Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

Greetings and welcome to the Check Point Software 2024 Third Quarter Financial Results Video Conference. I'm Kip Emeitzer, Global Head of Investor Relations. And joining me today, our founder and CEO Gil Schwed and Chief Financial Officer Roy Gillan. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that the conference is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website at Checkpoint.com. During the formal presentation, all participants are in listen-only mode to be followed by a Q&A session. During the presentation, Check Point's representatives may make forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made speak only as of the date hereof, and Check Point undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements. In our press release, which has been posted on our website, we present GAAP and non-GAAP results, along with a reconciliation of such results, as well as reasons for our presentation of non-GAAP information. If you have any questions after the call, please feel free to contact Investor Relations by email at kip.checkpoint.com. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Roy Galan.

Thank you, Kip. And thank you everyone for joining the call. One moment, I'll open the presentation.

Can you see my... You're on the right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Front slide, you're on the right.

Yeah, yeah. So can you see now? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. So we had a very good quarter. We'll start with the revenues in EPS. In the third quarter, our revenues grew by 7% to $635 million, $3 million above the midpoint of our projections. Our non-GAAP EPS grew by 9% to $2.25 million. One cents above the midpoint of our projections. So overall, very good results. Going further into our revenues and our business. So as I mentioned, the revenues grew by 7%. Our subscription revenue grew by 12% to $277 million. The calculated billing reached $562 million, which represents 6% growth year over year, while our current calculated billings grew by 5% to $563 million. The calculated billings this quarter was affected by several deals that were pushed from Q3 to Q4, that we expected them to close by September 30th, were pushed to Q4, and mainly in Europe. And we do expect that this will provide us a benefit of approximately three points to the billing in Q4. Some of them were already closed in October, and the majority will be closed before the end of the year. So that's, I think, important to mention regarding our billings. As for the revenues, the revenues, as I mentioned, grew by 7%. That was driven mainly by product and subscription revenues that grew to $396 million. That's mainly driven from strong demand for our Infinity Consolidated platform, our Harmony email that keeps doing, have this strong demand, and And we did see also demand, and we see the product revenue grew by 4%, so we see an increase also in the demand for our appliances. I mentioned the Infinity. So Infinity had another great quarter. It continued to flow in an accelerated way to the revenues. Another quarter with strong double-digit growth year-over-year, becoming more and more significant to our total revenues. which now is approximately 15% of our total revenues. And we see more and more customers, existing customers and new logos that are adopting our platform, answering their needs under one umbrella of products and services. Now let's look at the revenue by GEOs. So America had, in terms of revenues, America consists 41% of our revenue and grew 3%. It is important to know that in terms of new business bookings, actually America had a very good quarter, continued the first two quarters in 2024 with the double digit growth in new business. EMEA revenues were 46% of our total revenues, and they grew by 7% year-over-year. I mentioned already about the billing effect in EMEA. So it's also, again, we did see some deals that were pushed from Q3 and Q4 in Europe. But again, we expected that that would be closed by the end of the year. And in APAC, we did see a 17% growth in revenues. Also, in terms of new business, APAC had a very good quarter. So I think, yeah, so that's the revenues by geographies. Moving into our P&L, so our gross profit was increased by 5% to $563 million, representing 89% gross margin. Our operating expenses increased by 9% to $289 million. This is mainly as a result of our continuing investment in our workforce. Organically and also the additional expenses related to with the acquisition of Perimeter 81 that we closed in the end of Q3 last year. Our non-GAAP operating income was $274 million, while our net income grew by 5% to $255 million. And the non-GAAP EPS was $2.25, grew by 9% year-over-year. Our gap EPS was $1.83. As for the cash flow and our cash position, so we had a very good, we had a very strong operating cash flow. We closed the quarter with $249 million operating cash flow, a growth compared to last year. Our cash balances amounted to $2.9 billion, while also this quarter we closed the acquisition of Cyberint. And the net cash paid for this acquisition was $186 million. Gil will add more about this acquisition in his slides. And we continue to do our buyback. We purchased through the quarter $325 million of shares at an average price of $182 per share. To summarize our financials, so again, revenues and EPS, both above the midpoint of our projections. Our revenues accelerated to 7%, mainly driven by strong infinity and harmony email performance. And another quarter with strong profitability, strong operating cash flow. So in general, again, a good quarter for us in Q3 and looking at for Q4. Gil?

Thank you very much, Roy. And I'm very excited to be here and share some of the insight on Q3, which actually was a very good quarter. So I think you've already heard from Roy. Revenue, ZPS, we were above the midpoint of our projections. I've looked at almost every financial metrics and they all look pretty good. I think we've mentioned the Infinity platform, continued strong demand, the Harmony email, which reached over $100 million in ARR. May you speak more about that, which I think is something... Very good. And I think what's more important is that we've continued to grow and continue to invest in additional area. So I think one area that's very important and a focus of this quarter is expanding our Infinity Global Services. That's a very important unit that we have over 3,400 customers, which is pretty big on that. And the main one and the main step that we did here was to get into the SOC market, the security operation with the cyberint acquisition, which is all about threat intelligence. And I'll explain what it means. It does show you that we are pretty consistent about making acquisition, expanding, trying out new things. And I think actually you'll see even some examples. They actually most of them actually work pretty well. So this is our 10th acquisition in just five years. Looking a little bit on customers, you can see that we continue to win deals. This is a combination of new customers, existing customers, but you see the names. These are impressive names of customers that allowed us to share their names. And you can see it's from all over, from the Deutsche Bourse in Germany to Mayo Clinic in the U.S. to U.S. Department of State, which shows us to protect some of your most important assets of the United States. Porsche Informatique. in germany automotive siemens actually this is siemens america so you see customers embrace checkpoint customers like what we do and this is reflected both in growing existing customers winning new customers and winning in many different categories in the last few quarters we spoke a little bit about wins in the public sector and that continues to be important and you see here Over 40 countries, 65 new government agencies in the public sector. That's just from the third quarter. But it's not just public sectors. Financial services, 40 new customers in 23 countries. Healthcare, 28 new customers in 17 countries. And I think the list goes on and on in additional sectors just to demonstrate the positive success that I think we have and the potential that we have because I think these numbers... can be much, much higher in the future. I've talked a little bit about email. And email has been one of the most critical entry points for malware into organization. We protect the network, and I think that's the most important element. But email continues to be a vector which is connected to the network where malware gets into the organization. And we've realized a few years ago that it's experiencing a quite interesting transition in the marketplace from on-prem email to cloud-based email. And that's a big opportunity for us. And that's where we acquired Avanon, That's why we acquired Avanant to get into that space. And through that space, we became one of the fastest growing and providing the best security for email. And you can see in three years, we've quadrupled this business. Our ARR now is way over $100 million. We're getting more and more large enterprise customers. to buy into this platform and the pipeline is good and the field is very, very positive about that. You can see high double digit growth here, year over year, well over 50% growth in the amount of business that we do. So this is something quite positive and quite good to see in our business where actually our strategy works, the platform works and our acquisition works. Thanks for everybody that made that happen. And this may be the next one, which I hope is going to be another example like that. And that's expanding our portfolio into the SOC, into the Security Operations Center. For us, I think it's very important strategically to get to be not just on the network, not just on the cloud, but also to be in the center with the SOC. And And we found a very unique opportunity here, and that's the external threat management, external exposure platforms. We acquire Cyberint, and in a minute I'll explain what they do. We have over 180 employees that just joined Check Point with Cyberint, way over 200 enterprise customers with some very big names, Fortune 500, even Fortune 100, and I think even Fortune 50 names amongst the customer list. A fast-growing company, still relatively small, but I think very promising. So what they actually do? Cyberint scans the organization assets. It can be web servers that are all over the internet, not just the main network. It can be the main network from the company. And it's mainly many, many other assets that we don't see. Like what people write about us in the dark web. What people write us on the, not dark web, on the open web. And there are amazing things you can find. For example, employees that lost their credentials. So somebody has an information how to get into our company because some employee forgot their username and password. There can be many, many different resources like that. Hidden certificates, cloud keys, a lot of things that get lost. kind of, I would call them lost, not all lost. Sometimes they are being stolen. Sometimes they are being manipulated because they were stolen from third parties, not from our employees, but from third parties. And they find themselves into the dark web and people can use them to attack us. So what CyberInk does is constantly scan our assets, our open web and the dark web, find these kinds of vulnerabilities, checks them out and gives us the real time report of this is the things you need to close. Now, all of that is an interesting market sector, less what Check Point does, because we always say that we are about the best security and we are prevention, not about reports. And that's what we want to create together with the cyberint acquisition. turning it into actual prevention. So when we see that an employee credentials were compromised, if it's really were compromised credentials, we can lock down the accounts. If we see maybe a server on the internet that's actually imitating our company, that's, by the way, another asset that CyberInt finds, companies that copy a company website and use that to trick their employees. We have the ways to do takedowns. It's a very impressive operation that something within minutes can do a takedown of a malicious asset like that or impersonating asset like that. In the future, if we want to be able to turn on network security capabilities and many other capabilities, To move that from here is a report and here is more work for you, Mr. CISO, to actually the opposite. Here is a report and here is the 50 things we did for you in the last day, in the last week, in the last month to close vulnerabilities, real vulnerabilities, not just potential vulnerabilities. And I believe that's a play on triple different things. It's a play on managed services. It's a play on the SOC. It's a play working with the CISO. And it's a play mainly for the platform and the collaborative security, how we demonstrate, how we take different elements of the cybersecurity space and show that they can actually work together and generate more value. So I'm very excited about that acquisition. We completed it, I think, on the last few days of the quarter. So we didn't have much financial impact on last quarter. But hopefully in the next few years, it will have a bigger and bigger impact. And hopefully we'll be here a couple of years from now and we'll be able to show similar results to the ones that we had with email and the ones that we'll have on SASE and a few other areas that I believe presents great addition to our platform and great growth potential for CheckPoint. So that's the cyberint acquisition. And if I need to summarize, I think overall, we had very solid quarter, very good quarter, revenues and EPS about the midpoint of our projection. Rhi also mentioned that in the last few quarter, we are seeing, this is the internal indicators that I'm seeing, not just the revenues that you see outside, very positive indicators in the Americas, in the US, which is the most important market. So we are seeing some good signs there. Infinity delivers continued strength. Harmony E-Mate exceeded the $100 million ARR, and we expanded our SOC offering and transforming security operation and threat intelligence through the cyber interquisition. So overall, I think that we had a Very good quarter. Very proud of what our team did and even more excited about what the team can achieve moving forward. So thank you very much. And I think before we open the call for questions, maybe a little bit about projections for 2021. the fourth quarter and for the full year. So for the full year, we are actually not changing our guidance. We're well within the range that we published before. Maybe I'll start with the full year. That's a little bit more complicated, but let's start with the complicated. You see, obviously, that the range for the year has narrowed. The range for the year has went up. I mean, if we started the year from 2475 to 2625 billion dollars in revenues, it's now on the right side of the center and the midpoint is right side on where we started the year. So I'm very proud that this year with all the things that we've done, with all the changes, with all the challenges that some of the market faced, we so far haven't faced too much of that. And we're not going to just finish at the midpoint, but finish above the midpoint. And that's true to our revenues. And that's true also to our EPS. We started the year with a broad range for EPS from $8.70 to $9.30. And we are going to finish it between $9.05 to $9.15, well over the midpoint range. that we started the year. And that actually you can calculate from that what's the range for the quarter. But the range for the quarter is going to be very consistent with our original plans. Revenues $675 million to $715 million. Earning per share between $2.60 to $2.70. Gap EPS is expected to be approximately 45 cents less. You know my regular caveat that projecting the future is always very challenging, high level of uncertainty. Results can be better, results can be worse. But I do feel that we're getting into the fourth quarter with healthy pipeline, energetic workforce, a lot to offer, a lot of things coming. not just in the sales pipeline but in the product pipeline new innovation new acquisitions and q4 is going to be a very interesting and exciting quarter for us and i'm looking forward to that so thank you very much and i think we can open the call for your questions thank you all right as always please keep your questions to one if possible

And first up, we'll have Shaul Leal, followed by Adam Tindall. Shaul?

Good afternoon. Gil, on the Billings Miss, I get the regional softness in EMEA. given a typical sleepy quarter. Did you have any eight digit contracts? Was it several seven digit related transactions? And maybe that can squeeze another one. You know, since you've announced the Dove replacing you, I know it starts in December, one of the prevailing views on the street, at least that we've been getting, is that given the Dove's strong VC background, Check Point is likely to embark on an M&A spree, accelerating growth, mid-teens, lowering operating margins, mid-high 30s. You've got to see the numbers out there. Interested in hearing your views along these lines. Thank you for that.

So it's two separate subjects. I would try to answer the billing thing. We are, by the way, not managing too much of the billings. We are becoming more and more sensitive of that because U.S. analysts watching that we are trying to build healthy pipeline of good deals. If we can give customers immediate billing, it's good. If we can actually let them use the fact that we are not short on cash and cash. and give them a long-term billing which lower billings it's also good for us as long as we get good healthy business and i think that's what we are doing and we are more and more sensitive to that i think rohim did mention that we had a couple of deals that slipped from q3 to q4 no impact on the financial results this is deals that didn't impact the revenues or didn't impact didn't have much impact on the immediate results it's actually deals that should have come forward And some of them already arrived in the beginning of October. So I wouldn't look at it as anything. I hope it's not anything that's indicating for something we should be aware of. And I think overall, I'm happy with the results. About the transition, over the past few months, I'm working on a transition plan with Nadav. It's working extremely well. I'm very happy about everything we're doing. I'm very happy about the potential. I think we're going to embark on new expansion, new strategies, new things. But for the immediate term, I'm not expecting any major changes. I think we've done 10 acquisitions over the last five years. We're going to do some acquisitions. I don't think that our strategy now to be mega acquisition that we wouldn't have done otherwise. I think we want to keep our operational discipline. And again, my focus was never on margin. My focus was always about how we generate good security, best security, healthy growth, profitable growth. I don't think that that agenda is changing. And I think over time, Checkpoint will see changes. And I think that we're going to see very positive changes in Checkpoint because Nadav brings amazing energy and amazing skills the checkpoint needs. So I'm super excited about that. And I don't think that at least in the short term, you're going to see any big changes. Long term, I think we always want to build a better future and a better strategy.

Next up is Adam Tindall, followed by Taliani.

All right, thanks. Good morning. Gil, at the end there, you talked about how you're seeing internal indicators that we may not see as much from a reporting standpoint, but those internal indicators that you see are very positive. I wonder if you could expand on that. I know it's probably a little too early to talk about fiscal 25, but based on your guidance here, you're going to finish this year at about 6% growth, which is a tougher comparison, but it sounds like those internal indicators are very positive. I wonder if that's a level that you might be able to hold in terms of growth on a future basis?

Thanks. First, I think if we look at the industry, we read that we all know that cyber is needed. We all know that Network security remained the centerpiece of security. We all see the level of attacks rising. I don't think we mentioned it here, but on the last year, there's been like a 56, 57% growth in cyber attacks on the US and almost all over the world. So, and the attacks are becoming more sophisticated. So yes, we will need more cybersecurity. That's some macro. We've also been reading some reports about potential refresh in network security and the reinforcement of the importance of network security, but that's a little bit about macro. Within Check Point, I don't have any strong indications for 2025. For Q4... First, I'm always careful, and this quarter in particular, there's so many moving parts in Check Point, so I would be a little bit careful, but we started the quarter with a healthy pipeline, pipeline that justifies the projections that we give. So that's what I'm saying. I'm seeing some good positive energy. I think that the U.S. market is always the best indicator and the most important market, The last few quarters have been quite positive on the deal flow that we see in the Americas, and that's great. I don't know if you remember, but we've also had management changes in the leadership of our Americas organization and so on. It's not coming in a vacuum. And it's too early to say if that organization is going to rise next year to its full potential, which is much higher. But at least seeing two or three quarters that the U.S. performs well, it's actually a very good indicator that shows that I hope that we are taking market share, gaining customers, and fighting where we need to fight.

Next up is Taliani, followed by Joseph Gallo.

Sorry, I need to whisper because I'm in a public space. First question is, what's your position on vendor financing? We've seen other companies in the space being more aggressive on vendor financing and providing financing to customers. The second one is more strategic. Rui, you spoke about double-digit growth for a while and the ability to get a double-digit growth, but the beat, you're beating the numbers, but the beat is very dismal. It's very minimal. And the question is, what needs to happen? You have so many products and so many acquisitions and so many refreshes, and what needs to happen for you to break this mid single digit growth kind of rate and get to sustainable double digit growth? Thanks.

Okay. You want to start, Gil?

You start, Rui.

So I'll start, you know what, with the double digit, the second question that you had around the double digit. So When I was asking, I mean, I've been asked about it. We've been asked about it for a few quarters. I think that what we've told that in order to be in double digit, I think we are positioning today much better to accelerate our growth than what we've been in the past. And because we, first of all, we did some very significant investments. The last one that we did, not the last one, because the last one is cyber ring, but we did a significant acquisition of perimeter 81. We expanded our, so we have a totally new SASE offering. We invest a lot of both on R&D side, on the go-to-market side. We said that it's going to take a bit of time that we're going to see to have a significant effect on our business. But definitely, that's one of the main agents that should drive us to accelerated growth and more than what the Mitzinger Digit that you mentioned. And And again, Infinity, we are seeing that through the Infinity, we see more and more customers that are taking not only the firewall, not only the network security quantum, they are buying more of our product. They are using, first of all, the email security. Many of these customers are taking in the Infinity, the Harmony email. We're starting to see in the last few quarters also customers that are taking the Harmony SASE. So I think, again, it's something that that's the... That's how we should, I mean, that's the main driver that should bring us to accelerated growth. The second question, again, what was the first one that you asked? Vendor financing. Ah, financing. So actually, again, we're talking a lot about infinity. The thing with infinity is the flexibility also. that we are providing to our customer. The flexibility, it's not only about when they are using their allowances and when they are using their license, it's also around the billing terms. So we see in more and more Infinity agreements that there are some There are some bidding terms that are more flexible. I don't want to call it financing, but they are much more flexible than a standard deal. So we don't see, we don't do any financing. But again, we are providing, I think that with our cash position today and the strength of our balance sheet, we definitely can be more flexible in terms of bidding terms. And that's what we are doing today, mainly with Infinity. So that's my answer for that question.

Anything else, Stell?

Thank you.

Next up is Joseph Gallo, followed by Brad Zelnick.

Hey, guys, thanks for the question. Maybe to follow up on the Perimeter 81 comment, how are you tracking towards having that fully integrated in 4Q? How is the pipeline building there? And then when you talk to customers, what is the willingness, particularly in the high-end enterprise, what is the willingness to eventually adopt that SASE solution? And when can we expect that to happen? Thanks.

We're actually seeing some positive traction in Perimeter 81. If you remember, we started a year ago. I think it's a very important step. element for our network security platform to have that sassy cloud delivered security as part of the platform. We started and we are selling it for the last year. Sales are going fine. And we started by integrating. So first, I think we are doing fine on the integration timeline. Second, I think last quarter we've seen some Q3, we've seen some nice jump in the amount of quarterly sales, and that's a very positive indicator. It's still small, so I'm not pointing it as the big thing or the big achievement, but when you have sales growing in a few percent every quarter and then a double-digit growth, I'm talking sequentially, it's a very positive change in the trend, which means that it's picking up. And for Q4, we have a few seven-digit growth. on that SASE platform and not the way it's connected to us. So overall, there's all the reasons to be optimistic about that. And hopefully we'll be able to even accelerate some of the things we are doing. But you know, that's my job as CEO is to ask everybody to accelerate. Their job is to do the best possible that they can. And I think we're doing a good job there.

Thank you. All right. Next up is Brad Zelnick, followed by Rob Owens.

Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Maybe just to start with you, Gil, it's good to hear that you expect next quarter to see three points of benefit to Billings growth, which comes from deals that slipped out of the quarter. I think it's more like five points of growth if they hadn't slipped from Q3. But naturally, deals slip every quarter. Is there anything specific to checkpoint the environment or competitively that explains for these deals slipping when you think about and do your root causal analysis. And maybe for Roy, we continue to hear the success that you're having with Infinity Contracts and recurring revenue products like Harmony and CloudGuard. As these continue to contribute more to the mix and what sounds like even exceeding your own internal expectations, what impact is that having on the model and how should we think about that going forward? Thank you.

So I think overall, we had a pretty positive quarter. I've looked very in-depth to analyze the quarter, and we had many regions in the world when we had some very good results. And we have a few regions in the world where we had some softness. Again, I'm talking about two and three levels beyond the big geos, even within geographies. In America, there are some areas that did extremely well, but there were some areas that were soft overall. America's U.S. was excellent for us last quarter. for example again i'm talking about the internal indicators so it's a similar case in other territories i think europe in q3 is always a challenge on one hand we do get business business continues but on the other hand it's very hard to change things and and solve bottlenecks in europe in the summer time when many people are on vacation so i think in europe we've seen some some of that softness um Overall, as I said, I think we had pretty decent results. When I look competitively, I think we're doing fine. I think we're winning. We're seeing more. If I looked at the last few quarters, our growth in key indicators like product and billings were very good. Clearly, by the way, I'm talking all the time about cyber and cyber growth. And I think cyber is one of the healthiest sectors that we have. But we clearly seen in the last two or three quarters weakness of some of our competitors. I hope that it's... not a long-term reflection. I hope it's maybe a result of other things, but I think that compared to that, we are actually gaining share in the core markets, and that's a positive thing. Obviously, like every time, I would like to see more growth in the market overall and more growth for Check Point.

And as for your question, Brad, around the mix, so we definitely see that the harmony, mainly the harmony email, which gaining, I mean, growing very significant. We just disclosed that we exceeded the $100 million ARR, higher than $100 million ARR, and definitely it's becoming more and more significant to our subscription revenues. So this together with the SASE that we expect that will be more significant for us mainly from 2025 after we're going to complete the integration, I think that definitely should drive our growth and should drive the subscription revenues growth. and and i think that that's that's uh what we see and then we hope to see to see the momentum with the email continues and with the other products accelerating roy i think he also was trying to inquire about timing with hardware around infinity contracts and things along that lines ah okay so Also, it's something that is reflected in our guidance, I have to say. What's going on with Infinity today, that Infinity is becoming, I mentioned, 15% of our total revenues. In some quarters, even in the product, it can be even higher in the product revenues. The thing with the product revenues related to Infinity that In standard deal, when we're selling appliances, so usually it's, you know, we're getting the order and it's being delivered. The revenue is recognized close to when the order is received. In Infinity, they have the flexibility. They are buying allowance. They are not buying, they are buying, it's a kind of, we are billing them for allowance, for example, for one year. And they have the flexibility whenever they want to purchase. to utilize the allowance, and then only we can recognize revenues. So because the infinity is becoming more and more significant to the product revenues, we have less in terms of when we're having orders that are being recognized immediately. So that's easier to predict. But when we have orders that are in the control of the customer who want to utilize it. So there is some kind of volatility that can have around the product revenue when it will be recognized. Because we cannot recognize revenues from product when they are buying allowance, only allowance. We can recognize only when we deliver the product.

Thank you so much, guys. Great to see you.

All right. Next up is Rob Owens, followed by Roger Boyd.

Thanks, Kip. Good afternoon. And thank you for taking my question. Gil, in your prepared remarks, you did talk about new customer acquisition across different verticals and geos. And I guess the question is, are you seeing an inflection relative to new customer acquisition? It's not something you guys have called out recently. And with those new customers, where are you landing with what products and who are you displacing? Thanks.

It's a good question. I think it's across the board. Obviously, most of the new customers are still network security customers, which is good because that's the core market and that's where we have the highest potential to gain share. We do have email as a great entry point to win some new customers. And in many cases, we want to grow it into other products as well. There's a few other examples. I think, well, on the SASE side, there's also some area that we are winning some customers. So I think all of them exist. But having said all of that and even looking at the model and saying, you know, we got this email business. It's great. We acquire a new customer and then we can cross sell it and upsell to it. That's great. Still, the vast majority even of new customers is our core network security customers. And that's, I think, a very positive thing.

Great. I guess the spirit of the question then, so where are you seeing displacement? Who do you think you're taking share from in the core network security?

I think we're taking share from all our competitors, but it's still, I think, in very small numbers that I don't think I don't want to brag about that. I think we can do in the future. I think, by the way, I'll give you an example. Some of the largest customers, they adopted policies that says that they're working with dual vendors. And for both security reasons, business reasons, and many other reasons, adopted the strategy when they are buying from two different vendors. I think we're seeing in some of them that new orders are coming to us. After a few years, they tried to balance it and maybe gave some more orders to competitors to kind of balance the account and have a competitor with a presence in the account. Now that they get to choose who gives them the best value, who gives them the best security, they are buying more and more Check Point. So I've seen a few examples of customers that are good, loyal, long-term customers that haven't purchased new products from us for two or three years and suddenly buying again more from us and growing with us. So that's a positive thing. Trying to think about more examples. I think we're seeing it all over. It's not the usual names.

Great. Thanks for the color.

All right. Next up is Roger Boyd, followed by Hamza Farawala.

Thanks, Kip. Gil, you continue to talk about the importance of building around the SOC and IGS with XDR and MDR continues to sound like it's doing well. You've now added cyber into the platform. Some of your key competitors have been a little more aggressive in their push into the SIM and security analytics market. So just wondering your perspective on that and given all this disruption in the SIM market, why not go after that a little more directly?

To be very honest, I think first something we're looking at, we're trying to see what can be done and so on. I'm not sure that at this point we have a real good opportunity to be a leader in SIEM based on the technology that we have, based on the players that exist, based on the technologies, based on the cost structure. Yes, there are some maybe inflection points in that market and changes and AI can change things, but it's not a simple entry point. So we are there. We are playing a little bit with that, with XDR and a few other technologies. But I'm not sure that that's the market we should grab right away. Of course, if we will find some breakthrough internally or externally, that can change. But at this point, I don't think that's our major growth. But again, I think the cyberint one can be a very brilliant entry to the SOC with kind of something that I think has a unique value proposition and can prove to be valuable in a very short period of time.

Thank you. Was there more to your question? Okay. Next up is Hamza Farawala, followed by Shyam Patil.

Great. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Gil, I had a question for you regarding just network security architectures in general. So, you know, network traffic has gone up by some measures 20% plus. since COVID. You launched new appliances earlier this year. We're seeing healthy growth again in the product revenue. I'm curious, as enterprises are considering refreshing some of that hardware, how long do you think this refresh can last, especially as some organizations are looking to remain hybrid and maybe on-premise for longer than we thought a couple of years ago?

Obviously, it's taking longer than I want it to happen. I think we are seeing healthy refresh cycles. We are getting them. We are winning them. I would have liked to see more of that coming in faster. And I think our new product line is definitely something that can show that. I mean, we have more bandwidth, more capabilities, everything together. who accommodate that growth in network traffic. We have our clustering technologies and our maestro hyperscaling technologies. So I think we are very well positioned to win a bigger share of that and to do it faster. I think, as I mentioned before, as much as I'm optimistic about our results, positive about our results, optimistic about the future. I think we had the year, but the year wasn't all green for everyone. Let's put it in a careful way this year so far. So the fact that we have growth in products and so on is actually a good indicator. In the ideal year, I would like to see much higher growth based on where we are.

Thank you. All right. Next up is Cheyenne Patil, followed by Gabriela Borges.

Hey guys, good afternoon. I had a question just on the go-to-market and I guess specifically the channel partner program that you guys launched at the beginning of the year. Just curious kind of how that's going, how that compares to kind of what you expected and just kind of any feedback so far on that.

I think we're getting very good feedback from everything I hear from our channel organization. We just completed a few channel conferences in different parts of the world and I got only positive feedback. I don't know that it has any material big impact on the results so far, but I think the sentiment from the channel is definitely becoming better and better and the feedback is all positive.

Thank you.

All right, next up is Gabriela Borges, followed by Saket Kalia.

Hey, good. Thanks for taking the question, team. I wanted to follow up on some of the opportunity that you might have with the embedded DPU chips with NVIDIA as we get closer to the shipment date. How are you thinking about some of the business models that you could be deploying to be able to monetize that opportunity? Thank you.

I think it's something we talked about. I don't remember if it was in Q1 or Q2 or the beginning of Q2, I think. That's a huge opportunity to go and secure the hyperscalers of AI and to be on the AI hardware infrastructure. It's in the very beginning of things. We're just starting to build some senior sales leadership to focus on that. We are working with NVIDIA and other AI hyperscalers to get that out. It's too early to say what impact will it have and how big is the potential, but I think it's a very unique value proposition that we have and something that the world will definitely need.

Understood. Thank you.

All right. Up next, Saqib Khalia, followed by Joel P. Fishbein Jr.,

okay great hey guys thanks for for taking my question here roy maybe maybe for you um you know i think we talked about infinity being about 15 of of total revenue and that's clearly growing a lot faster than the overall but i guess i'd love to talk about the other 85 a little bit and and maybe longer term as you think about this model in the future infinity is clearly going to become a bigger mix but the question is is that going to come at the expense of the other 85 meaning Can the 15 and 85 both grow together? Or does the 15, in an absolute dollar terms, does that 85 need to go down over time? Does that make sense?

Yes, that's a good question. So I think definitely it can grow together. It definitely can grow together. I can tell you that what we see with Infinity, that Infinity is driving the growth. I mean, it's driving growth. So we see that our customers that are adopting Infinity, we see growth. more growth there than what we see that customers are not adapting. It doesn't say that the customers that are in the other 85, we don't see any growth. For example, we just mentioned Harmony Email. Harmony Email, of course, there is a portion that it's part of Infinity, but there is a portion that it's just sold standalone and it's growing very fast. Same thing with other products. So again, it can definitely grow alone. I think that our future will be Infinity. I mean, we... We think that in the end, this 15% will grow every quarter, that you're going to see more and more, you're going to see that Infinity would be more significant to our business every quarter. And I think that's the future of, and again, that's the platform, that's the future of Checkpoint, that will drive the growth that we are looking for.

I would maybe jump in and saying that when I measure the success of Infinity, there's two things. First, how many people move to the platform and deploy more technologies and get to commit to us for longer term? And then are they actually growing? Because converting an existing contract to an Infinity contract is When you get no growth, it's good from a commitment technology, but it's not driving that. And overall, our Infinity customers are driving high growth. I think on the average, last time I've checked, it's not in the last quarter, Infinity customers were growing 20% faster than non-Infinity customers. So if I took a group of customers... Day one and then two years later with Infinity, with existing contracts, they were kind of stable. With Infinity, they grew by 20%. And that's why we still think that moving customers to Infinity is good, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the value that we provide and the value that we get.

Very helpful. Thanks, guys. All right. Up is Joel P. Fishbein, Jr., followed by John DeFucci.

Good morning. Just a quick question. At CPX24, you really spoke a lot about the CNAP market. How integral is CNAP to gain traction in this move to double digit growth? And can you elaborate on where you think you are in that market? Thanks.

I think we started the year with challenging conditions in the cloud market. I think the last two or three quarters actually have been far more positive in terms of growing the overall cloud business. Still, I think the judgment is still out. What's the potential that we have? Which areas will we win? Will it be more cloud network security or more SYNAP on that? I think we did a very good job in modernizing our SYNAP product. I did a deep dive into the product a few weeks ago, and I was very impressed with what we got. I compared it to a competitive product, and I thought that we should be very proud of what we have. Still having said all of that, there is a long road to get the maximum potential for us at Synapse. And there is a good question, which I don't know the answer, whether we should focus more on Synapse or more on other cloud technologies to win and provide value in the cloud space.

Thank you. All right. Next up is John DeFucci, followed by Ben Bolin.

Thanks. Gil, questions for you. You said yourself that Europe is always soft in the quarter. Was this more than usual? And if so, what caused that? You mentioned some struggles of some of your competitors. Are you implying softer demand for network security in general? Or is it more incremental macro softness than you expected in Europe? Or was this simply an execution issue for those deals that slipped on the part of Checkpoint?

Frankly, I don't have the full answer and I don't want to mislead. Last quarter, for example, even though Europe is usually weak in Q3, we won some giant deal in Europe, which made this a tough compare. I'm not using that as an excuse and I didn't open with that because I think the fact that we have a large deal last year means that we should have had two this year and not just repeat the same thing. But that's made it a little bit difficult. tougher compare for Europe for specific country from last year when we won a giant deal in the third quarter I don't have any strong attribution I do see some weakness with the competitive market and some competitors that are struggling that were struggling again I don't know about this quarter I know about previous quarters so I don't have all the good answer at the end of the day I think we finished the quarter in a very positive way Healthy numbers, all the financial numbers are right. We are tracking that orders that we think were slipping are actually being won in the fourth quarter. And so far, it's going well. We even had some large quarters from Q4 that arrived earlier in the quarter, which is always a good indication because... Usually you always expect a deal and it always arrived in the last minute. So we just seen a couple of deals that arrived ahead of time, which is a positive indicator. Overall, I think we gave our projection for a fourth quarter, taking all the different elements into consideration.

Okay. Thank you, Gil.

All right. Next up is Ben Bolin, followed by Andrew Nowinski. Andrew Nowinski.

Good morning. Thank you for taking the question. I'm interested in how the current guidance, the framework thinks about budget flush opportunity in 4Q of this year versus prior years. And then an additional item, just any thoughts on how competitive landscape might be influencing the duration of sales cycles or close rates. Thank you.

So, as for the guidance, the midpoint of the guidance didn't take into account any significant budget flush that will be in this year. I remind you that two years ago, I think, we didn't see any budget flush. It was something that we didn't see in the past. A year ago, we did see a bit more budget flush than two years ago. This quarter, again, we do expect some budget flush, but not significant. It didn't take into account significant budget flush in our guidance. And the other question was around the sales cycle and duration band.

Yeah. How competition, bundling, discounting might be influencing the length of the sales cycle and your thoughts on close rates?

So we did, when I'm looking on at something that we are monitoring all the time, the close rates, when we are looking on the close rates, we didn't see any significant change in the close rates. I mean, in the end, the close rates, I mean, I'm not talking about these specific Deals that were slid from pushed from Q3 and part of them already closed in Q4. We're talking about in the close later in the quarter, we didn't see any significant change. The sell cycle, again, nothing special that we've seen this quarter that it's longer than in previous quarters. Again, it really depends on the deal, on the customer. Of course, infinity deal is something, usually it's a It's a multi-million dollar deal, so it involves more approval. Approval cycle can take longer, but nothing that is unique that we've seen this quarter. Thank you.

Next up is Andrew Nowinski, followed by Patrick Colville.

Thank you. Good afternoon. So I want to ask about... Billings again. So in Q2, you know, you had a few large deals, I think, pay up front, which boosted your billings growth by a point and a half. And then if you normalize this quarter, if you normalize the deals that pushed out, your growth actually would have accelerated, I think, from eight and a half to 11%. So I'm wondering, how do you think about the growth rate in Q4, the normalized growth rate, given the positive trends we've seen from Q1 now to Q2 to Q3, a continued acceleration in your billings growth?

So we don't provide any guidance around billing. I can say that based on what we're looking on the funnel, based on what we see also on the expectation around the billing, again, the billing should expect it because of the benefit. First of all, we do see strong pipeline, not related even to the sleep deals. We are seeing strong pipeline for Q4. Second, we do going to expect to have a benefit that what I mentioned about the sleep deals. from Q3. So I think we're going to, again, we don't provide any guidance, but we definitely expect and anticipate that from the final that we see today. And again, we need to be cautious because it's final. We do expect to have a strong quarter in Q4.

Thank you. All right. Our next up is Patrick Colville, followed by Greg Moskowitz, who will probably be our last question of the day.

All right. Thank you so much for having me on. Roy, I guess I want to ask about the guidance. So, you know, nice to see the guidance raise at the midpoint. I know, you know, Checkpoint don't guide line by line, but should we expect if everything goes to plan in 4Q, a sustained re-acceleration in the product line? And then I guess just as a tactical question, in terms of the inorganic contribution from Cyberint in 4Q, can you just give us some kind of guideposts on that one? Yeah.

So right now, as I mentioned, the product revenue, I mean, again, we don't disclose the separation between the product and the other line items in their revenues, but we do expect another good quarter on the product. We see a very, very good pipeline for the appliances, for demand in appliances. I have to say that a significant portion of this pipeline for the product is coming through Infinity Deals. So there is some kind of, I don't want to call it a risk, but there is some kind of a situation that it won't be recognized this quarter. It will be recognized in 2025. So therefore, we are providing a guide. So I think that the guidance is wider in Q4 because we have a significant product market. Significant product revenue is usually in Q4. And with the infinity, that's the main risk that we see today.

Actually, winning the deals, but recognizing the revenues later. For an annuity business model, growth business model, it's good. But for the short term, we are transitioning more and more on the business model to deferring the revenues on that.

Yes. And Patrick, the second question that you had again?

It was, you know, congrats on the Cyberint acquisition, you know, a nice tool to bolster the portfolio. Can you give some guide rails around if there's going to be any inorganic contribution in 4Q?

Yeah, so Cyberint, we bought Cyberint. They had already a nice ARR that we acquired them. Again, we don't expect it to have a significant effect on Q4. I would say less than one point, less than 1% of our total revenues in Q4.

All right. Our last question of the day is going to come from Greg Moskowitz.

All right. Thank you guys very much. Two quick ones. First, I apologize if I missed it, but Roy, RPO, I know it grew 10% last quarter in Q2. Obviously this quarter you had some slip deals, so I'm sure that had an impact, but what was the RPO growth in Q3? And then secondly, a follow-up on Cyberint, since it did actually close just before the end of the Q3, are you able to clarify what that added to deferred revenue? Thank you.

Yes. So first around the RPO, RPO actually grew by 8% in Q3. Around the cyberint, yes, there was no effect on the P&L side on cyberint because it was closed in the last few days of the quarter. It is, I think, less than 1%. I think in total it has approximately one and a half points on the calculated billings that you're seeing. Thank you very much.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. I'm sure we'll be talking to you throughout the day and throughout the quarter. We'll look forward to seeing you guys at the year end in January. Have a great day. Thank you very much.