Fortinet, Inc.

Hello and welcome to Fortinet's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to Aaron Ovadia, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. This is Aaron Ovadia, Senior Director of Investor Relations at Fortinet. I am pleased to welcome everyone to our call to discuss Fortinet's financial results for the first quarter of 2025. Joining me on today's call are Ken Zee, Fortinet's founder, chairman, and CEO, Keith Jensen, our CFO, Christiana Olgaard, our CAO and sales operations leader, and John Whittle, our COO. As a reminder, Keith will be stepping down from the CFO role on May 15th, and Christiana will take over as our next CFO. Ken will begin our call today by providing a high-level perspective on our business. Keith will then review our financial results for the first quarter of 2025, and Christiana will provide a forward-looking view, including guidance for the second quarter 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 SEC 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. As a reminder, this is a live call. It will be available for replay via webcast on our investor relations website. The prepared remarks will also be posted on the quarterly earnings section of our IR website following today's call. Lastly, all references to growth are on a year-over-year basis unless noted otherwise. I will now turn the call over to Ken.

Thank you, Erin, and thank you to everyone for joining our call. We are pleased with our strong performance in the first quarter, successfully balancing growth and profitability, including building a revenue growth of 14%, record first quarter operation margin of 34%, record free cash flow of 783 million, a margin of 51%, and strong growth in secure operations and unified SASE with security service age building growth of over 110%, which drove our unified SASE building growth to 18%, accounting for 25% of our business. The Fortinet leadership in innovation and long-term investment is evident in our market position as the number one deployed firewall vendor worldwide, a market leader in SD-WAN and OT security, and with our strong SaaS strategy and growth, we are confident we'll be number one in this space as well. The strong momentum behind our unified SASE pillar underscores the value customers place on our single OS platform. The typical SASE journey begins with a customer initial purchase of Fortinet's industry-leading ASIC-based FortiGate firewall, powered by FortiOS. From there, the majority of large enterprise customers expand into SD-WAN before progressing into our FortiSASE solution. This expansion path continues to grow as 73% of large enterprise customers have now adopted our SD-WAN solution and have either begun or are well positioned to transition to 40-SASI. With our 40-SASI penetration among large enterprises increasing nearly 10% quarter over quarter to 11%. We remind the only vendor to have organically develop all of the core SASE capability within a single operation system for DOS, including NetGen Firewall, SD-WAN, ZTNA, Secure Web Gateway, CASB, and DLP technologies. This native integration of networking and security reduce the capacity and operation cost while enhancing user experience and ensuring secure across both on-premise and cloud environments. In addition to our traditional SASE offering, we also offer Sovereign SASE, a tailored solution for large enterprise and service providers that require full on-premise or in-country control of their data. With Sovereign SASE, customers can deploy FortiSASE within their own data centers, ensuring that all data is processed exclusively through customer-owned or country-specific locations to meet compliance requirements by country or industry regulations. This approach accelerates performance through our FortiASIC technology and is well-suited for highly regulated sectors such as finance, government, and healthcare. AI-driven secure operation building increased by 29%, accounting for 10% of our business, as customers continue to consolidate multiple security vendors on our integrated and AI-enhanced fully-fabric solution. Looking ahead, in addition to SaaS and secure op, we expect OT security and AI to be key growth drivers over the next five years. In OT security, a rapidly expanding market driven by a surge in connected devices, Fortinet is recognized as the only leader in the Westland Advisory Report, supported by over a decade of strategic investment and specialized solution positionals for continued growth. We also continue to invest in our AI capabilities, which we began developing more than 15 years ago and now hold over 500 issued and pending AI patents, more than any other competitors. With our AI technology now integrated into a dozen products, new AI capabilities like FortiAI Assist for automating security tasks, FortiAI Protect for advanced threat detection, and FortiAI Secure AI for protecting AI infrastructure. Today, we announce the FortiGate 700G series, a high-performance firewall for mid-sized business and distributed enterprise. powered by our 40ASIC technology, which delivers a 5 to 10x performance advantage over competitors, and 40OS, the only operating system recognized across five secure networking Gartner Magic Quadrants. This approach significantly lowered total cost of ownership and complexity while reducing energy consumption and drive Foodnet's continued strong growth and market share gain in secure networking. I would like to thank our employees, customers, partners, and suppliers worldwide for their continued support and hard work. I will now turn the call over to Keith and Christiana.

Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Aaron. Welcome, Christiana, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's start with the key financial highlights from the first quarter before handing the call off to Christiana for a more detailed and forward-looking view. We delivered strong performance and top-line results that approached the high end of our guidance range, together with record first-quarter operating margin of 34%. Total revenue grew 14%, driven by strong product and service revenues, with product revenue growth of 12%. In addition, new logos increased 14% to over 6,300, driven by continued worldwide investments in our channel partners. Looking at our financial results in more detail, total buildings grew 14% to 1.6 billion, driven by 18% growth in Unified SASE and 29% growth in AI-driven SecOps. Unified SASE and SecOps now account for 25%, and 10% of total billings, respectively, up one point each. RPO grew 12% to 6.5 billion, while current RPO grew over 15% to 3.4 billion. Unified SASE and SecOps ARR increased 26% and 30%, respectively, reaching a combined ARR of 1.6 billion. Turning to revenue and margins, total revenue grew 14% to $1.54 billion. Product revenue increased 12% to $459 million, driven by growth in both hardware and software solutions. FortiGate hardware revenue grew in the mid-teens, uphasing total product revenue growth, driven by strong performance in low-end and high-end models, and supported by early-mover large enterprise customers upgrading their firewall infrastructure. Software license revenue grew in the mid-teens and represented a high teens percentage of total product revenue, driven by on-prem time-based software license growth of over 30%. Service revenue of $1.08 billion grew 14% to 70% of total revenue. Security subscriptions revenue increased 16%, while support and related service revenues increased 12%. Service billings grew 14%, our highest growth rate in the past five quarters. Total gross margin increased 380 basis points to 81.9% and exceeded the high end of the guidance range by 90 basis points. Product gross margin of 67.7% increased 1,200 basis points as inventory-related charges normalized from the highly elevated levels we saw in the first half of 2024. This added approximately 1,300 basis points to product gross margin and approximately 400 basis points to total gross margin. Service gross margin of 87.8% was down just 10 basis points as we successfully absorbed increased costs associated with the expansion of hosted security solutions. Operating margin increased 570 basis points to a first quarter record of 34.2%, and was 320 basis points above the high end of our guidance range, reflecting the strong gross margin, an FX tailwind of around 100 basis points, and cost efficiencies in the business. Looking at the statement of cash flow summarized on slides 18 and 19, free cash flow tends to be seasonally strong in the first quarter, and was a record $783 million, while free cash flow margin was 51%, Up six points. Adjusted free cash flow was $839 million, representing a margin of 54%. Infrastructure investments were $67 million, down $155 million due to a lower level of real estate investment. Cash taxes were $27 million. Average contract term was 27 months, roughly flat year over year, and down two months quarter over quarter. And while we did not repurchase shares during the first quarter, we did repurchase approximately 4.6 million shares for a total of $401 million during the month of April. Remaining share buyback authorization as of today is approximately 1.6 billion. I'll now turn the call over to Christiana to share a few significant wins from the first quarter, as well as our more forward-looking view, including business conditions in the second quarter and full-year guidance.

Thank you, Keith. As Ken mentioned earlier, the noteworthy headline in this uncertain macroeconomic environment is that customer adoption of our solutions is accelerating. This momentum is driven by two key factors. One, our decades-long innovation leadership, and two, our competitively differentiated dedication to putting the customer first. Together, this creates a powerful network effect, with some of the most discerning organizations rapidly adopting Fortinet's solution at scale. This is exemplified by Fortinet being the number one solution in firewall, as well as a leader in SD-WAN and OT security. Also, our leading SASE strategy is driving strong growth, reinforcing our confidence in becoming the number one player in the SASE market. Building on this momentum, our SSE solution is gaining strong traction, fueled by continued success in upselling SSE to our large SD-WAN customer base. With both ARR and Billings growth at over 100%, we believe Fortisazi is the fastest growing SSE solution at scale in the market. As shown on slide seven, the typical 40 SASE journey begins with a customer purchasing our market leading 40 gate firewall, followed by an expansion to SD-WAN and then onto our single vendor SASE solution. Our adoption of SD-WAN and SSE continues to grow with our large enterprise expansion penetration rates increasing to 73% and 11% respectively with the SSE penetration rate growth increasing nearly 10% quarter over quarter. In addition, a second customer buying journey illustrates the growing convergence of security and networking. It too starts with our FortiGate firewalls and expands to our switches and access points. The key to this expansion is FortiOS FortiLink technology, which enables seamless management of our switches and access points through our unified operating system. Our increased penetration rates show the success of this strategy. Now, I'd like to review some deals that showcase our SASE adoption and customer expansion. In an eight-figure displacement deal, an international government purchased our SD-WAN solution as well as our FortiSASE solution to secure the hybrid workforce of 6,000 users. This customer chose Fortinet for its ability to deliver flexible and consistent security enforcement, ensuring secure access to both on-premises and cloud applications while maintaining a seamless user experience. By harnessing the power of our FortiOS, we delivered superior performance over the competition, reduced total cost of ownership, and effectively consolidated multiple security functions into a single integrated platform. In another SASE win, we replaced the incumbent vendor at an international education provider, which chose FortiSASE for their 40,000 users. The decision to transition to FortiSASE was driven by ongoing performance challenges with their previous SASE vendor. Keys to this win included FortiSASE's ease of use, seamless integration with the Fortinet security fabric, and proven scalability across their SD-WAN sites. Based on the success from their proof-of-concept, this customer will benefit from improved performance, consistent security for users everywhere, and greater operational efficiency. In a seven-figure deal, a large multinational manufacturing company selected our SD-WAN and multiple SecOps solutions. Fortinet displaced the legacy SD-WAN provider by demonstrating how 40OS simplifies operations, reduces total cost of ownership, and unifies security and networking functions on a single platform. The integrated nature of 40OS also enables seamless alignment with the company's existing Fortinet security infrastructure, establishing a strong foundation for future projects. Lastly, a Fortune 500 company signed an eight-figure deal that spans all three of our pillars. Over the past three years, they've expanded their FortiGate install base by more than 80%, driven by our world-class support for their data centers and branch locations, as well as the automation and seamless integration enabled by our FortiS operating system. Rounding out the billings commentary. Large Enterprise was our top-performing customer segment with growth of around 30%. The number of deals greater than 1 million were up 30%, including three eight-figure deals this quarter, up from one during the same period last year. EMEA was our best-performing geography, driven by mid-teens growth from international emerging. Among our top five verticals, financial services and worldwide government led the way with growth of over 20%. Before moving on to guidance, I'd like to spend a few minutes discussing the current US tariff situation. The US tariff situation landscape is evolving rapidly, and our comments on this call reflect the information currently available to us. Despite the current geopolitical uncertainties, demand for our cybersecurity solutions remains strong. Our pipeline continues to grow, and we are not seeing signs of near-term erosion. Additionally, our close rates remain robust, and sales cycles are tracking within our normal historical range. For the second quarter, we do not expect U.S. tariffs to have a meaningful impact on our operating margin, as only a few components are subject to tariff charges. Should tariffs increase in the future, we expect any resulting impact on our operating margin to be limited to hardware sales to U.S. customers. As long as our international hardware sales do not flow through the U.S., they are not subject to U.S. import tariffs. Moving on to guidance. As a reminder, our second quarter and full year outlook, which are summarized on slides 21 and 22, are subject to the disclaimers regarding forward-looking information that Aaron provided at the beginning of the call. While our business remains strong and we outperformed on the top line in the first quarter with continued confidence in our ability to execute, we recognize that our customers' investment decisions can be influenced by the broader economic outlook. As a result, we are maintaining our full-year billings and revenue guidance ranges to account for potential top-line risks associated with the evolving geopolitical environment. Regarding the record firewall upgrade cycle that we've spoken about previously, we continue to expect the firewall upgrade cycle to gain momentum in both purchasing and planning activities in the second half of 2025. Looking at the bottom line, the US dollar weakened more than anticipated from early February when we first issued our 2025 guidance. As a result, we expect an operating margin headwind of approximately 120 basis points to the second quarter, and approximately 90 basis points to the full year, which is factored into today's outlook. Despite the FX headwinds, we are raising the midpoint of our full year operating margin guidance as a result of our first quarter outperformance and expected efficiencies in the business. Our continued business momentum and strong execution gives us confidence that we are on track to achieve the rule of 45 for the sixth consecutive year. For the second quarter, we expect billings in the range of 1.685 billion to 1.765 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 12%. Revenue in the range of 1.59 billion to 1.65 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 13%. Non-gap gross margins of 80 to 81%. Non-GAAP operating margins of 31.5 to 32.5%. Non-GAAP earnings per share of 58 to 60 cents, which assumes a share count between 773 and 777 million. Infrastructure investments of 180 to 200 million. A non-GAAP tax rate of 18%. And cash taxes of 230 to 255 million. For the full year, we expect billings in the range of 7.2 billion to 7.4 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 12%. Revenue in the range of 6.65 billion to 6.85 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 13%. Service revenue in the range of 4.75 billion to 4.725 billion, which at the midpoint represents growth of 15%. Non-GAAP gross margins of 79% to 81%. Non-GAAP operating margins of 31.5% to 33.5%. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.43 to $2.49, which assumes a share count of between 769 and 779 million. infrastructure investments of 380 to 430 million, non-GAAP tax rate of 18%, and cash taxes of between 525 million and 575 million. I will now hand the call back over to Aaron to begin the Q&A session.

Thank you, Christiana. 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. If you'd like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will hear your name called and receive a message on your screen notifying you that you may unmute yourself. We'll allow a moment for the queue to form. Our first question will come from Brian Essex with JP Morgan. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Great, great. Yeah, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the results for the quarter. I guess maybe for Keith, maybe, or Christiana, could you unpack the dynamics behind the maintenance and services revenue? Just trying to understand, it's a segment that I think we were expecting to kind of accelerate and decline sequentially. So just trying to understand some of the puts and takes behind that and how you expect that to, I guess, grow throughout the rest of the year. So you can kind of like level set expectations. Thank you.

So, I think there are a couple of aspects that you touched on. One is the quarter-over-quarter slight decline is really affected by the Q4 having two more days than Q1, and that affects the daily rate going into revenue. Of course, we would have expected a slightly better acceleration, but there's a little bit more time that we need to grow our acquired entities. and their revenue streams. So that's impacting Q1 service revenue predominantly.

Is there a dynamic there between FortiGuard and FortiCare that we need to think about?

I would say current RPO is still strong. So, I mean, we have confidence in the growth.

Yes, and also the 40K growth above the building growth, which will drive future service revenue. So we see the 40K growth, building growth, actually a couple points above the per den before the 2000 kind of a 40K growth average. So we see it's a pretty good sign. Plus we started adding more service on top of 40 OS and that's also what drive the future service revenue.

Great, great. Tan, Christiana and Keith, thank you so much.

Our next question will come from Taliani with Bank of America. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Pagliani, you are free to unmute your line and ask your question.

There you go. Can you hear me? Yes, please. Okay, thank you. We spoke about, in earlier quarters, we spoke about end of service coming up. bringing demand forward. Even in the last quarter, you said that demand is going to come this next four quarters. It's going to come this year instead of next year. So the question I have is, why are we seeing some lightness in the guidance for the next quarter? Why don't we see the demand coming forward to the next quarter? Can you just speak about the drivers? I just compare your numbers, your guidance to consensus and i i'm trying to understand why don't i see already strength especially ahead of a tariff increase that is going to increase the prices likely increase the prices for everyone thanks uh i think i don't think we uh uh

Like we mentioned in the tariff, I don't think we plan to change in the price and the current condition. On the other side, there's still some uncertainty, so we try to be kind of a little bit careful. But we do see... the customer like the solution we have and just sometimes the geopoliticals and also some other part just increase some kind of uncertainty. So we try to be careful. Probably, Christina Keys, you know this better.

So I would say We saw good close rates and a good linearity in Q2 in April. So it gives us confidence, but we also are tied a little bit by the expectations that we get from our sales teams. So we see good momentum, but sales is hesitant with all the things that are going on in Q2. to go up in their expectations for us. And so I think that's where we'd rather be careful with the guidance and then hopefully are gonna meet our numbers.

Got it, thank you.

Our next call question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you. Maybe, Christiane, I'll pick up right where you left off on sales being hesitant. Clearly, we're all seeing similar headlines as you are. Maybe just tell us specifically, what are some of the conversations that sales is having from customers? What are the reasons they're hesitant to commit to purchasing Fortinet? And how are you thinking about maybe some of that hesitancy getting resolved? Is it maybe when we run into the lead time situation for the end of life or How do you think about that flowing through over the next few quarters? Thank you.

We had a number of events in Q2, and we get really good feedback. So I think it's going to resolve. We have good channel activity. We have good channel programs. And I think some of you may have seen that in channel checks also, that they are positive about Fortinet's programs. So I think it just needs to, with all the macro news that are happening coming in every day and then don't turn out as bad as they are, there is hesitancy because until a PO is in, it can get delayed. So we are positive. I mean, I think you saw it from my comments. We haven't seen delays yet, but we don't know what happens over the next two months, right, or the rest of the year.

That's fair. Thank you.

Our next question will come from Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Excellent. Thank you for taking the question. Maybe carrying on with that line of thought, if you will. What gives you guys confidence that you're still going to be able to perform to like the stronger second half pickup? I get it. There's a product cycle going on and people have to start preparing end of life, but is there no risk there of potentially people kind of sweating the acid or pushing it, pushing it out? I guess that's just the question of that. Like where do you stem confidence of that? The second half will be stronger. And how much of that second half strength is implied in the guide right now?

I mean, the second half strength is implied in the guide because we have harder comparisons to meet, right, in the second half as well. What gives us confidence, we have a number of products that have been released, the next generation, and our products provide, I think, significant improvement of total cost of ownership and security compared to what customers bought eight, nine, ten years ago. And we see the activity going on, especially in the enterprise. I think we mentioned in our prepared remarks that 40 gates grew faster than the rest of product revenue, which I think is a testament to the strength that we are seeing. The same is true for OT. And so I think we are confident probably in this room more so maybe than sales when they talk to customers and need to put a commit on their pipeline.

Yeah, that's where we kind of measure the growth in the three different pillars. So if you look at the secure networking, that's the traditional area. We are very strong. We're the only one without this ASIC technology solution, single 40 OS. So we continue gaining market share even we are the number one leader there. And then the unified SASE, we also believe we are like a top three, top two player and then also grow faster than any other player. And we'll be the leader. And so each of this, also the secure op, which we grow like a 29%, also probably faster than most other players of a similar size. So that's where each of these pillars we're keeping gaining market share. Just we're not quite sure the overall market growth later this year, next year, will be continuing to hold out for whatever, some forecast. So that's where we do believe with the technology we have, the unique advantage we have for each pillar will drive us keeping gaining market share. But the overall market condition kind of has a little bit of uncertainty there. I know a lot of people talk about security a little bit more sticky. and more resistant compared to some other bodies. They do have some impact. So we try to be careful. And by the same time, we're hoping to overachieve all this guidance.

Got it. That makes a ton of sense. Thank you. Thank you, Keith.

Our next question will come from Shaul Ayal with TD Cohen. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. And congrats on solid set of results, considering the going macro. The number of eight-digit transactions has been on the rise over the past few quarters. When we unpack those transactions, and I know they could differ from one another, are they representative of the entire Fortinet platform, its stack? Do they include SD-WAN and SAS? What's driving those large transactions predominantly from a product perspective? Thank you.

So a significant driver for these large transactions is SD-WAN deployments and enterprises. And so typically that's the starting point, but then as we mentioned, The customers are buying into the fabric and are buying additional solutions in addition to SD-WAN.

Our next question will come from Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Great. Thank you very much. Follow on with Shabu's question there just around these large deals. Were they considered in the pipeline as you looked at the first quarter? And I know back in the fourth quarter on some of the larger transactions, you did talk about some potential changes. pull forward relative to the end of life. So curious if this was a similar experience with the larger transactions, or was it more wall-to-wall SD-WAN deployment or global SD-WAN deployment like you spoke to? Just more color would be great. Thanks.

So no, these were transactions that were in the pipeline and closed. as expected. So I think this is where our remarks came in. We do not see deals pushing out yet, but these deals also closed before the end of March, mostly.

All right, thank you.

Our next question comes from Eric Heath with KeyBank. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, this is for the question on for Keith. During your prepared remarks, you talked about how tariffs would impact hardware sales to US customers. Are you able to quantify that impact margin from tariffs? And also, could you talk through some steps you might be taking to evolve your supply chain to mitigate those impacts?

So We did not mention that we have impact from tariffs in Q1, right? So we don't expect any impact from tariffs in Q1 or significant impacts in Q2 because only very few of our products are subject to tariffs. And then it's only a small portion that actually gets imported into the U.S. for U.S. customers.

Yeah, the other part is really because we design from ASIC chip to the system to all the OS and the service, we'll be able to relocate where we can manufacture. That's also because we also tend to have a little bit more inventory than some other company. So that's also give us some buffer. So, so far we don't see the impact of TAF yet.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Saket Kalia with Barclays. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hey, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. Christiane, maybe for you, just to stay in that topic, but just from a different angle, Can you just talk about whether there was any changing behavior from channel partners this quarter ahead of tariffs? You know, I think some industries out there saw just some earlier purchasing ahead of potential price increases. Did Fortinet see any of that this quarter?

We got questions about whether we would increase our prices, but we did not see specific acceleration of deals.

And, Sokka, maybe I'll just kind of fill in some of the – to build on what Christiana just said and understanding what, one, really aren't tariffs impacting our business today. And the first place that you'll see that would be in cash flow, right? You won't see it in the income statement because of how COGS is recognized for gap purposes for several quarters. So you really should just kind of assume there really isn't an impact on tariffs in that regard. I think the other thing that you're probing at as a group is, you know, did we see pull forward as we saw in other industries? And the answer to that is no, not really. And, again, because – In our business model and with our pricing advantage, it's really not under the gun. We're not raising prices immediately if we had tariffs because it will not hit our P&L for an extended period of time, if that helps.

Yeah, that does help. Super helpful. If I can sneak in a follow-up maybe for Ken, just to zoom out a little bit from the tariff discussion, it was great to see the unified SaaS business just continue to scale and Can you just talk about, and there were some great deals that were called out in the prepared remarks, can you just talk about what solutions you're typically replacing at these customers? I mean, is it primarily VPN hardware, or is it secure web gateways, or is it other solutions that Fortisassi is able to replace?

I think we see both replacing some traditional old VPN, but also replace some other SASE player competitor. Because we talk about for a few quarter, we have like a three key differentiation in a SASE. First off, SaaS is integrated into the single OS platform, which none other player had that. So that was very easy for the traditional customer, which we are the number one in the firewall space. Over half the global deployment, they can easily add a SaaS service, add SD-WAN service to their current box, the current OS there. So that's probably good. over 90% growth come from this. And then the second also definition, kind of also our early strategy, we try to work with a lot of carrier service provider, and then since they are a little bit slow, so we decided to do it ourselves like 18 months ago. So now we still see the service provider and also a lot of bigger enterprise customer, especially in finance service, healthcare, they still want to do their own private SASE, sovereign SASE. So their interest got higher and higher. So we started working with them. They started to see the real deployment of solving SASE, which we can have build their SASE solution in their own data center. Just a few bars can give them all the solution they need. It's supporting like 100,000, 10,000 customers, their users there. And then the third one, really, the global infrastructure we build out with a lot of our own kind of secure technology also give us a cost advantage and also give us more secure solution than some other SASE player. So that's, I see, both the traditional VPN replacement and also, like in Christiana's remark, we also replace a few SASE player. That's a lot of us, big enterprises. So we see like the traditional one probably more penetrated into the small SMB area, some mid-enterprise, which they also see the SASE give them some kind of ZTN solution. But in the big enterprise, we started replacing a lot of other SASE players.

Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Patrick Colville with Scotiabank. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you so much for taking the question. I guess I want to just go back to Keith and Christiana about the service revenue downtick sequentially. Christiana, you mentioned this was because there was two fewer days in fiscal first quarter versus 4Q. And I presume partly that's because of the leap year. But we didn't see this dynamic four years ago or even eight years ago. So I guess what was different now? And could an explanation be that this is customers refreshing appliances and then not adding new subscriptions? They're just refreshing their subscriptions and that's causing this dynamic? Thank you.

Patrick, I'm going to jump in because some of that was historical in nature. So we actually did have this same conversation in 2021, I believe it was, coming off of a leap year as well. Because when you're doing year-over-year accounts, right? So that was the unusual thing. It does seem that I forgot about that sometime in the last three and a half years. That bites me in the ass. And then from Q4 to Q1, you do just have the natural decline of two days. Two days to 92 days, call that 2%, which I think is what Christiana is talking about. And then you were going down a path of customers refreshing on the service revenue It was like we were cutting out a little bit, but maybe a comment I'll offer, and Christiana can correct me, is that the conversation about the guidance setting process and what we're seeing about pull forward and such, look, I think in this environment where the guide ends up as a bit of an observer to the guidance and not a participant, I think it was prudent in terms of not passing through the beat, if you will. I think that when you, the conversations that Christiana was making reference to with channel partners and end users, If you compare where they are today on the upgrade cycle versus where they were six months ago, it's night and day and with our own sales team. I mean, you're getting it in the channel checks. You're getting it in the surveys. It's real. We're picking up in the account plans as well. We are not seeing any signs to this point of customers suggesting they're going to change their design architecture. That has not come up, but we've lost the deal because they're going to a SaaS solution that they did. I think that the team here would move them in that direction of their own product. Similarly, you're not seeing competitive displacements against us. So I think those are the considerations that went into the guidance setting process, but I'll let Christiana come back and make sure I haven't committed her to something she doesn't want to be committed to.

No, I mean, Keith is right that there are a lot of factors why we guided her. the way we guide it from what we can see and what we get from the sales teams, right? Also, don't forget that each fiscal year you start rolling out new channel programs and it takes a little bit of time until you see how these are picked up, right? So we expect service acceleration through our channel programs and we expect improvements. But from a quarter over quarter perspective and from a growth rate, we were not there where we wanted to be.

And partially it's also due to a little bit more churn on some acquired customers.

Okay, very helpful. Thank you so much for that.

Our next question will come from Shrena Kothari with Baird. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yeah, thanks. Can you guys hear me all right?

Yeah.

Great. So, Pete and Christina, you mentioned EMEA was your best performing geo with mid-teens growth and partner-led momentum there, clearly a tailwind. And you also made it clear that tariffs pull forwards are not really a dynamic. So just curious, what is driving strength out there? I mean, I know Ken mentioned about the telco partnerships and kind of shaping demand for sovereign SASE. Just curious if we can elaborate a little bit there. And in APAC, are you also starting to see traction from other modernization initiatives around OT or AI SOC deals as well? Thanks, Anna. I had a quick follow-up.

So in EMEA, specifically in internationally emerging, you see a lot of strength in OT, right? So there's a lot of opportunity in OT and also in government. We see, to your question on modernization, we see that in APEC as well, and we had good wins there in government as well as in other areas.

Got it. And just a quick follow-up on the new logos. It was pretty solid, 14% year-on-year. Just curious, how much of SASE SecOps growth is now driven by first-time 49 customers versus expansion from your existing install base, are these newer modules landing early in the deals or are they still largely dependent on the anchoring 40 gate deployments? Thanks a lot.

I would say the majority of our new customers are smaller customers, as you can tell by the number of customers. We had some nice large new logos, but most of the smaller customers do start with the FortiGate.

Got it. Thanks a lot.

Our next question will come from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Great. Thanks so much. Can you guys hear me? Mm-hmm. Awesome. Thank you. Last quarter, I think it was you talked about investments that you're making in various forms of enablement. So there's the channel and your direct sales would be optimally positioned to capture the refresh opportunity. How is that progressing? And what have you seen over the past few months in terms of your competitors trying to capitalize on this end of service event that's coming up? Thanks so much.

Don't really see, I think our competitors are talking about it, but we don't really see competition in our end of support cohort.

And then the incentives on that.

Yeah, I mean, there are a number of channel incentives to execute on new product combined with more services, right? So especially in the lower end of the market, I think the opportunity is huge to expand on SASE and other products. And we have multi-product incentives with the channel partners.

Thanks for that. If I can maybe just ask one follow-up. I think this is the first quarter where you now have Linksys consolidated. I assume it's not all that material, but is there anything just to call out that we should consider when we think about the trends going forward in terms of contribution and flow through to the financials? Thanks again.

Yeah, I mean, this is John Whittle. I would say it's immaterial. I don't think there's anything to really factor in there.

Thanks for taking the questions, guys. I think in the first quarter guide, we provided what we thought the impact would be from the M&As, and I think we were in line with that, if I recall correctly.

And right now, we are letting them run on their own strategy while we are creating our internal integration play for service providers.

Yeah. It's still like one to two years away to co-develop some new product for the consumer, leverage some of ASIC technology, some other like FortiLink technology. So it's a long-term growth potential, but it's not short-term.

Awesome.

Our next question will come from Adam Boer with Stifel. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

This is Peter Weed.

Great, do you hear me OK? Yes, please. Great, thank you so much. Just maybe, Christiane, on the upcoming refresh cycle, any way to talk through some of the assumptions, both in terms of, hey, the number of firewalls we expect to be refreshed, will it be the same or fewer than what they had previously? Obviously, I'm assuming the performance of the models will be greater given these are old models. And I know you talked about it a few minutes ago, but maybe talk a little bit more about are you expecting any type of shift towards virtual or SASE from physical as part of this refresh? Thanks so much.

So what we are seeing so far, the customers that have EOS devices, the smaller customers are buying more. The larger customers who had large 40 gates, it depends on the strategy. It depends on whether they are consolidating on bigger 40 gates or larger. buying pretty much a similar amount of the same next generation model. So I don't think on the enterprise side in the data center appliance, you see one strategy. It depends on customers. In the MSE, in the smaller customer cohort, what we see is that they're buying more than what they had previously.

Interesting conversation, Christian, I was sharing with me right before this call was that one of the challenges in tracking the refresh is not just that they're out there and saying, okay, I have 10 products that are going into service, but as you pointed out, they have those 10 plus they're buying for other use cases at the same time. So the deal sizes are getting bigger, but it's a little bit blurrier in terms of how much of that is the old product versus a new use case as you go forward. But I would say that the deal sizes she's quite pleased with.

That's great. And maybe just... Oh, go ahead.

Oh, sorry. Also, on the product side, we're keeping developing new products like the one we announced today, the FortiGate 700G. So there's a few more coming towards later this year and next year. So that's why we try to time in some of the replacement from the... the product side and then try to make sure the new product is a way better than the the old one so that's where sometimes they also try to see it's still most of the customers probably still one years away so they still have some time to to evaluate that's great i really appreciate the color there and maybe just for ken a bigger picture question

In our field work, data security just continues to come up as a really important priority. I know late last year, I think it was back in August, you guys acquired NextDLP. I'd love to talk a little bit more about early feedback on that acquisition and how you're thinking about the broader data security opportunity for Fortinet. Thanks so much.

Yeah, that's a great acquisition technology for the DLP. Not only enhance the SASE we have, but also can be sold separately to enhance a lot of our big enterprise, the data security, the data leakage side. So we see... It's a very good product and a team. And so I totally agree with you. Now they're kind of looking at how to secure the data. That's also the reason we kind of started pushing some of Sovereign SASE, some other, especially in the finance service area, in the government, in healthcare. So the data is super important. So it's a very good solution there.

And we're also seeing that being rolled out at scale at large enterprises. And we just have to accelerate that, but it's working well at scale at large enterprises.

Our next question will come from Junaid Siddiqui with Truist. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yep.

Yep. Yeah. All right. Great. Thank you. Yeah, just had a question on the CNAP market and, you know, the traction that you're seeing in lace work. You know, one of your competitors has effectively ceded that space to a partner of yours. How do you see that market shaping up and, you know, who are you seeing from a competitive perspective and how are you differentiating from some of those competitors? Thank you.

So I think we see opportunity with the WIS Google development. I think that disrupts the market fairly significantly. And so we see significant opportunity there. We think the Lacework solution is a very good solution. I think we just have to, you know, it's a new sales motion for us a bit. And so we need to focus on that. So it'll just take a little bit of time. but we see it as a good opportunity. Big market, obviously huge TAM and a lot of disruption in that market. And that solution just got a good rating. It's a very good solution. We just need to kind of refine the sales approach a bit.

Great, thank you.

Our next question will come from Keith Bachman with VMO. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you very much. I wanted to ask a little bit about sensitivities. And what I mean by that is, Ken, you highlighted the three buckets of spend that Fortinet has, secure networking, unified SaaS and SecOps. As you think about over the next number of quarters, is there any comment when you hear feedback from the channel on deal elongation? Is it more, in fact, on the subscription side than the hardware side? with, you know, maybe users not wanting to sweat their assets for regulatory reasons or compliance reasons or governance or what have you? And is there thereby a risk of some crowding out, if you will, on hardware refreshes that perhaps are ongoing that make may cause some weakness in the unified SASE and or SecOps. I think it's SD-WAN, probably not, but just talk about the buckets of spending in terms of sensitivities as we go out over the next number of quarters, whether it be deal elongations or what have you. Thank you. And Keith, certainly all the best to you.

Thank you.

It's a good question. Yeah, I mean, in the industry, like over 30 years, see a few up and down in the economy, in the big environment. So usually during the downturn, they tend to slow down some of the infrastructure changes, you know, the hardware purchase, and then try to more like stretch whatever the things they have. So there's some uncertainty right now, I feel, but it's on the other side because the strengths we have, whether in the network security or secure networking, and also the unified SaaS is secure up. So we see that's also the opportunity during the downturn to gain market share quickly because we feel we are better positioned than the competitor. So even the overall market may grow a little bit slow, but also that's an opportunity to gain more market share quickly. Because in each category, we have pretty unique advantage, like secure networking is really carry the convergence and also leverage of ASIC and the single OS. The same thing I mentioned earlier about unified SASE, and then you see the secure op also grow like a 29%. It's all pretty strong growth. That's how we're continuing to keep investing in the growth and also do some long-term investment to keep driving the next five to ten years long-term growth. Both will benefit the space and benefit the customer and also a partner. So that's where we look on this. But also, like last quarter, we also see probably the building growth also the first time better than the last six, seven quarter, probably seven quarter. And especially the 40 gate even grow better. So that's I see is a good sign on the strengths we have. Maybe some is because we code upgrade or code refresh. But on the other side we do see the Some smaller player in the space where the secure networking is a mother won't get a week and weaker so we do see some take take take their market share and some other bigger players that in shift in some other focus and so with us we feel we have a better Product and better position That's where in all three Peter. We do believe we beginning share on each pillar of the market share probably Christiana keys any

I would just say, like Ken said, Q1, we felt good about the growth in Q1. The economy, the geopolitical environment was already kind of a bit uncertain. And then also in 2008, 2009, through the financial crisis, we were private at the time, but had good growth through that. And then it was one of the first companies to go public after that based on good growth through that crisis as well. So I think Ken is always focused on never let the opportunities from a good challenge pass you by, and so we'll look at this from an opportunistic standpoint.

I would just add one comment as well, and I think what we heard from our customers at our customer events at RSA most of them are going hybrid, right? They will have on-prem devices. They will have some cloud devices. They will have some public cloud. And I think that's our opportunity because we play in all markets and they can leverage the OS. And I think that's the feedback that we got. So from our perspective, we are well-positioned.

Okay, thank you.

This concludes our question and answer session. I will now hand it back to Aaron Avadia for closing remarks.

Thank you. I'd like to thank everyone for joining today's call. We will be attending investor conferences hosted by JP Morgan and Bank of America during the second quarter. The fireside chat webcast links will be posted on the events and presentation section of our investor relations website. you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me. Have a great rest of your day.