2/13/2025

speaker
Walter Pritchard
Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Palo Alto Network's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. I'm Walter Pritchard, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please note that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, February 13th, 2025, at 1.30 p.m. Pacific time. With me on today's call to discuss second quarter results are Nikesh Arora, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Deepak Galecha, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, Lee Klarich, our Chief Product Officer, will join us for the question and answer portion. You can find the press release and other information to supplement today's discussion on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com. While there, please click on the link for quarterly results to find the Q225 supplemental information and the Q225 earnings presentation. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements and projections regarding the company's business operations and financial performance. These statements made today are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ from those forward-looking statements. Please review our press release and recent SEC filings for a description of these risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in the presentation today. This presentation contains non-GAAP financial measures and key metrics related to the company's past and expected future performance. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are in the press release and the appendix of the investor presentation. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all results and comparisons are on a fiscal year-over-year basis. All per share figures have been adjusted for the two-for-one stock split that we announced November 20, 2024, and affected after the close of trading on December 12, 2024. We also note that management is scheduled to participate in the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference this quarter. I will now turn the call over to Nikesh.

speaker
Nikesh Arora
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Walter. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today for our earnings call. I'm excited about our Q2 results. Our team did a phenomenal job of executing its scale. We made considerable progress in platformization, allowing us to outperform both our top and bottom line expectations for this quarter. We delivered on our high RPO expectations towards the top of the range. This gave us strength in our NGS ARR and also allowed us to outperform our revenue expectations. In Q2, growth was pretty broad across the entire portfolio, with strength across all three geographies and platforms. In particular, we saw a strong performance from large deals internationally and also a strong contribution from SASE, Software Firewalls, and XIM. On the profitability front, we delivered operating margins ahead of our internal target despite some one-time events. Our efficiency initiatives continue to bear fruit, including some promising early contributions from AI. These results allow us to raise our operating margin and EPS guidance for the year. We're also very happy with our free cash flow performance and continue to be confident in managing our free cash flow guidance for the next few years as outlined. More from Deepak on this later. From our vantage point, the outlook for cybersecurity seems to have been robust in Q2 and is likely to stay so over the rest of this year. Despite the settling in process of the new administration, we see signs that we are going to be able to see reasonable growth through the rest of the year. As the conversation around AI continues to get omnipresent and companies race to evaluate, experiment, and deploy AI, they're discovering that some of the legacy architectures come in the way of their aspirations. Interestingly, this is resulting in a resurgence of cloud transformation projects and consequently demand for network security and network transformation. While cybersecurity is a derivative effect, it is clear that the longer-term trend towards AI is going to continue to underpin technology transformations that hence continue to drive demand for security. The transformations are all geared to embedding AI capabilities across infrastructure. Additionally, many of them involve changing strategies towards data and a growing understanding that data security will be more and more important in the future. We see that from the heightened interest in data security posture management, where our acquisition of DIG seems to be proving pre-signed. To fully harness the power of AI, customers must unshackle their data from disparate legacy systems and providers and open up broader access and lean into the cloud. Cloud infrastructure is much more dynamic than on-prem IT, creating risk. As cloud data volumes grow and customers utilize new services from the cloud service providers, such as modern data repositories, they're doubling down and ensuring they're protecting their cloud environments from development to runtime, understanding who's accessing what data in the cloud and putting controls around these new services. In other words, the cloud is becoming an integral part of the enterprise and the same level of security must be delivered. A constantly changing attack backdrop is also compounding this inflection we have seen. There are tangible signs that bad actors use AI to accelerate attacks. Google recently found that adversaries can use generative AI to more rapidly create attacks, including custom payloads, iterate on malicious scripts, and use evasion techniques. Additionally, bad actors are using gen AI to do reconnaissance of target organizations, including their infrastructure and hosting providers, which are often exploited in attacks. We have a new technological revolution that requires us to secure AI. As customers leverage the cloud, transform on-prem infrastructure, and respond to the escalating threat environment driven by AI, they're transforming how they manage security operations. Legacy offerings cannot unify SecOps across cloud and on-prem, across multiple vendors, and also take advantage of AI. AI is key for providing automation to help stitch together overwhelming volumes of data and generate the near real-time analysis and remediation needed to keep pace. As I said, security is a data problem, and the data has to be all in one place for AI to have context and stop threats in their tracks. Our industry has to change the paradigm by shifting from fragmentation to platformization to enable the best security outcomes. In a recent study we did with IBM, platformized organizations take 72 days less to detect and 84 days less to contain a security incident. Our teams are busy helping customers as they accelerate cloud adoption and transformation across their environments. They need integrated security products and platforms for AI to be most effective in staying ahead of this active cybersecurity landscape. A year in, we're pleased with our progress in driving our platformization strategy and the adoption and endorsement of platformization broadly across the industry. As I mentioned a few quarters ago, I wish we had made this move earlier. We're seeing some interesting behavior that reinforces our conviction that the future state of cybersecurity will have to be AI-enabled platforms that can markedly improve the speed of response. We delivered approximately 75 new platformizations in Q2, up from approximately 45 in the year ago. We now have a total of over 1,150 platformizations within our top 5,000 customers. As you might expect, most of our platformizations start with network security and are from customers that are platformized in one area. However, our number of two-platform customers grew over 50% in Q2, and we're seeing our number of three-platform customers up three times year-over-year. Also, the number of customers platformized on Cortex is up more than three times, reflecting our strong XIM momentum. We're excited to see the number of paths we have had success driving the strategy so far, and our Q2 performance keeps us on track to achieve our stated target of 2,500 to 3,500 platformizations by fiscal year 2030. Investors have always asked me what platformization deals look like, so I want to provide a few examples based on deals we signed this quarter. A bank in Asia signed a transaction worth over $65 million in Q2, platformizing with us for the first time on Cortex with a significant XIM deployment. They have been leveraging XTR and other Cortex capabilities several years ago, but are also a network security customer and a QRadar customer. They had many point products in their SOC and were not getting the outcomes they needed, with limitations in the time to discover and remediate security incidents resulting in compliance issues. In platformizing on Cortex, our NGS AR with this customer increased by five times to over $12 million year-over-year. We look forward to driving a successful deployment here, which can be an avenue to platformizing a network or cloud security in the future for this customer. A U.S. municipality signed a transaction of over $60 million with us, which included renewal of its network security estate and expansion across our portfolio. The customer leverages all three of our form factors within network security and is already platformized there. The deal also included Cortex and Prisma Cloud, which positions us well for future platformization in these areas. Our NGS AR here increased over 40% in the last 12 months to over $11 million. European automotive manufacturers signed a $25 million transaction in Q2. They're already platformized with us in network security and cloud security. They added several capabilities as they renewed their firewalls and support footprints, including IoT, virtual firewalls, and SASE. This is a complex customer, and we also secure business with them in Cortex, with XDR, XO, and Xpans, as well as Prisma Cloud. In doing so, we are now well positioned in the future to consolidate the stock opportunity with XIM. For this customer, the NGS ARR grew 50% to $9 million. More broadly than these anecdotes, the growth in our large deals tells the story. We had 74 accounts that did transactions over $5 million in Q2, up 25% year-over-year, and 32 accounts that did transactions over $10 million, up over 50%. Now moving on to an update about our first security platform, NetSec. Our Q2 NetSec momentum was driven by strong software demand. We continue to lead the market in network security, which is approximately 80% of our bookings. Our Zero Trust platform combines three best-to-be form factors built in a consistent architecture. This is fast becoming a requirement as applications proliferate across data centers, hyperscalers, SaaS, and leveraged AI. Meanwhile, users are increasingly distributed across headquarters, remote locations at home, and other places. And also, there are now soon-to-be non-human users in the form of AI agents, where interactions with applications must be secured. Disjointed network security offerings require significant resource to be applied to integration, creating the possibility of gaps in security policies given the disparity of control panes, and more importantly, unless we can harmonize the data across the network, it will be challenging for customers to adopt AI-enabled security capabilities in the future. We have to believe that in the future, all solutions will need to integrate, harmonize data, and use that to train AI agents to solve security. Looking deeper into Firewall as a platform, our bookings accelerated and grew by 21%. Within this, we continue to see stable demand in the appliance market. That stability, coupled with us continuing to take market share, allowed us to grow our appliance bookings in the mid-single digits. There's a refresh cycle coming for many players in the industry, and we believe we are well-positioned to benefit from it. Software and SASE make up approximately two-thirds of our firewall-as-a-platform bookings and grow over one and a half times faster than the rate of the total firewall-as-a-platform business. We have been on a multi-year journey to reinvent our security subscriptions, which we use consistently across all three form factors. Each of these advanced subscriptions are cloud-delivered and we believe significantly differentiates with what's in the market. Delivering these incremental innovations into our platform, like advanced subscription and network security, makes our customers' adoption seamless. This is core to our strategy of staying ahead of our customers' security needs with future-proof innovation. It is also a win-win for Palo Alto and the customer. Next, let's dive deeper into SASE and our software firewall business. As customers transform their networks to keep pace with delivering first-class security capabilities for remote users and branch offices, we continue to see demand for SASE. Many SASE projects are large and comprehensive, which is well-suited to our rich offering. SASE continues to be our fastest-growing form factor in network security and a strong contributor to our growth. We grew SASE customers by over 20%, while we grew bookings well north of 50%, and increased deals over $1 million in value by 2.5 times. We now have over 5,600 SASE customers and over 23 million individual seats. Across our SASE base as well as our GP customers, we have been chosen to help protect a base of over 100 million users. Meanwhile, the drivers of our SASE momentum are broadening. Bookings of newer modules on the SASE platform, such as Autonomous Digital Experience Management, or ADEM, Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, Prisma Access Browser, which you just saw an ad for, and AI Access grew nearly fourfold this year. Customers are happy with their initial SASE deployments and are adding these to derive a more modern security environment and streamline their vendor landscape. I'm particularly excited about the momentum we're seeing with Prisma Access Browser. Roughly one-third of the new Prisma Access seats we sold in the quarter were for our secure browser. We signed a transaction in Q2 for over north of $10 million with one customer. There's a total of over $30 million in Prisma Access Browser bookings in Q2 and growing seats by 95% quarter over quarter. We also continued to innovate in SASE, releasing the mobile version of our integrated secure browser. This browser, integrated with Prisma Access, offers mobile phone and tablet users the same robust security and access to private applications. We added capabilities to AI access, ensuring organizations can apply controls to how their users interact with AI-based applications. We can now provide real-time visibility into over 1,800 applications, up from 500 six months ago. AI access comes with out-of-the-box policies to manage functions such as uploads, downloads, and sharing capabilities. In a short period of time, this quarter, we crossed 300 customers who used the AI access capability. We can also provide comprehensive data protection to secure sensitive data secrets and intellectual property. Now turning to software firewalls. This has been a strong area of growth. We saw 50% bookings growth in our software firewall business with AI and public cloud adoption continuing to be the strongest driver. Approximately 70% of our VM deployments are now in the public cloud. We continue to see customers adopt our software firewalls alongside our hardware appliances. As a testament to this, about two-thirds of our software firewall customers are also hardware firewall customers, showing the hybrid nature of the solution and the need for platformization. We also continue to innovate in this business. Early in Q2, we released our API-based AI runtime security capability, which added the ability for our product to directly secure AI applications without being in the traffic path. Later in Q2, we leveraged this capability to secure AI agents, as many of our customers look forward towards the value propositions of agents, but need to secure them as they would need to secure any other user or applications. This capability helped drive our first seven-figure software firewall transaction for AI in the quarter, and we have a healthy eight-figure pipeline for AI firewalls for the future. Now moving on to Cortex. This morning, we had an exciting announcement. We took our industry-leading Prisma Cloud platform, evolved it with more capability, merged it with our CDR capability and our Cortex platform to announce the introduction of Cortex Cloud. Cortex Cloud is now the industry's first end-to-end cloud security platform, which deeply integrates into the SOC. As we have been delivering cloud security over time, we have learned that the customers are keen to ensure that they can trace the cloud security capability all the way into runtime reproduction and do real-time security against this. We're also delivering a powerful data security, DSPM experience, and real-time security capability with a cloud agent. Again, all of this is now natively connected to the Cortex platform. This is where cloud security is going. We have anticipated the market change in cloud security and it's one reason for our momentum and leadership in the space. Recall that in our early days, we entered the cloud security market in 2018 with two acquisitions and continue to build up these capabilities. pioneering the category and leading with our initial cloud posture capabilities. Soon after, it became apparent that too many security issues were reaching production and organizations could not keep up with remediating them once applications were deployed. We led the trend to shift left, connecting this to the cloud posture to address security issues before deployment. Attackers took note as customer deployment of mission-critical applications and sensitive data accelerated into the cloud. Our own Unit 42 research shows that 80% of security exposures are found in cloud attack surfaces. There's a 66% increase in threats targeting cloud environments. With these evolutions in the attack backdrop, we believe cloud security and security operations must be intricately linked. Existing Prisma Cloud customers will have a seamless upgrade to Cortex Cloud to benefit from AI-powered prioritization, automated remediation, and new simplified powerful user experience. Additionally, they can also adopt Cortex's best-in-class CDR capability to gain real-time cloud security capabilities. The unification of enterprise to cloud can further drive the adoption of XIM into the customer's cloud environment. Cortex Cloud natively integrates with cloud data, context, and workflows within Cortex XIM to significantly reduce the mean time to respond to modern threats with a single, unified SecOps solution. More importantly, because we are natively integrating cloud solutions with SOC, XIM has now transformed into both a cloud and enterprise center. We're excited about the prospects for us to maintain or accelerate our strong XIM momentum. As I mentioned, we are making this announcement on the back of strong momentum in our cloud security and security office business. I want to give you some highlights. We drove bookings growth of approximately 50% in both Cortex and Prisma Cloud in Q2. In Cortex, we had healthy momentum with customer growth of approximately 20%. Fueling this customer growth, we again signed hundreds of new XTR customers in Q2, which become opportunities for SOC transformation on the broader Cortex platform in the future. Our XTR momentum continues to be fueled by the efficacy of our product. This quarter, we achieved further external recognition of this, achieving the leadership results in the most recent MITRE ATT&CK evaluations. XIM, our AI-driven SecOps platform, surpassed the $1 billion cumulative bookings milestone in Q2. While we know we have a winning product with XIM, we're also starting to see external validation of our leadership with Frost & Sullivan and Omdia recognizing us as leaders in the SIM category. Contributing to our Cortex strength in Q2 was over $100 million in Curator-related bookings. Our pipeline on Curator is equally strong, leaving us optimistic about our IBM partnership as a driver of Cortex. On the cloud side, we saw the adoption of our capabilities continue to broaden. With DSPM integrated into Prisma Cloud, we've seen early adoption to be one of the strongest ones of any of our new cloud security capabilities in the past. We're excited to see this success continue with DSPM as part of the Cortex Cloud product we announced this morning. We're also seeing particular success among some of the largest companies in strategic industries. For example, several SaaS companies signed significant cloud security deals with us in Q2. In this industry, SEM is the top 10 SaaS companies outside of cybersecurity, leverage their cloud security capabilities to secure the customer's environment. As you can see, we saw strong momentum across the business in Q2. We're seeing customer imperatives around AI driving accelerated cloud adoption and infrastructure investment, which is supporting strong cybersecurity demand. This healthy spending backdrop and strong execution from our team and platformization helped drive the healthy top-line trend we saw in Q2 across SEM. RPO and GSARR in revenue. We remain optimistic about sustaining this momentum as our sales teams leverage our ecosystem, continue to become more adept at aligning our many capabilities into a unique platformization journey for each customer. We remain confident in our long-term and GSARR forecast. Supporting this is a steady innovation stream and momentum across our portfolio. We're leading early mover into new market categories like enterprise browser, secure AI by design, the AI-powered SOC, which are making it easy for our customers to adopt key new innovations with our platform approach. Lastly, we're driving profitable growth, balancing operating module improvements with strong cash flow. We continue to make progress in driving a culture of efficiency and power-up networks, and you've seen the results of this over the last few years. This focus on efficiency and some early success in AI-based initiatives gives us the confidence to continue delivering profitable growth. I will now pass on to Deepak for his remarks.

speaker
Deepak Galecha
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Nikesh, and good afternoon, everyone. To maximize our time spent on Q&A, I will provide you with highlights of Q2. You can review the results in our press release and the supplemental financial information on our website. In Q2, total revenue was $2.26 billion and grew 14%, above the high end of our guidance. Within revenue, product revenue grew 8%, while total services revenue grew 16%. Drilling into total services revenue, subscription revenue grew 20% and support revenue rose 8%. Our product revenue is approaching 40% software on a trailing 12 month basis. We expect healthy software contribution to product revenue in the second half of this year, which we expect will increase our product revenue into the double digit growth range. We also saw stable demand for firewall appliances in Q2, which we expect to continue through fiscal 2025, as the appliance market grows 0-5%, as we have previously discussed. Moving on to geographies, we saw double-digit revenue growth across all theaters, with the Americas growing 13%, EMEA up 18%, and J-PAC growing 17%. We were particularly encouraged by the volume of large deals we closed, with some notable large deals in EMEA and JPAC. For example, we had our largest deals ever in both EMEA and JPAC this quarter, each in excess of $50 million. As Nikesh noted, these deals demonstrate the broadening of our large deal success in North America to our international theaters. Also, I know many investors have had questions about the U.S. federal market. We have had prudent expectations in this market this year, and we saw stable federal business in Q2. Much of our federal business is tied to renewals and existing programs with longstanding funding. During the quarter, we also received FedRAMP high authorization across our network, cloud, and security operations platforms. We now have the most comprehensive suite of AI-powered cybersecurity solutions authorized for use in federal networks at the high impact level. Total RPO grew 21% to $13 billion at the high end of our guided range. Our current RPO grew 17% to $6.1 billion. The average duration of new contracts remained at approximately three years. It did trend towards the high end of our historical range in Q2, based on our performance in large platformization deals, particularly customers making longer-term commitments to XAM. Our NGS ARR again delivered strong growth, growing 37%, finishing Q2 at 4.78 billion. Our NGS ARR was driven by the strength across our advanced subscriptions, SASE, and Cortex. Moving down the income statement, gross margin of 76.6% was down slightly as we continue to see the impact to some of our newer SaaS offerings that are growing quickly but have yet to achieve scale. Also, we had some costs in Q2 related to inventory and product transitions that were higher than typical, and we don't expect that that will occur in the second half of the year. It is worth noting we have been transitioning our contract manufacturing facility in Texas as our primary manufacturing and fulfillment center, not only to enable scale and innovation in our appliances, but also to take advantage of our foreign trade zone that can help mitigate tariffs in products we ship to international destinations as we assemble and manufacture all of our firewall appliance products in the U.S. More broadly, we continue to see efficiencies across the company as we focus on driving profitable growth. We saw operating expenses as a percentage of revenue decrease by 120 basis points as we benefited from scale in our business model and initiatives as part of continuing to build our culture of efficiency. We delivered 81 cents of diluted non-GAAP EPS, and our diluted GAAP EPS of 38 cents continues to grow along with our overall profitability. As a reminder, in the year-ago period, we had a significantly positive impact to gap EPS from the large $1.5 billion release of tax valuation allowance that happened only in fiscal 2024. We generated adjusted free cash flow of over $509 million in Q2. On our balance sheet, you will see that our debt balance came down by over $100 million as we continue to see early conversions of our convertible debts, which occurred at the discretion of the debt holders and was settled by us in cash and equity. Our remaining debt of just over $500 million matures in June 2025, although we may continue to see some early conversions. We did not repurchase any shares in Q2 and our buyback strategy remains opportunistic. We have a billion dollars in authorization remaining through December 2025. As Nikesh mentioned, we are pleased with the momentum we are seeing in our platformization strategy and the outcome in driving our financial results. I wanted to update you on what we are seeing a year into this strategy. As you all no doubt remember, we announced our platformization strategy a year ago. Over the last 12 months, we've learned from our success and adapted where it made sense. We launched a number of structured sales programs that we highlighted to jumpstart this initiative. Our goal was to remove friction, both related to technology risk and budget challenges for the customer. We have now embedded these practices into how we do business. A year in, we have seen both the industry rally around this approach, as well as some of our key ecosystem partners also put significant resources behind platformization. This has helped leverage our own investments on the sales and marketing side and brings us closer to enterprise accounts where ecosystem partners have strong relationships. Many of our large platformization deals have been pursued and closed with global system integrators. With these joint successes, partners collectively are putting more resources behind platformization. When we initially announced platformization, we had piloted the program, helping us build conviction in our aggressive launch. Predating our broad announcement, some of our top reps were driving deals with the principles that embody platformization. A year in, we have seen rep participation significantly increase, with approximately a third of our sales reps having already participated in a new platformization deal win in the last 12 months since we launched our accelerated strategy. Lastly, when we launched the program, we had assumed that platformization would enable us to increase our ARR per customer. As you can see in some of the large deal highlights that Nikesh covered, we have seen success signing larger deals and further expanding our ARR and platformized customers. As you can tell from both the tone and some of the details that we provided, we are very happy with our progress here. I'll reiterate what Nikesh noted last quarter and earlier. Our biggest learning is that we should have made this move earlier. Now, turning to the bottom line. Our confidence in future operating margin expansion is rooted in our visibility to continued leverage across our P&L. As Nikesh mentioned, we've seen some encouraging results from our AI-based initiatives across multiple areas of the company that give me greater confidence in this ability to drive leverage. I wanted to provide you with an update of some of these AI-based initiatives and what we're seeing so far. In the areas that we have focused on, we've seen meaningful efficiencies which either manifest as lower spending, enabling us to drive incremental innovation, or absorb expected increases in volume without additional spending. One of our first AI-based initiatives was focused on our employee-facing processes. In the past, we have leveraged contractors in various business processes in IT. We are on track to reduce this contract labor by about 50% as we close out fiscal 2025, which will result directly in operating expense savings. In our global customer support business, we've leveraged an internally developed co-pilot to assist in case resolution. So far, we have seen our support co-pilot used in about 85% of cases in network security, which is where we first rolled out this technology. We're seeing approximately 50% reduction in the time to resolve cases. This results in a better experience for our customers and also our teams being able to absorb more case volume while adding less headcount than in the past. Lastly, we are deploying co-pilot tools for our developers earlier and are seeing some exciting results. We've recently deployed the technology to all of our engineers. These and other initiatives that are still in their early stages give us consistent outcomes, and that gives me more confidence on the tangible benefits to our business, including our cost structure. Before I turn to guidance, we have a lot of questions about how we get comfortable with the sustainability of our cash generation, given some of the transitions happening in our business. We began to see an increase in deals with deferred payments in fiscal year 2022 and have seen a significant increase driven by larger transactions, particularly in our SaaS offerings over the last three and a half years. As we have absorbed an increase in deferred payments, our visibility into our free cash flow each year has increased. In fiscal year 2024, when we entered the year with $1 billion in deferred payments scheduled for the year, that was 32% of our fiscal year 24 adjusted free cash flow. This year, that amount increased to $1.4 billion, and our visibility increased to 41% of our expected adjusted free cash flow. Looking forward, we expect to enter fiscal 2026 with $2 billion in deferred payments scheduled for the year, further increasing our visibility into free cash flow in fiscal year 2026. We've progressed substantially over the last several years through the transition of deferred payments. We've also spent significant time over the course of this year ensuring that we're balancing this transition with other uses of cash and opportunities for cash flow optimization. Because our appliance bookings and smaller bookings predominantly are paid up front, and many of our large transactions already utilize deferred payments, we believe we can manage the trend towards more of our larger transaction bookings utilizing deferred payments as we have done over the last several years. Consequently, our expected increasing profitability as we scale and these financial dynamics give us improved confidence in our free cash flow generation. Our confidence holds for fiscal year 2025, where we continue to expect 37% to 38% adjusted free cash flow margin, as well as our cash generation beyond this year. We are comfortable that we can generate adjusted free cash flow margins for fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027 of greater than 37%. As a reminder, we do not guide free cash flow on a quarterly basis, and we do see year-to-year fluctuations in our cash flow seasonality. In fiscal year 2025, relative to prior years, we expect to see fluctuations in seasonality driven by the timing of deferred payments from customers, the timing of bookings within the year, and the timing of cash tax payments. But this year, we expect, relative to the street, that more of our free cash flow will come in Q4. With that, let me turn to guidance. For fiscal year 2025, we expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $5.52 to $5.57 billion, an increase of 31% to 32%. Remaining performance obligation of $15.2 to $15.3 billion, an increase of 19% to 20%. Revenue to be in the range of $9.14 to $9.19 billion, an increase of 14%. operating margins to be in the range of 28% to 28.5%, diluted non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $3.18 to $3.24, an increase of 12% to 14%, and adjusted free cash flow margin in the range of 37% to 38%. For the third fiscal of 2025, we expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $5.03 to $5.08 billion, an increase of 33% to 34%. remaining performance obligation of $13.5 to $13.6 billion, an increase of 19% to 20%, revenue to be in the range of $2.26 to $2.29 billion, an increase of 14% to 15%, and diluted non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.76 to $0.77, an increase of 15% to 17%. We've included our typical modeling points in the presentation for you to review. Before I turn back to Walter for Q&A, we will roll one more video.

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