Fortinet, Inc.

Welcome to the Fortinet Q3 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Aaron Ovaria, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. This is Aaron Ovaria, Senior Director of Investor Relations at Fortinet. I am pleased to welcome everyone to our call to discuss Fortinet financial results for the third quarter of 2024. Joining me on today's call are Ken Zee, Fortinet's founder, chairman, and CEO, Keith Jensen, our CFO, John Whittle, our COO, and Christiane Algard, our CAO and sales operations leader. This is a live call that will be available for replay via webcast on our Investor Relations website. Ken will begin our call today by providing a high-level perspective on our business. Keith will then review our financial and operating results for the third quarter of 2024 before providing guidance for the fourth quarter of 2024 and updating the full year. We will then open the call for questions. During the Q&A session, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question to allow others to participate. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements, and these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our STC filings, in particular, the risk factors in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q for more information. 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. Also, all references to financial metrics that we make on today's call are non-GAAP, unless otherwise stated. Our GAAP results and GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations are located in our earnings press release and in the presentation that accompany today's remarks, both of which are posted on our investor relations website. The prepared remarks for today's earnings call will be posted on the quarterly earnings section of our investor relations website following today's call. Lastly, all references to growth are on a -over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. I will now turn the call over to Ken.

Thank you, Irene, and thank you to everyone for joining our call. We are pleased to report another quarter of strong execution and continued growth momentum, including record growth margin and operation margin, with the operation margin increased by 830 basis points to over 36 percent. Total revenue growth of 13 percent as we return to positive building and product revenue growth. Unified SaaS building growth of 14 percent. Secure operation building growth of 32 percent. And secure networking return to positive growth, all driven by a continued share gain in our total addressable market of $284 billion. As highlighted on slide 11 of the investor presentation, Fortinet continues to be the only vendor to leverage a single operating system, FortiOS, delivering solutions in five secure networking, done a magic quality report. Secure service edge, SC1, single vendor sassing, network firewall, and enterprise-run wireless LAN infrastructure. FortiOS combined with the proprietary FortiASIC technology significantly boosts secure computing power, delivering 5X to 10X better performance than our competitors, while lower customers' total cost of ownership and energy consumption. In the third quarter, Unified SaaS building was 23 percent of our business, up one and a half point, driven by secure service edge building growth of 220 percent, with pipeline up 130 percent. FortiNet is the only vendor offering all SaaS functions in a single operation system and providing a unified networking and security stack on premise and in the cloud. This allows FortiASIC to be deployed within minutes from our SD-WAN customers. Our single OS-based FortiASIC also enables sovereign SaaS for service providers and large enterprise to deploy FortiASIC with their own data center for data privacy. In addition, we were recently recognized as a clear leader in the 2024 Garmin Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN for the fifth consecutive year, and notably, our position highest of all vendors in ability to execute for the fourth year in a row. Leveraging FortiNet's leading position in firewall and SD-WAN, and our integrated FortiASIC within the same FortiOS, FortiNet provided the easiest and most secure path for migrating from traditional firewall to secure SD-WAN and Unified SaaS. We continue to invest in our global infrastructure.

Over

three-minute square feet of cross-office space, executive briefing center, operation facility, and data centers. Our own hosting capability gives us a long-term cost advantage while allowing us to use our own FortiStack for better security and management. AI security operation was a fast-growing pillar, outpacing the overall market with a 32% building growth, accounting for .5% of our total business, up to point. We have expanded our security operation portfolio with the launch of a LaceWork FortiSeaCAC-RCNAP and FortiDLP, which together represent a new $20 billion market opportunity. And we expect to cross-sell both solutions to a large install base of customers. Our commitment to innovation and investment in R&D has enabled us to rapidly expand FortiAI, our GenAI system, into seven key solutions. FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiSim, FortiSOAR, FortiDLP, and recently announced FortiNDR and FortiCMAP. More GenAI about FortiAI portal will be announced in early 2025, as Fortinet AI-based secure operation business accelerates. Before turning the call over to keys, I would like to thank our employees, customers, partners, and suppliers worldwide for their continued support and hard work.

Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Aaron. And good afternoon, everyone. Let's start with the key highlights from the third quarter. We're very pleased with our strong execution and financial performance in the third quarter, repeating our second quarter performance by, again, achieving record gross margins and record operating margins while delivering top-line results at the top of our guidance range. Total revenue grew 13 percent, driven by strong growth in services revenue and product revenues returned to growth. We again added over 6,000 new logos, driven by the resilience of small enterprise customers and the strength of our robust channel partner ecosystem. As you'll hear in a moment, we are pleased to again raise our revenue and operating margin guidance for the full year, and we believe we are on track to achieve our seventh consecutive year of exceeding the rule of 40. Looking at buildings in more detail, RPO grew 15 percent to 6.1 billion, and total buildings grew 6 percent to 1.58 billion, driven by robust growth and security operations at 32 percent, and unified SASE at 14 percent. SSE and related cloud technologies were again the fastest growers in unified SASE, benefiting from our large SD-WAN customer base. Our unified SASE and security operation pillars are gaining considerable traction, with over 90 percent of the buildings coming from our secure networking install base, and combining to drive our SASE solution, organic ARR growth rate of 74 percent. The customer buying journey from FortiGate to SD-WAN to SASE supports our customers' drive towards consolidation and is gaining traction. This consolidation journey first begins with a firewall in FortiOS, and typically expands to SD-WAN and next to SASE. I should share that two-thirds of our large and mid-enterprise customers have deployed our SD-WAN technology, providing them with a gateway to FortiSASE. These large customers, our first year of SASE delivered high -single-digit penetration rates, highlighting both the dramatic expansion opportunity, as well as customer demand for vendor consolidation. Including all elements of unified SASE, pipeline growth was over 30 percent, and while the SSE technologies are seeing pipeline and ARR growth of 130 percent and over 500 percent respectively. Larger enterprises continue to drive our expansion into unified SASE and the security operation markets, with large and mid-enterprises representing 91 percent and 76 percent of SASE and SACOPS buildings respectively. As we worked through the wind down of last year's backlog and the related -over-year headwind to growth this year, secure networking has returned to growth as we expected. Rounding out the building's commentary, SMB and large enterprise were our top two performing customer segments, while EMEA was our best performing geography with double-digit growth. Among our top five verticals, manufacturing buildings grew by over 20 percent, driven by OT buildings growth of 19 percent. Retail returned to growth for the first time in six quarters, up 9 percent, while the service provider vertical reached its highest growth rate over that same six-quarter period. Turning to revenue and margins, total revenue grew 13 percent to 1.508 billion, driven by 19 percent service revenue growth and product revenues returned to growth. Service revenue of 1.034 billion grew 19 percent, accounting for 69 percent of total revenue. Service revenue growth was driven by growth in our SAS solution, including 50 percent services growth in SecOps and 27 percent services growth in Unified SASE. Product revenue returned to growth for the first time in five quarters, increasing 2 percent to 474 million. Excluding the impact of backlog, product revenue grew sequentially at double-digit rates, outpacing historical norms for Q2 to Q3. And following a similar storyline on what we saw in Q2, when sequential growth also outpaced historical norms. A moment ago, we talked about solution consolidation and described the customer's journey around firewalls to SD-WAN and onto SASE. The second customer buying journey is supporting customers' convergence of security and networking. Their journey begins with four-net firewalls and expands to leverage our 40-link technology to manage four-net switches and access points. It's worth noting that over 95 percent of our larger enterprise switch customers previously or simultaneously purchased FortiGate firewalls. At the same time, our switch penetration rate for these larger customers is around 50 percent, highlighting both our success and the future opportunity. Software license revenue continued its double-digit growth, driven by SecOps solutions, and represented at mid to high teams percentage of total product revenue. Combined revenue from software licenses and software services, such as cloud and SaaS security solutions, increased 33 percent, accelerating from 32 percent in the second quarter, and providing an annual revenue run rate of over $900 million. Total gross margin increased 630 basis points, to a quarterly record of 83.2 percent, and exceeded the high end of our guidance range by 320 basis points. Gross margins benefited from higher product and service gross margins, as well as a four-point mix shift to higher margin services revenue. Product gross margin of 71.6 percent was also a quarterly record, and increased 1,370 basis points, which includes a 320 basis point benefit related to the renegotiation of supplier contractual commitments. Excluding this one-time benefit, the product gross margin would have been 68.4 percent. Service gross margin of 88.5 percent increased 130 basis points, as service revenue growth outpaced labor cost increases and benefited from the mix shift towards higher margin FortiGuard security subscription services. Operating margin increased 830 basis points, to a quarterly record of 36.1 percent, and was 360 basis points above the high end of our guidance range. Excluding the one-time benefit to product gross margins, operating margins would have been 35.1 percent. Taken together with our reported Q2 margins, the Q3 margins, excluding the one-time benefit, provide directional insights to our financial performance. Before moving on to the statement of cash lows, I'd like to provide a few details related to the impact of Lillis work and NextVLP acquisitions. These acquisitions increased Q3 buildings and revenue by approximately 60 and 90 basis points respectively, and increased gross and operating margins by about 30 and 220 basis points respectively. And I spoke when I said decreased gross margin and operating margins. Looking at the statement of cash lows summarized on slide 16 and 17. Free cash low was 572 million, representing a margin of 38 percent. In adjustment for real estate investments, the margins came in at 40 percent. In the first nine months of the year, free cash low was 1.5 billion, or 1.75 billion after adjusting for real estate investments. Cash taxes were 140 million, up 114 million, reflecting the prior year's regulatory extensions of estimated tax payments. Infrastructure investments totaled 36 million. The average contract term in the third quarter was 28 months, flat year over year and quarter over quarter. DSO decreased six days year over year and quarter over quarter to 62 days, reflecting stronger than usual linearity. The $106 million gain on bargain purchase from the Lacework acquisition relates to NOL carry forwards and the related recognition of the deferred tax assets. The gain is excluded from our non-GAAP financials, but it is included in the GAAP financials, adding 14 cents per share to our GAAP ETS. Share buybacks in the quarter totaled $600,000, and last month the board increased the share repurchase authorization by an additional $1 billion, bringing our remaining share repurchase authorization to approximately $2 billion. Now I'd like to share a few significant wins from the third quarter. First, in a seven-figure up-sale deal, an existing SDOM customer in the retail industry continued their consolidation journey, adding 40 sassy for 16,000 users. This customer selected our 40 sassy solution for its simplicity, ease of management, and consistent security enforcement across their infrastructure. We outperformed the competition by leveraging our 40 OS operating system, streamlining operations, and reducing cost of ownership, while showcasing our ability to consolidate multiple security functions onto a single platform. In another seven-figure win, a medical device company purchased 40 sassy to replace their existing solution. This customer chose 4NET for its simplified and consistent security management, significant cost savings, and 40 sassies enhanced functionality, particularly the bi-directional connectivity between their data center and remote users, enabling to push policies more effectively. In an eight-figure competitive displacement win, a multinational bank commenced their partnership with us by selecting our FortiGate firewalls and multiple SecOps solutions to secure their architecture. This customer was particularly impressed with our integrated security and the end visibility and automated response capabilities of our 40 OS operating system. Before discussing our guidance, I'd like to offer a couple of comments on the firewall recovery and refresh opportunity. During last quarter's remarks, we mentioned that the continued improvement in the days to register FortiGuard contracts indicated the inventory digestion at end users was returning or had returned to normal. In the third quarter, this metric was stable, further validating our view that the firewall market is recovering. Today, we'd like to add to this commentary by noting that in 2026, a record number of FortiGates will reach the end of their support lifecycle, and we expect these customers to start the refresh cycle for these products sometime in 2025. Moving on to guidance, as a reminder, our fourth quarter and full year outlook, which are summarized on slides 19 and 20, are subject to the disclaimers regarding forward-looking information that Erin provided at the beginning of the call. Before reviewing our outlook, I should note we expect Lacework and Next DLP, those acquisitions, to increase Q4 Billings in revenue by 75 and 135 basis points respectively, and decrease operating margins by 230 basis points. All right. For the fourth quarter, we expect Billings between 1.9 billion and 2 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 5%. Revenue in the range of 1.560 million to 1.620 million, which at the midpoint represents growth of 12%. Non-GAAP gross margin at 79.5%. to 80.5%. Non-GAAP operating margins of 33 to 34%. Non-GAAP earnings per share of 58 cents to 62 cents, which assumes a share account of between 768 and 778 million. Capital expenditures of 100 to 120 million. A non-GAAP tax rate of 17%. And cash taxes of 127 to 177 million. For the full year, we expect Billings in the range of ,000,000 to ,000,000. Revenue in the range of ,000,000 to ,000,000, which at the midpoint represents growth of 11%. Service revenue in the range of ,000,000 to ,000,000, which at the midpoint represents growth of 19%. Non-GAAP gross margin of .3% to 81.3%. Non-GAAP operating margin of .9% to 33.9%. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.20 to $2.28, which assumes a share account of between 766 and 776 million. Capital expenditures of 380 to 400 million. Non-GAAP tax rate of 17%. And cash taxes of between 550 million and 600 million. I look forward to seeing you at the Analyst Day later this month and updating you on our progress in the coming quarters. I now hand it back to Call it a Pairing to begin the

Q&A session. Call it a Pairing to begin the Q&A session. Thank you, Keith. As a reminder, during the Q&A session, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question to allow others to participate. Operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, you may also press star 1-1 again. Please stand by. Okay. Please stand by while we load our first question. Our first question comes from Hamza Fodawal with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Great. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Ken, I couldn't help noticing in your investor presentation, you talked about a market growth that you see over $200 billion growing 12% over the next four years. Obviously, a big chunk of that growth is driven by the SASE market and your share gain there. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about Bortnett's approach in terms of sovereign SASE. How is that differentiated versus some of the competitors out there? What is it that you're doing differently, particularly for those highly regulated verticals out there? Thank you.

Thank you, Hamza. It's a great question. We've invested in the SASE for about five to ten years in the market, including all the SD1 and also all the SASE functions in the same 40 OS, both on the same OS and in the same box. That's for the sovereign SASE. We usually call it private SASE. Actually, if you look at it probably one year ago, we were more focused in that area with a lot of service providers, which is quite important for them to deploy the SASE in their own data center to process data and also to keep the data in their own kind of data center and also process also within their own data center. That's a two important factors there. They have to be local to secure the data and at the same time to process data locally. That's a huge advantage in the same OS and also a lot of function can use in 40 ASIC or a salary. The other differentiation comes from the business side. We have written number one on the network security firewall. We also have number one on the SD1. So, leverage our installation base and also both the firewall function and also SD1 function in the same OS with the SASE. That's for the customer. They have the most easy migration path from the traditional firewall vendor, from the traditional firewall to the SD1 customer go to SASE. It only needs a few minutes reconfiguration. They can enable SASE based on their previous SD1 or the firewall configuration there. So, it's a very easy migration path. Now, as you can see, the pipeline grows and also the business growing there from SASE, like over 200 percent, the pipeline grow over 100 percent. So, we do believe we'll be the number leader in the SASE space in the next few years.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Essex from JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. Stick to one topic. I guess either 10 or Keith, could you dig into the commentary around the firewall refresh cycle that you provided? So, with respect to conversations you're having with customers and maybe with a little bit of color of what you've seen historically, how far before the renewal point do customers tend to refresh? And do you have any insight into the mix of SMB, large enterprise, service provider, retail, and what the timing and the magnitude might be, whether this might be a first half event, second half event, any kind of insight you could provide that would really be helpful?

Yeah, I'll kind of jump in a little bit on this. I think that we see these end of life of these products starting in the second half of 2026. We don't expect the customers to wait until the 11th hour to make the change. For larger enterprises, they would go through another certification, POC project perhaps as part of that before they place them in service. So, we saw a similar, not similar, we saw a lift, if you will, similarly in 2023, although the magnitude in 2026 is much, much larger. And why it's relevant to 2023 is that if you go back and look at product revenue growth in 2022, very different world, supply chain, switches, etc., but I think in 2022 product revenue growth was a little bit over 40%. So, we do think there's a relationship there. We do think it starts earlier. To the second part of your comment, as I mentioned, the absolute number that we see in 2026 is by far the largest we've seen probably ever, but so in the last five or six years. It is, each year it's dominated by the entry-level firewalls. However, in 2026 we see a significant portion of that actually being in the mid-range firewalls as well. And that is a very unusual and positive situation. I don't have a breakdown by SMB or something else. So,

maybe Christiana

wants to offer something more on that.

Or by vertical. I think you've mentioned before that you need large enterprise retail and service provider in order to recover. So, if you have any insight there, how their cycles and spending patterns may impact that, that would be helpful.

Well, again, I think 2022 was a robust year for those industries that you just talked about, retail in particular, and manufacturing across the board. And I would expect that they would be active players, if you will, in the refresh cycle that we see in 2026. Christiana?

Yeah, you were asking whether or how early customers would refresh. And many of the enterprise customers have enterprise agreements where they have account-level support and subscriptions. So, they don't really wait until something expires. They will probably, I would expect what you typically see refresh about a year before EOS. And for smaller customers, they will probably try to wait until the contracts expire. But because we don't allow them to renew for less than a year, you also see these refresh cycles happening about 15 to 18 months out.

Got it. Super helpful. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Bolani from Citi. Your line is now open.

Oh, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Tana, a question for you. There was a discussion about the routes to market in terms of gaining your market share within the SASE universe. And one of those important routes is leverage your install base by converting and graduating a lot of the SD-WAN customers. So, my question for you is how should we think about the potential for the cannibalization of some of your refresh potential as that migration journey transpires from SD-WAN to SASE? And then I just have a follow-up for Keith.

Yes, that's a very good question. I think if you look at the customer, a lot of SASE is really supporting the ZTNA and also remote work environment. So, they are not coming like any network security firewall deployment, which tend to be more in the office in the high quarter there. On the other side, it's mostly if you look at our current SASE growing strength, it's mostly come from the current SD-WAN customer base or even the firewall customer base there. So, that's where they do need a hardware firewall SD-WAN there to support in the SASE with additional SASE user license with additional all these other function service add-on there. So, that's where we see like both three pillars, whether the secure networking side and also the SASE side, which will help in add additional service and plus we call the secure operation side all kind of starting growing now. So, we do believe we can keep on growing all these three areas faster than the market, keeping gaining market share, especially SASE, the technology we can put all in the same OS with AC to accelerate and also supporting both the cloud-based SASE or the co-private SASE or sovereign SASE. It's a huge advantage and also come and we also believe eventually the service provider carrier will play some important role in the SASE and offer a lot of their own kind of SASE to their customer. So, that's where we are very strong supporting all the service provider build their own SASE infrastructure and we do feel it's a huge growth potential on top of the cloud-based market.

Thank you, Ken and just Keith for you to double back on the end of support catalyst around the refresh that you're talking to and telegraphing for 2026. Anyway, you can give us a lens on either the proportion of the shipment footprint or the install-based footprint or the customer footprint that this applies to and in the aggregate. Thank you.

Yeah, at the risk of taking all the fun out of the analyst day in 10 days. I would say that the second 2023 was a 2022 was the second best second highest I looked at 26 is more than is a little bit more than 2x23.

Thank

you. So, you're not coming to the analyst day.

All right. Thank you. Our next question comes to the line from Sakit Kalia from Barclays. Your line is now open.

Awesome. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. Maybe for Keith or Christian, I think we mentioned a SAS Solutions ARR growth number in the prepared remarks. Could you just remind us, is that an organic or inorganic number? And maybe just touch on what are the solutions that are driving that growth?

So, the growth number that Keith referenced was an organic growth number. We did not include the ARR that we acquired from Next DLP and Lake York. So, the growth would be even higher year over year would be 150%. What are the solutions, the organic solutions that are driving this ARR growth is really 40 EDR, 40 client, 40 NDR, clouds, 40 web. So, a variety of our cloud solutions and SAS Solutions that we've started to offer. Some of them are acquired, some of them are internally developed.

Keith, thank you for my follow up for you. Just to shift gears a little bit, it was great to see the profitability again. Could you just remind us what, you mentioned something about being one time in nature in the quarter. It sounded small, but could you just remind us what that was? And more importantly, do you think about this as a more sustainable level of profitability?

Yeah, I think if I were to use the headline first, I would say the pro-forma margins, if you back out that one time benefit, product growth margin would have been about 68.4, .5%. And operating margin, if you backed out that benefit, would be 35.1%. As you may recall, we have two different things that are impacting our margins in that regard. One is the traditional excess and obsolete inventory calculation, the inventory you have on hand. That's pretty straightforward in comparison. The second one is future deliverables. And the operations team has worked really hard over the last year negotiating and renegotiating those. And we saw a benefit there that kind of pencils out to those margins I gave you. In round numbers, we got a benefit there of about $15 million. That's very unusual. I've not seen that in the past.

And anything on sort of the sustainability of that margin? And if that risks pulling anything from the end, I'll say I totally understand, but wanted to make sure the question was asked.

Yeah, I think we feel really good about the profitability of the business. And I think it comes back to where those investment vectors that Ken and John Will and others are going to really focus on as we go forward and how we want to invest there. But I think we certainly have ample room to invest in the growth of the company.

Very helpful. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from a line of Tal Liani from Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Hey, guys, you have Tomer Zilbermann on for Tal Liani. I just wanted to ask about the billing guidance for next quarter. The organic billings, X, Lacework and Next DLP came in well below street expectations. I just wanted to ask where you see the weakness and how you measure that against the comments of seeing stable firewall demand this quarter and the expected refresh cycle in 2025?

Yeah, great question. And I think what we're seeing when we look at the fourth quarter right now, we're really pleased with what we got out of the very first month of the first quarter. And I think that the second month is early at its tracking. What's giving us pause are some chunky deals that are teeing up for the final month of the quarter. And they just need to mature a little bit more before we start thinking about them as part of our guidance numbers. So I think it's really that population of a large seven-figure and a few eight-figure deals that are kind of coming into play there a little bit.

Got it. And maybe to follow up asking more generally about the competitive landscape, we've seen over the last couple of quarters, some of the larger vendors are now focusing even more on discounting, bundling and vendor financing. So how do you see the competitive landscape? Do you see any pricing pressure because of that? And how are you participating with that as well?

Yeah, I think maybe Christiana will add a couple of comments here as well. But I think the discounting was very similar to what has been in prior periods. As I mentioned, we certainly have ample margin to invest in a wide range of ways. And we're encouraging our sales team and our channel partners to take part of that. But I think there's also been some other changes in terms of incentives that we offer as well. But maybe Christiana has some thoughts as well.

Yeah, I think overall the discounting we expect to be pretty stable. But of course, it depends on the product set a little bit. And then, yeah, we have incentives in the market for channel partners specifically, but also for our customers to buy more 40-net solutions.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from a line of Gabriela Borges from Golden Sax. Your line is now open.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Keith and Ken, I wanted to ask you about the go-to market. And more specifically, I think it's been about a year since you up-leveled your Salesforce around SSE. What are some of your learnings? What do you think is working well? And what do you think is incrementally a focus as we go into 2025 where you think you can maybe up-level some more? Thanks.

Yes, you can see the last 12 months we made a huge progress in the SSE -to-market directly. But also you can see Q3, some of the service providers also finally starting in their current world now and realized the importance of the SSE into their customer base. But it's probably still take some time. But on the other side, we see our own customer base really like the SSE and very easy microwave from the firewall, as you might into SSE. So that's kind of probably 90% of our SSE business come from existing network security and also I see one customer. And that's actually help us sell additional service, additional margin there. On the other side, the technology we have, whether the single OS, the ASIC, or cellular dysfunction, it was a huge advantage to expand beyond traditional SSE market, which is only focused on the cloud-based SSE. So that's where we see whether the sovereign SSE, private SSE, or even beyond go to the edge computing area with all kind of technology with our clients, also see especially for the OT IoT area, both the hardware agent, software agent who's supporting all these OT device, we see also huge growth potential there. So that's where we're pretty confident. So we're leading the SSE market and just like we did in the firewall OSD1 space.

Yeah, I think that can spot on. That makes sense. Thank

you.

Yeah, yeah, spot on with that. I think that if you very contrast where we are today versus a year ago, what I would say is that given the response that we get from customers when they meet with us, they're very excited about the architectural design of SASE that we've taken. And what we really want now is just more at that. When customers sit down with us and hear that story, it resonates with them. And you see that in some of the pipeline numbers and some of the ARR numbers that we're talking about, which are still very early days. And I think part of that is getting more reference customers involved. And I think also, you know, the channel needs to partner more closely with the channel to make sure that we're getting more advance on those SASE opportunities.

Thank you. Our SASE also infrastructure is also different than what my daughter competitor. I think that we, like I said, we own more than three million square feet of our own kind of facility, which if our own data center can deliver the SASE function, probably less than half compared to all this COLO and then also kind of only 10 to 20 percent cost compared to some core provider. But we're definitely working with them because they have also good coverage. So that's where for us, we do have a cost-side advantage for structure side. Plus on the OS technology, on ASIC acceleration can lower the energy cost within the data center, within all the SASE processing. I think we do have a huge advantage both on technology, from infrastructure, and also leverage the business customer base we have on the far west C1. So that's the three advantage we have overall other SASE competitors.

I think it's also interesting to note, like you said, we started really focusing on SASE a year ago. Like Ken said, we've been building the solution for some time, of course. A year ago at the November 23 earnings call right around that, we broke out those two other pillars, SASE and SecOps, externally and also internally to focus on those pillars. And you've seen really nice growth when we focus on solutions like that over the past year. It's only been a year. And I think it's a little analogous when you think about kind of affording that ability to execute. If you look at SD-WAN, which we started to really focus on in 2018, and now we've risen to be the leader in the Garden Magic Quadrant, it steadily grew over time. And so I think that those past results delivered around SD-WAN are illustrative of what Fortinet can do when they focus on things. And we've really been focused on SASE and SecOps for that year. And so I think we've had really good results over the course of that year in a very short period of time and a lot more focus to come going forward.

Absolutely. Good stuff. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Saul Yaw from TD Cohen. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Ken or Keith, in your press release, you're talking about Fortinet being well positioned to lead in its three core growth areas and drive sustained growth. Keith, again, I don't want to spoil the analysts, they will frontrun it in advance, but sustained growth, what are we talking here? Low teens, mid teens, any color will be highly appreciated.

Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to it, and maybe Ken wants to a little bit, although I would probably be careful what he says. I think, well, obviously, we'll talk about 2025 as we get to the February earnings call. And we understand that the November analyst day is probably going to bake in some of the 2025 conversation. So I think that's a well-structured question, but I think we'll pause on answering it for now.

Yeah, I agree. So probably waiting for another week. And also, you can look at the investor slides. Probably number six, there's some information there. We probably provide more detailed information about total address for market, how we want to grow faster in the market in each sector.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from a line of Rob Owens from Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. And Keith, I wanted to, I guess, double back on your comment around Q4 and some of the chunky deals setting up for the final month of the quarter, giving you a bit of caution. Was that not in your purview, I guess, when you were looking at the setup for the second half before? Have these things somewhat slipped relative to maturation, your ability to get them across the line? Just curious why the additional conservatism around them now? Thanks.

Yeah, great question. And I do think that compared to what I've seen in other quarters, maybe a little bit less or a little bit slower progress on the maturation on those larger deals in the third quarter as they got teed up for the fourth quarter. Certainly not shutting them out. I just think it's more prudent right now to take a more cautious approach and let them mature a

bit. It's another fact that's really probably the first time we also started giving RPO number. And also compared to one year ago, some of the deal, probably Christiana can give more detail. Instead of a finance from the channel, get it building right away for multiple year deal. Some of them may just use an RPO, just build annually. Maybe Christiana knows his better.

As you can imagine, the customers won't pay might be years upfront. And so we have internal discussions around either getting the channel finance or do it ourselves. And this is also not matured enough to be comfortable guiding in that direction, but gives us some part because some customers just don't want to sign up for long periods without financing.

This maybe has a little bit short term impact, but also a benefit company long term with better margin, better customer relation. So that's what we're looking for long term success.

All right. Thank you. Our next question comes from a line of Catherine Trevnik from Rosenblatt. Your line is now open.

Oh, hi, Catherine Trevnik here. Thanks for taking my question. Can you discuss how your virtual firewall is performing this quarter or the trends for it? And competitively, we've been picking up that Microsoft and Google have been doing a really good job with their virtual firewall. So how is that standing competitively with you? Thank you.

Yeah, I think that the virtual firewalls have done very, very well. It is a component of unified capacity as well as part of our network security portfolio. So and I think the only thing we look at is the crossover that we see, which is a very strong relationship between. Sorry,

I have another call.

You still there, Catherine? Well, I'll just finish the thought. I think the only thing we'll talk about later this month is just the strong overlap that exists between our enterprise customers that are buying both physical appliances and virtual appliances.

All right. Thank you. Our next question comes from Adam Bord from Stiefel. Your line is now open.

Great. And thanks much for taking the question. Maybe for Ken, just on the Lacework for the CNAP offering now, I'd love to hear a little bit about initial customer feedback, partner feedback, and kind of near term R&D and sales and marketing priorities. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I mean, I think the feedback we're getting is similar to what we found. This is John Whittle, by the way. What we found when we did our diligence, great product, great engineering team. It's an incremental TAM of $10 billion for us. So it really opens up that incremental TAM. Now we have cloud security endpoint network, and we have great threat intelligence from all three. So I think it's very, very positive feedback in terms of the quality of the product. We're continuing on the roadmap to improve the user interface in other areas and really make it a really, really strongly competitive product. I think it's very competitive against some who have kind of pieced their solutions together based on multiple acquisitions forming their CNAP solution. And so what we find is in that context, oftentimes we hear this feedback from customers a lot. Their solution does not work well together. It's reportedly integrated, but it's not. Lacework CNAP solution was largely developed organically by them to all seamlessly work together. So we're hearing really positives on that front. And then also versus other competitors, we do have this broad suite of products that we can offer together versus other kind of single point single product vendors who just offer CNAP. So we have real competitive differentiators against the others in this space that we see working to our advantage.

Yes, both companies have a market-leading technology and the team there are also pretty strong. At the same time, also kind of better as a company. So we're keeping hands on own kind of solution, integrated solution there. And that's probably better than other competitors who actually leverage our customer base, leverage our also strong R&D resource, have both combined solution and also stand-alone solution to supporting customer units. A new $20 billion total addressable market, I think, definitely adds huge growth potential both in the secure off and also in the strategy space.

That's great. And maybe just as a quick follow up, just on the government vertical, obviously three cues important for the US Fed. I know the Fed's a little bit smaller on the vertical for Fortinet, but maybe talk about the government vertical more broadly in the quarter and how you can speak about it in common periods. Thanks so much.

Yeah, to your point, we're not really aligned with the US Fed part of the market for us. The government part is more state and local as well as international government. So you don't really get the same sort of 930 benefit that maybe some other companies see. Great. Thanks again.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Culver from Scotia. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Joe Vandergaan for Patrick Culver. Can you guys talk more about how you're enabling or incentivizing partners to kind of lead with Fortinet SASE when they may already have existing relationships with more established vendors in this space?

Thanks. Yes, you can see the Fortinet channel partner, you can see a lot of the actuality. He's our partner for network security and also SD-WAN. So it's a very easy upgrade path to SASE. And a lot of them also compare to whether the cost, the security, the performance, the flexibility, the broad range. We're also not better than any other competitor. So it's a quite easy migrate from some of the competitors to Fortinet. So we do see some kind of acceleration there. The other part is also we have a pretty big SMB customer base. SMB run out probably on a single digit, has any kind of network security deployment. We also see that's also one of the fast growing areas because they do suffer a lot of advancements that will attack all these concerns. So we do see there's an additional segment we can grow. And at the same time, for service provider, for big enterprise, do this a private service SASE, that's also not another competitor can offer whether in OS or to the local data center deployment within the customer premise there. So that's why we feel we have quite some differentiation can give us huge advantage over other competitors.

Got it. Thanks, Ken.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Joseph Gallo from Jeffreys. Your line is now open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. It was great to see the OT grew 19% buildings growth. How should we think about the sustainability of that business? And then are there any changes in that competitive landscape?

Well, I think that very bullish on the OT market, but the leadership opportunity for us.

Yeah, OG is out of here. We were leading the space in some report with the army leader in OT security. We do believe also investing this year for a long time. And also we believe in the next five to 10 years, probably most of the connections that will come from this device level and which most of them probably have a difficult way to deploy the agent software on this device. Have to use network security. So we see a huge opportunity. This OT combined with all this age computing we feel is what will be the strongest growth area in the next five to 10 years. So leverage whether the OS or ASIC technology and also the infrastructure we have, we feel this is a huge opportunity there. We'll be driving, we'll definitely have the long term growth.

And then maybe just to double click on retail and some of the verticals. It was great to see that that grew for the first time, I think, in six quarters. Now that we're post-election, are there any verticals that you expect to rebound or are there any changes going forward over the next couple quarters that we should expect? Thank you.

We see the manufacturer already pretty strong in Q3. We feel the post-election probably also keeping accelerating there. Also the other one, like carrier service provider is out of market. We feel finally see some growth after probably six quarters. And probably some other like retail, it's a pretty strong growth in 2001, 2002, 2021, 2022, almost like 100% growth. So I think that probably will be more getting the refresh in cycle, starting whether next year or 2026, because we see the number of units in that space registered being like goes through all these months, like four years. We probably more reach to the time to refresh now.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Keith Bachman from BMO. Your line is now open.

Hi, Manny. Thanks. Good evening. I wanted to ask two questions, sort of a micro and a macro, and I'll just ask them concurrently in the interest of time. Keith, just on the SASE penetration, you indicated in slide nine about 45% is with large enterprise. If you took out the SD WAN, and it's a very impressive figure, if you took out the SD WAN, what would that penetration rate or share look like in terms of customer type? I'm just trying to understand the SD WAN versus the other bucket. And then the second question is a broader question, but how are you thinking about Europe as you look out over the next quarter, too? I know it's T plus one in terms of the election and what economic growth may be as a consequence, but just how are you looking at Europe over the next couple quarters, not just in Q4? And that's it for me. Thank you.

Yeah, maybe we've confused you or I've confused myself on slide nine. I don't think that's showing penetration. I think that's showing mix of customers.

Yeah, that's what I, sorry, that's what I meant. But what would the just mix of customers, if you took out SD WAN of the SASE piece alone?

You're going to find a mix of customers that's more tilted to the larger enterprises if you look at SASE alone than when you look at the entire universe, would be my expectation. I think that I think we said, yeah, okay. It has, when you look at dollar values, right, not customer accounts. Okay. Yep. Okay. Europe, I mean, Europe was, I think we mentioned the call international, EMEA was number one. I think US, US was number two and Europe was right behind them in number three. You know, it's a little bit like the SMB headlines that we talk about every quarter, that the economy is slow, everybody worries about SMB and it continues to do well. I'm not saying there aren't pressures in Europe. And as we look forward to the fourth quarter, I don't know that we're expecting anything like an outside performance from Europe, but we'll see how the quarter comes out.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from a line of Junaid Sidiqvi from Tuis. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to drill down in your hardware appliances and if you could maybe just give us a little bit more color, how, you know, the high-end family perform versus the mid-range and the lower end. Thank you.

Good question. Looking for some numbers real quick here.

So overall, I would say mid-range and high-end has continued to be stable but not outgrow. We had a little bit more units at the end.

I guess what we're saying is there's something that jumped off the pages when we look at our numbers. How's that? Great.

Thank

you.

Our final question comes from Gray Powell with BTIG. Gray, your line is now open.

Oh, great. Thanks for working me in. I greatly appreciate it. So yeah, it was really helpful to see the product level billings growth rate disclosures on the slide deck. Within Universal SASE, could you maybe give us a ballpark sense as to how fast the SD-WAN piece is growing? My understanding is that that's probably been under pressure over the last 18 months. So I guess my question is really, do you see potential for that product to reaccelerate, particularly as VMware customers start looking for alternative solutions? Thanks.

Yeah, I think if you look at our SD-WAN space, and I think we made reference to the penetration in the larger enterprises at something on the order of 65% or 70%, that is of our customer base. Gray, as you're pointing out, the opportunity for us to see greater growth there is by, in white space accounts and bringing them on board with the FortiGate and SD-WAN solution and starting them on that customer journey that goes FortiGate, SD-WAN, SASE. I think you're going to get some renewals from the early adopters of SD-WAN here as you start looking into 2025 and into 2026. That will be natural. I think that those same, just as we're going through a renewal cycle for SD-WAN, our competitors will be also. And we've historically shown where we have a superior product like SD-WAN, that's an opportunity for us to dislodge the incumbents.

Yeah, Gray, if you look at the top five SD-WAN providers, we're the only one internally developed in agreement with security, also the SASE, all these things, all the other comp acquisition, a lot of them have also been sold after acquiring some of SD-WAN. So they're kind of a function of technology already stopped developing in a few years now and come after refresh, we do see it's a huge opportunity. It's still a very fragmented space, but we do see a lot of replacement opportunity deal right now. And we also feel we are not only leading on the technology, but also performance, cost, energy consumption. So that's where we feel the SD-WAN we're keeping accelerating and grow faster than the market, getting market share there.

Understood.

All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.

This does conclude the question and answer portion. I will now turn it back over to Aaron for closing remarks.

Thank you. I'd like to thank everyone for joining today's call. As a reminder, we will be holding an analyst day on November 18th, marking our 15-year IPO anniversary. We will share the company's vision for the future of cybersecurity and provide an update on our strategy and midterm financial model. We will also be attending investor conferences hosted by Barclays, Needham, Scotiabank, and Wells Fargo during the fourth quarter. The webcast links will be posted on the events and presentation section of Fortinet's investor relations website. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me. Have a great rest of your day.

This does conclude the conference call. Thank you for being here. You are now signed to disconnect.