge, you'd have the SASE
component of that.
And so to us, it's building that SD-WAN and then building components
out. Because SASE has definitely lots of different definitions. There's
this joint definition of SASE with 12 products. There's one with 5
products. There's one -- the one that I see the most is just really
sort of Gateway-as-a-Service. That's the one that most customers are
buying right now.
And so to us, we can add that capability to our SD-WAN as we go
forward. So again, it's -- I think all the edge need protecting,
whether it be cloud edge, data center edge, WAN edge and NAND edge. And
you need to be able to implement that at the endpoint of the network
and the application of cloud to be successful.
Roger Boyd
Got it. And then on the service provider side of things, you've
expanded some key agreements with providers like Verizon and AT&T over
the course of the year to now sell managed SASE solutions. Can you talk
about what those relationships look like? And when we might expect them
to start showing up in the numbers?
John Maddison
Yes. Well, we think service providers are absolutely the best vehicle
from a cloud edge perspective because they own the network and the
transport. This -- you look at a lot of the SASE vendors, there's a lot
of money that goes into transport and hosting costs and everything
else. And you've got to wonder the long-term profitability of such a
model.
We think the service providers are the best model. So we're going to
partner with them. We did announcements last year -- no, this year.
There will be some more announcements. It's not something you kind of
just switch on tomorrow. It's something that you have to build
together. But we feel like our capabilities along with our big service
provider partners is the best way long term to go from a SASE
perspective.
Roger Boyd
Got it. Okay. Maybe one step further out, the managed security service
provider market, the talent shortage in security is very, very
well-known. We're seeing a ton of demand for shared security models,
MSSPs and MDR. How big of a channel is that for Fortinet? And what have
you seen in calendar '21 in terms of demand from the MSSP channel?
John Maddison
Well, it's the same challenge that I think -- we just talked about SASE
and service providers. Service providers sold a lot of SASE over the
last 5 years. They've suddenly realized, hey, now every SASE vendors
compete against me. We have the same concept with MSSPs. If you provide
a lot of your own services, then you're competing at the MSSPs.
And so what we try and do is -- and we built some of it ourselves, but
really, our end goal is to enable our MSSP partners. So yes, we have
some of our own MDR services and some other managed services, but we
try and build it. It's just that the MSSP can take it and manage it
themselves. And you're totally right, all -- every customer I speak to
for enterprise is having trouble recruiting cybersecurity skill sets.
And even when they recruit them, they're having trouble keeping hold of
them. And so that's why I think the MSSP marketplace is going to be a
very important marketplace going forward just because of the lack of
skill sets. But our goal is to enable that marketplace through our
products, so we always build our products so they're multi-tenant,
they're scalable, they have APIs, they have consoles so that they're
easy for our MSSP partners to take and then market to their own
customers.
Roger Boyd
Got it. Maybe a high-level question to finish things off here and going
back to the roots. You have this huge price performance advantage with
the NP7 ASIC. Longer term, how do you think about the split between
hardware and software virtualized form factors? And where do you think
this industry will end up thinking through the needs of multi-cloud
environments and hybrid cloud architectures? And just where do you
think we end up in terms of the split between hardware and software and
virtualized?
John Maddison
Well, I think it's very dependent on the actual market. So as I go back
in my 20 years, a long way back, e-mail needs to be an appliance, it
became software and now it's cloud because we want that security next
to the application. The same is happening, as I just mentioned, around
secure gateway, you maybe want more flexibility in putting it within an
application.
Other things are very different. Firewall is very different. It has to
be at the WAN edge, you have to do a segmentation. It's not something
you can just put in the cloud and say, Firewall-as-a-Service. What is
happening is there's been a migration, obviously, in the kind of public
clouds to a virtual format. We've seen that, and that's a really good
business for us. We actually mentioned that business.
But I do think that markets like that will still remain 80% appliance,
maybe 15% virtual, maybe 5% native and 1% or 2% Firewall-as-a-Service
for a long time to come because you can't just place it in one place.
It has to sit across your network. And the other thing customers talk
to us about is I'm not putting a virtual machine against the Internet.
It needs to be protected.
And so -- and I can't put a virtual machine, there was this concept
around a universal CPE, where I put a white box at some retail store,
well, that just -- that marketplace has virtually disappeared because
it wasn't relevant. So we still think appliances has got a long way to
come.
Yes, we talked about our network processor, which is very important for
our hyperscale products. We've launched our 7000 series that does
gigabits of performance, but not just firewalling but also next-gen
firewalling. But it's also our system on a chip architecture using on
base systems that allow us to factory-build, especially for SD-WAN,
allow us to scale to thousands of deployments at a very low price point
for high performance.
So I think the marketplace for firewalling is still 80% appliance for
some time to come. I know that while the cloud vendors go, it's going
away and they disappear, that's not been the case. If you look at the
market share numbers, the virtual Firewall-as-a-Service and appliances
from Gartner or IDC, you'll see that's not been the case.
Roger Boyd
Perfect stuff. Maybe a good spot to end it. I just want to thank you,
gentlemen, again, for joining us. And I hope everyone has the nice rest
of their day.
Keith Jensen
Thank you.
John Maddison
Thank you, Roger.
Peter Salkowski
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
End of Q&A
