Palo Alto Networks (TICKER: PANW) Palo Alto Networks Inc Panw Ceo Nikesh Arora Presents Credit Suisse 25th Annual Technology
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) Credit Suisse 25th Annual
Technology Conference December 1, 2021 12:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Nikesh Arora - CEO
Conference Call Participants
Philip Winslow - Credit Suisse
Philip Winslow
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I take it it's not afternoon yet.
Good morning still everyone. Very excited to have Nikesh Arora coming
down. First off, thank you just for being here in person. I appreciate
you coming down.
Nikesh Arora
My pleasure. It's my first in person conference after -- can I say
Morgan Stanley?
Philip Winslow
But actually we were just talking about this outside and I know we've
talked about some questions. But we were saying when you joined as CEO,
there's this debate about, hey, could there actually be a $20 billion
market cap in a security company? And so the question now, I think, is
kind of be $100 billion. It's the market cap security company. Well, my
bets on you guys. So you have to get there.
Nikesh Arora
Just write a note and send it to everyone and that way we're done,
right? No, look, three years ago when I came, I want to talk about just
CIOs, I knew nothing about cybersecurity, I still know just enough to
be dangerous. And the challenge, if you think about it, if you step
back and think on a macro level, just $10 trillion of IT plant embedded
in companies today, roughly, give or take and cyber is about 6% to 8%
of that. So $600 billion, $800 billion of cyber plant in there. And
that needs to get referred, because a lot of that is [cyber]. So IT,
you can have a server that's eight years old and run with it. If you
have a cybersecurity product that's eight years old, you're pretty much
hacked, you're done. So this plant has to regenerate much faster than
the IT plant, if you will. So I got to change my cybersecurity firewall
as fast as I can change my debt server. Anybody has a pilot of north of
seven years, it's a bad idea. I'm trying to tell my team, don't make
them so good to last seven years, because people are replacing them. So
we're not doing that. Only half a dozen, they don't either, so anyway.
So what do you want to do is -- that was one part of it. The other part
is that it's very hard for one cybersecurity coming to all of this,
because every time a new threat vector shows up, a new company gets
born and people start solving their problem. So it used to be
firewalls, then it became XDR, EDR, then it became cloud and you'll
notice over time, different companies come do this. So three years ago,
we sat down and said, where's the going to pug going, the pug is going
to the cloud, we're going to double down, triple down, quadruple down
and build a cloud security business, which we did. Let's say what's a
knock on impact to our firewall business is going to be a SASE
business, we do that too. Now if you look, what are the -- and then
third was as a replacement of endpoint when it happen from McAfee and
Symantec, which is going to be EDR, XDR, we did too. So you've got
CrowdStrike, SentinelOne chasing the XDR, EDR route, we have an XDR
product. You've got Zscaler Netscopechaging SASE, you have a SASE
product. You've got -- none of these guys went hard in cloud security,
it's also a bunch of startup. So the three biggest tech vectors and the
opportunity of times of future are going to be SASE, cloud and endpoint
that's going to get really sort of redone. So in all three of them and
I see the next ones coming up, I think going to see a huge effort
towards replacing the current SoC and SIM business with some sort of an
AI driven business, so you can imagine where we focused in.
Philip Winslow
That was actually my next question. What is the next [leg]? I mean I
totally agree with like, I think actually was you in years said
security is a data problem?
A - Nikesh Arora
Yes. It's a 100% data problem, the problem -- however, the problem is
like, as the world is proving everything is turning to your data
problem. Why do I go to the doctor and show the doctor my X-ray?
Shouldn't there be some AI that can look at my X-ray and tell me,
because it doesn't seem in mu X-rays, because you don't have normalized
data. Well, security has the same problem. There is no normalized data
in security. So you have all these large data stores sold by many
companies, but it's about unnormalized query only data, you can't build
AI against it, you got to build normalized data link. So that's an area
that's gonna be very exciting at the next three to five years.
Philip Winslow
Totally agree. Now if we think about the company that you continue to
build over your tenure here, there's been a lot of organic innovation
and organic acquisitions. When you think about your priorities you're
going forward, where do you put those, where are you doubling down?
Nikesh Arora
So look, part of the challenge was when I came to Palo Alto, there's a
lot of investment in the firewall business and associated capabilities.
There was very poor investment in cloud security, very poor investment
in SASE, very poor investment in whole SoC transformation business. So
I'd say the first two years, we've made a lot of technical debt and you
have a choice. And I have a theory that to build a great product in any
industry, whether it's in consumer Internet or whether it's in
enterprise, it takes four to seven years, whether it's a Google or
YouTube, Facebook, on the consumer side, Uber or whether it's
Snowflake, Palo Alto, it takes four to seven years to build a robust
technology product which we look at it. I have a choice, I can sit
down, start innovation now and out with great products three to four
years later, or I can buy somebody who's been working out of three to
four years and my probability of success is higher. So we went and we
spent $3.5 billion buying 15 companies, but the only thing we did
differently is we bought the best. We didn't buy second best, the third
best in the market, we bought the best in the market at that point in
time, because there's a reason they traded a premium, there's a reason
they're the best is because they're the best. We bought them.
The second thing we did was we integrated them and which is a rare in
our business is we made the CEOs of those companies run it for us.
Normally, you go to -- you acquire company and somebody says, I'm
Senior VP of Innovation, these three companies are going to work for
me. Well, guess what, if you were such a good Senior VP of Innovation,
you should have been building that stuff. Those guys beat you, let's
have them run that and having worked with them. So we did that. So all
that stuff has worked out. So we paid technical debt in the first two
years, two and a half years. Now we're at a point we believe we have --
we're at the bleeding edge on various categories. It's just harder for
us to acquire at the bleeding edge. There are areas we don't play in
like identity or email security. We've chosen to let them be. And
security in my view is you don't get into an established market unless
there's an inflection point. So endpoint had an inflection point, it
went from endpoint protection to EDR, you can go in there. Cloud
security, there's no need for inflection point, it was brand new blue
ocean, we chased it aggressively. So there's an inflection point in
email, there's an inflection point in an identity, we'll probably go
into those markets but we're happy where we are.
Philip Winslow
Yes ,that's been interesting. I mean, yes, that's one thing I
appreciate was at a RSA Conference 2019, I remember going around that
conference. And after many of your acquisitions, it was interesting
when they talk about container security, they wouldn't call it
container security, they named the company the Palo Alto [Bot]. It was
synonymous. It was serverless, et cetera. It's like -- it was everyone
that Palo Alto [Bot] was sort of the -- I didn't refer to space, I
referred to the company. And that was really a hot moment for me. So I
think obviously...
Nikesh Arora
Did you hear any other companies out there?
Philip Winslow
Ones that are still anonymous, yes, I'll let you know if there's an RSA
2022, I'll let you know. But let's talk about competition because, to
your point, you're in a lot of different spaces now. Where do you see
the most distance between you and the competition and the least where
you're focusing on to try to expand that gap?
Nikesh Arora
Well, I mean, if you go back to the macro discussion, right, in the
$140 billion cybersecurity market, on a revenue basis, we're probably
the largest market share with slightly north of 3%. So it's one of the
most fragmented technology markets in the world. CRM is different,
cloud is different. In security, we have 3% share. I think the company
should have 10% share. There's no reason one company cannot have 10%
share in the long term. So with that as the background, I think we have
tons and tons of opportunity going forward from where we are. In terms
of competition, look, unlike consumer Internet, where people like to
play winner takes all and everybody else is nonexistent, there are four
firewall companies and we still have 25% market share. And I'm very
happy with 25% share in any subsegment of the market because that's
better than my overall 2% share. So from a competitive perspective, we
think we're head-to-head on SASE with the players in the market or
technically head-to-head on XDR and EDR. Some of them have done a
better job on a go-to-market perspective as I earlier. We think we're
at least 18 to 24 months ahead on cloud security, and we're
head-to-head than anybody in firewalls.
Philip Winslow
Yes. Definitely. Yes, it's interesting to wash out to your point how
you weren't even in these spaces and now you're a leader or the phases
[Indiscernible] spaces didn't even exist, if you think about it, like
we were talking about [Indiscernible] and now the real markets and
you're the leader. And so congrats on that. Now let's break it down
into -- this is called the strata, Prisma and then Cortex versus
Strata. I mean I think one of the big surprises, obviously, you hear it
on the earnings call is product revenue growth. The inflection you've
seen, I think, caught a lot of people by surprise the past couple of
quarters here. Do you see this as structural? Is there something, call
it, cyclical and COVID related? How do you think about, I guess, demand
push or pull here?
Nikesh Arora
Yes, we partly were surprised, too, 23% product growth in the quarter,
where we had been [3.3, 3.11] or something like that. So it was good.
When we went back and looked at it, there were three or four things
that contributed to it. One is we had just done a new products launch
in half of our portfolio, which was net new. We saw more demand
associated with that. I think some of it was return from COVID. One
didn't realize how much people had not spent money trying to buy
firewalls at that time frame. So there's a bit of that. There was,
obviously, a bit of competitive activity in terms of replacement from
other vendors. So all in all, all of that contributed. The other thing
which is kind of interesting that's happened is with lead times have
extended, we never had six to eight or eight to 12 weeks of lead time
to ship goods. So you can imagine, we have way more visibility into the
stuff that I shipped last quarter -- stuff that was ordered in the last
four weeks of the quarter last quarter hasn't shipped yet. So I'm
sitting on orders, which I'm trying to ship in this market. So we have
a lot more visibility. So not only was the growth surprised to the
market a little bit to us, not a lot. But the good news is that it's
going to be sustained throughout this year, at least, we think.
Philip Winslow
Yes. That's great. And actually, let's talk about lead times for a
moment. Maybe just talk about evolution sort of lead times, and how
you're thinking about that going forward here?
Nikesh Arora
Yes. Well, look lead times are -- I think there's a lot of discussion
on the supply chain. There's good news and bad news. The bad news,
there are supply chain issues across the board, across the industry.
The good news is we probably buy less than $100 million of chips a year
in the market, which is $140 billion -- $130 billion industry. So we
just need the box that falls the back of the truck. We don't need the
entire industry to serve us. There are some other players who need lot
more...
Philip Winslow
You don't need the semis, you just need a box.
Nikesh Arora
Yes, we just need a box. And pretty much the only part of the market
that we have to keep working hard towards getting supplier is CPU
business, right? It's pretty much -- there's two, three vendors,
there's all CPUs. And all I will say is anecdotally six months ago,
they kind of canceled all orders and said, we'll give you what we can.
Three months ago, they started giving you a sense of what you could
possibly get. Now they're willing to say, I'll give you this. So from a
trend perspective, we're seeing that the visibility is better. I would
not say the certainty is better yet. So I think the last quarter might
have been the worst quarter from a supply chain challenge perspective,
that doesn't mean on the margin, you won't have a few percentage move
left or right depending on what shows up the last year, it doesn't show
up. But I think the tougher problem's behind us. And I think in the
next three to six months, things will keep getting better. In the worst
supply chain environment, we did 23% growth.
Philip Winslow
So it still works. Some of it is still working.
Nikesh Arora
Something that's still working, yes.
Philip Winslow
Let's start firstly on the -- in the SASE market. Obviously, this has
been a great success story for the company. But the one number that
really stood out to me, as you said, over 25% of new Prisma SASE
customers are new to Palo Alto, because I think you've asked most
people in this room frankly probably even myself before you gave that
number, I would have said, no, obviously, they came from the installed
base, the firewall side. I guess my question to you is what's causing
SASE be so well with these new logos, in particular?
Nikesh Arora
What's interesting is like we have 57,000 firewall customers. As you
know, we're more weighted to the mid-to-high end of the market, not to
the low end of the market. So these are 57,000 customers. We have 1,400
of those which have taken SASE, right, from us. Now what's interesting
is that when you buy a firewall, you like Palo Alto, you're going to
hold on to that firewall from whoever you bought it for five to seven
years. So even if I like a customer, a customer likes me, they like our
strategy. I'm so sorry, I just bought the firewalls two years ago, the
last time I bought them, I can't buy any more firewalls. But now when
they go SASE, it's like, I really like your product, I'm going to take
the SASE product. And over time, when my firewall refresh or renewal
comes up, I'm going to go reverse and then buy other firewalls, but
I'll take your SASE now. So that's kind of what's happening in the 25%
of the market where people -- they like our security strategy, people
are getting more security sensitive, they want to go down the Palo Alto
Security path and thy take SASE from us, which is good for us because
these customers, we have nothing to sell them three years but they buy
SASE from us. By the way, SASE is equally, if not long term more
profitable for us from an LTV perspective.
Philip Winslow
Yes. How do you think about just the growth in this market? Because
that's one of the questions I get is that, hey, with the pandemic,
didn't everybody have to shift already, so to speak, and that is then
we see peak SASE, any response?
Nikesh Arora
Yes, I don't think people have fully grasped the SASE evolution, to be
fair. So let me break it down. Fundamentally, what's happening is SASE
has less to do with the pandemic. It has more to do with the Cloud
transformation. And if you're going to tell me that our friends at the
very large companies selling cloud and public clouds are going to be
out there, clipping $50 billion to $80 billion of cloud revenue every
quarter, it's coming from somewhere. Somebody is going to be shutting
down data centers, moving stuff to the cloud. My personal view is that
in the next 10 years, 50% of most organizations compute will be in the
cloud. Now when that happens, fundamentally, anybody trying to access
that data has to -- today, all the data goes back to your data center
and then go through the cloud, which is silly, if half your data is
going already there, why would you bring your connectivity back into
the data center, take half there. The ability to split that traffic,
the ability to go to the public cloud and to your data center in the
most efficient way is enabled by SASE. Effectively, what you do is you
take the firewall out of the data center, put it in the cloud, you take
the traffic and you split in the cloud, so you never go -- take this
traffic to the data center. So SASE is effectively putting firewall
capabilities in the cloud, that's what it is. Now if you believe half
the world is going to have [indiscernible] compute in the public cloud,
we're in the -- start to try to do the right analogy. So I learned
after that in the first innings in baseball and the first three overs
in 20-20 cricket.
Philip Winslow
It's like -- I'll use the first analogy. I know what that means.
Nikesh Arora
That's right. So I think the SASE market is very early. I think pretty
much every company is going to go towards a full stack SASE in the long
term in some way, shape or form. And the pandemic has helped because in
the past, your remote access employees, anybody doing remote access. If
you access half the apps, it was okay, you'd go to the office the next
day and figure it out if you're traveling and you had to access certain
things, people sending an e-mail with the data. But now if you're going
to be working from home, you need to be a first-class citizen. And the
only way to be a first-class citizen is to have SASE deployed in the
enterprise. Now you're telling me it's all over, no, I still have over
15,000 customers doing VPNs and my firewalls, and that's probably
millions of customers using VPNs. You don't have SASE, you have VPNs. I
got 1,800 customers using SASE , I have 15,000 using VPNs. If you tell
me over time, those 15,000 have to become first-class citizens and go
down the SASE route, I think we're big year analogy.
Philip Winslow
Yes. I have been working two banks. I am very familiar with the VPN
infrastructure. It's still alive and well out there. It's hopefully
around for long. It's like -- as a remote worker myself. But one more
question too. I had a -- I'll check that I do in the security industry,
he said about SASE. He was like if the vendor does not have a scaled
SASE platform by this point, it's too late. What do you say that from a
competitive perspective?
Nikesh Arora
Look, honestly, in the market, I think there's two and half players
that can actually sell your scale SASE today. We have a customer who's
deployed 1 million users. We have customers deployed 650,000 users in
Asia. We have customer in the US, large consulting company deployed
over 250,000 users. 80,000 users have defense manufacturers. So we have
scaled this from our perspective. There's probably one other vendor who
can scale SASE. Again, our perspective is biased, I'm sure. It's that's
not fully true SASE because of it's obvious non-web applications, but
that's a different conversation for a different time. So if you haven't
scaled it, yes, you're in trouble because why would -- also don't
forget, SASE is no longer just passive security. It's like if your
laptop doesn't access your applications, [Indiscernible] on a call and
screen. In the past, you never call on screen, we've got a firewall.
You will screen with SASE. So SASE not only has to scale, it also has
to be reliable. It also has to be something that doesn't disrupt the
organization's capacity to work.
Philip Winslow
Got it. A switch to the Prisma Cloud for a moment here. This has been
one of my favorite areas to watch over the past couple of years to see
the strategy and just the products that evolve. How are customers
conversations changing, especially sort of post pandemic? I mean, out
of the line that we've been using, there is no cloud, it's officially a
no go. So what are you hearing from customers?
Nikesh Arora
Yes. Look, the good news is there's -- I'm guessing, about 30,000 cloud
salespeople out there, with Amazon, Google, Oracle, IBM, Alibaba and
Microsoft selling the cloud. So we don't have to sell the cloud. These
guys are doing a great job of selling the cloud. We just have to show
up and say, listen, you're going to the cloud, you just have to make
sure you have security. Now in the first instance, we'd be told, well,
we have security, but I already have security as part of my cloud
purchase because all these people have native security capabilities.
But then you go show them, look, there are five panes of glass, you
have to access for their native security, you have one pane of glass
from us, which in the last three years the conversation has changed,
saying, wait a minute, I'm on two of those clouds. I'm not on one
anymore, so I need five for one and five for the other. I'm like, well,
you don't need five, five. You need one across both of them. Then you
get a third cloud, you need one across all three clouds.
So the multi-cloud point of view is working. The market continues to
evolve very fast from a capability perspective. And we have a team
north of 500 engineers working on continuing to develop the
capabilities going forward. The good news is, which you and I have
talked about, what we did was we sell credits to our customers, and we
keep giving them more functionality over time, so they can consume
those credits very easily in terms of our new capabilities. That's why
we share how many credits are consumed by our customers. So you've
taken the friction of selling the friction or adoption out with our
customers because we know that over time, there will be more and more
capabilities needed. And this is great because our largest cloud
security deal so far was north of $20 million. That's kind of the total
bookings of any of the new cloud startups for one year. So it's helpful
when you can go create a platform that allows you to have multiple
modules, and the customer is convinced that they're willing to make
that commitment with you because they understand this is critical to
their deployment in the future.
Philip Winslow
Yes. I remember I just flashed back to our Zoom conversation a year ago
at this time, and I've used your line multiple times, multi-cloud,
multi-platform is the game changer.
Nikesh Arora
Yes. And the good news is that the whole team is focused on landing
these customers. We have 77 Fortune 100 that use Palo Alto Prisma Cloud
Security. Remember, [indiscernible] has AWS, GCP Azure as an underlying
cloud platform. So they have chosen to go put a security vendor on top
of that cloud instance that they have because they understand they need
to be multi-cloud platform, that's multi-cloud unbiased.
Philip Winslow
Got it. Okay. Cortex now. One things that I take notice was just sort
of the pace of innovation at Cortex. It's really seemed to be
inflecting, it's been quite impressive. What new release is seeing the
most early traction in your mind? And then how are you keeping the
sales force best positioned to sell here?
Nikesh Arora
So I think what's important to understand is the endpoint market
changed fundamentally three years ago. In the past, the endpoint was
kind of your laptop. You had an endpoint agent. It checked for any
antivirus, any new infection that you have, a malware in your laptop
and blocked it right there. Now to block it, it needed the signature
saying, I maxed this signature that's in my laptop with the fact that
this new malware has showed up, I'm going to block it. Now the good
news is that hackers are way smarter than that, so they say, well,
that's how you're going to check me, I'm going to figure out a way of
doing it, I'll just send you three pieces of code and they'll go get
together in your laptop afterwards. So -- and we'll do crazy
[Indiscernible]. I'm sorry, I don't talk security language, but I can't
[Multiple Speakers]. So when that happened and as latency went down on
Internet connectivity and compute went up on the Internet, just forget
it, why do I have to compute this in laptop. Why can't I start looking
for anomalous behavior and collect all the data, what's the behavior in
the cloud and tell you that's bad, shut it down. And you can do that
with low latency.
So the market went from endpoint protection to endpoint detection and
remediation, that became EPP went to EDR. So that's the new wave of the
crowd strikes that will Palo Alto Cortex EDR, Carbon black, all these
things were doing that. We're like, great. Now if you're going to start
collecting data from the endpoint and bringing it back, there were two
strategies. Some vendors said, let's just take the data, which we need
to figure it out. We say, let's take all the day we can get that's
incoming and we'll see what we can cross-correlate with to reduce the
security risk. So we took the data from the endpoint, merged that with
firewall data because we have 57,000 firewall customers. And we
realized that the same problem that you see in the network and the
firewall is seen at the end point. And by deep duping, we could reduce
the number of alerts for our customers at 50 times, right?
Any problem that it comes from an end point eventually ends up in a
network. So we started deep duping this by 50x. They say, what else can
I do? So I put identity in there. Now we can put Okta or Microsoft AD
and say, oh, I see some problems in the identity server. I see them in
the endpoint, that's deep dupe. So we're now able to reduce the
security alerts for our customers by 50 times across the board with
whatever data we collect. So part that's actually resonating is, I'll
just asked this yesterday [this] team, close to 25% of our customers
are not just using our XDR product as just an endpoint product, they're
using it as a cross-correlation of data ingestion product. So as I've
said, this becomes a data problem. The end point becomes a sensor.
Endpoint security is less the opportunity. The bigger opportunities in
the endpoint sensor, we used to normalize data, cross-correlate that
with everything else and eventually eliminate the need for me to have
15 analysts staring the data, trying to make it happen while there's a
hack of using the quantum compute instance [indiscernible].
Philip Winslow
Yes, awesome. Speaking of impressive metrics, obviously, we just talked
about Cortex and the innovation there, but just big deals, in general,
over the past, gosh, a couple of years here. Have been meaningfully
inflecting. I guess two questions here. One, in terms of products, is
there anything that's sort of -- from the customer's perspective, the
aha moment that's leading to this. Similarly, too, just from the
go-to-market perspective, something changed with the go-to-market team
that they're able to land these bigger type of transaction?
Nikesh Arora
I think if you look at the data we gave this quarter, I'm doing this
off the top of my head, between XDR, SASE and cloud, there's 6,000 new
customers, right, in two and half years. That will be the envy of any
start-up, give me 6,000 customers, two and half years, that's not bad.
It's all new areas. We never had these products before, we added 6,000
customer instances of those in the last two and half years. Now a lot
of these deals can be large deals. So you've added a whole new set of
category of products where you can do large deals. Couple that with the
fact we're doing $80 million, $90 million, $100 million deals already
in the quarter on our firewall business. So we did $160 million deals
in the last quarter. And told my team I said stop counting
million-dollar deals, start counting $5 million, $10 million deal
because it will become more important.
So the math the team has done is that enterprise, a lot of this was 1%
inspiration, 99% perspiration. So you're right about go-to-market. The
only way to double your revenue is to double the number of deals or to
double the value per deal, and the answer is somewhere in the middle.
And it's hard to double the value per deal, if you don't have more
product to sell. So we've gone aggressively, built a lot of product. I
think you'll see us in the next calendar year, the following calendar,
really scaling our go-to-market capabilities. We think we're doing a
good job. We're not doing as good a job as we should be doing and we're
going to go spend a lot of time in the next two years scaling this even
more, because I think the current go-to-market metrics are a good
start.
Philip Winslow
Got it. We only got four minutes left. So I might just pause for a
moment to see if there's any question from the audience. I've actually
got a bunch more of board left here. Wait for the audience. Okay. Well,
we'll just keep going then. We must be doing a good job. But going
back...
Nikesh Arora
I just put everyone to sleep.
Philip Winslow
It's like, never. Let's go back to the -- we talked just a little bit
about the $100 million in the long-term guidance, but $8 billion
revenue, $10 billion of billings, 35% free cash flow margin or the long
term targets. What gives you the confidence in getting -- in hitting
those?
Nikesh Arora
Well, we're joking about this. When I came to Palo Alto, we did an
Analyst Day six months after I joined...
Philip Winslow
Yes...
Nikesh Arora
Less than that.
Philip Winslow
Yes, less.
Nikesh Arora
And I'm killing you, it was -- there was a lot of hope and prayer in
addition to my forecast...
Philip Winslow
Well, you pulled it off well...
Nikesh Arora
As long as you can put up an act, but this time it is less open payer
because we actually understand what -- because again, I don't want to
be facetious. What I meant by hope and prayer is that we were building
new product categories. And there was a lot of risk that these products
going to fit in the market and going to be adopted as fit as we want
it. So there's a lot more risk in the execution and product market fit.
Today, I don't have any concern about product market fit. Now it's a
go-to-market scaling question. I know go-to-market scaling way better
than I know whether the customer is going to buy a private security
product or not because -- and the teams did a phenomenal job. We do the
right acquisitions. We put them together well. So that's what allowed
us to deliver the numbers we promised three years ago. Today, we know
where the product market fit is. Today, it's a scaling question. Can we
go keep scaling and getting to all the customers we want, because we
are getting multimillion-dollar deals on SASE, on Cloud and on XDR.
So there is a resonance between our customers and the product that
we're delivering them. And we are seeing the need for people wanting to
have integrating platform based approach for Palo Alto. So we know
there is a strong product market fit. We know we're not going to take
the foot off the accelerator on the innovation front. We have people
who want to keep building, keep building to keep us ahead in this
category. Another question is, can I go amplify that go-to-market
capability, for example. We've been talking our new President, BJ and
I've been talking. And we think we should bring a lot better
internationally than we have been in the past. So I'm not going to
focus our attention, making sure can we go amplify this across more and
more international customers and scale our capabilities around the
world, around SASE, around Cloud, around Cortex. That's stuff we can
do. So the fact that we've laid out three year plan, it's now a simple
matter of execution as opposed to building product that was
[indiscernible] in humor. Nothing is simple. But yes, it's a matter of
execution as opposed to having to build new products, which is harder.
Philip Winslow
So we know the destination three years out where we want to get to.
When you think as CEO over the next 12, 18 months, what are things,
call it along that path that you feel like we need to hit this, this,
this, to make -- set ourselves up to hit the goals?
Nikesh Arora
Look, again, two and half years ago, we didn't have a lot of these
product categories. We keep selling, executing, delivering to our
customers, evaluating what we need to streamline because as you scale,
you have to make sure you keep taking the kinks out of the system
because things break if you don't streamline things over time. That's
what we're focused on right now, making sure that each one of these
sales are result of happy customers and deployment and implementation.
That's one part of it. The other part is more and more land. Let's
start to get more and more customers. And we share our customer metrics
by product categories, so you guys can see them...
Philip Winslow
Appreciate that, by the way.
Nikesh Arora
You're welcome. One of the things that Walter who used to do this for a
living, he came back and said, what do we guys like on the other side?
A set of consistent metrics, keep showing them again and again, so we
understand them and keep delivering against them. So we're trying to
that.
Philip Winslow
Let's keep that going then. Awesome. Well, our 30 minutes went very
fast, Nikesh. Thanks for the time, like I say, things for coming down,
Walter. Glad to have you at your first conference. It's on this side.
Nikesh Arora
You guys never give an invite when he was in city. Did he?
Philip Winslow
Not so much. And he didn't crash though, either. So I appreciate that.
Thanks.
Nikesh Arora
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
End of Q&A
