Zscaler, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Zscaler Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, your first speaker today, Mr. Bill Troy, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Finance. Thank you. Please go ahead, Bill.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Zscaler Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. On the call with me today are Jay Chowdhury, Chairman and CEO, and Remo Canessa, CFO. Please note that we have posted our earnings release and a supplemental financial schedule to our investor relations website. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers we talk about today will be on an adjusted non-GAAP basis. you'll find the reconciliation of GAAP to the non-GAAP financial measures in our earnings release. I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements, including but not limited to the company's anticipated future revenue, calculated billings, operating performance, gross margin, operating expenses, operating income, net income, free cash flow, dollar-based net retention rate, future hiring decisions, remaining performance obligations, income taxes, earnings per share, our market share and market opportunity. These statements and other comments are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to risk and uncertainty, some of which are beyond our control, including but not limited to the duration and impact of COVID-19 on our business, the global economy and the respective businesses of our customers, vendors and partners, market adoption of our offerings, and our expectations regarding the development of the markets in which we compete. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. For a more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the SEC as well as in today's earnings release. We will upload a copy of today's prepared remarks to the IR website when we move to the Q&A segment of the call. Now, I'll turn the call over to Jay. Thank you, Bill.

We had a very strong quarter to close out a spectacular year. In Q4, we delivered growth of 57% in revenue and 70% in billings as customers embraced our expanded cloud platform. to accelerate the digital transformation. Let me share a few highlights of fiscal 21. Our full-year revenue grew 56% to $673 million, and billings grew 70% to reach $934 million. We are seeing revenue growth across all verticals, customer segments, and geography. 51% of revenue was from outside the United States. I'm very excited to see our ARR approaching $1 billion. And please do note that our new annualized bookings and new logo acquisition accelerated throughout the year. All product pillars of our platform saw strong demand. CPA revenues surpassed $100 million in fiscal 21, growing 166% year over year. Increased cybersecurity risk and accelerating digital transformation have increased the need for our zero trust architecture. We are uniquely positioned to reduce business risk and make businesses agile and more competitive. We are the only cloud provider at scale with a proxy-based architecture to deliver true zero trust security. FireWarn and VPN-based castle and mode security connects users to the corporate network, which facilitates lateral movement of threats, increasing cyber risks. C-scaler connects users only to applications, not to the network. a core principle of zero-trust architecture that reduces ransomware attacks and other cyber risks. Built from the start to enforce policy at the edge, as advocated by the SASE framework, the Zscaler Cloud spans 150 data centers with five nines of availability, providing fast and secure access to all applications, whether in your data center or in a multi-cloud environment. Because of these architectural advantages and our proven ability to scale, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange has become the foundation for digital transformation. With a record number of seven-figure ACV deals in Q4, we now have over 200 customers with greater than $1 million in ARR. Over 5,600 enterprises, including 35% of the Fortune 500, trust Zscaler to secure their transformation journey, while the average net promoter score of SAS companies is 30. Zscaler's is 74, which is 2.5 times higher. of the values these pillars deliver. Now, I would like to discuss three market segments where we made significant progress during the quarter and the fiscal year. First, the financial services sector has become our top vertical as these companies are embracing the cloud and Office 365. Let me highlight three new customer wins in Q4 for the purchase of ZIA and ZPA together. First is the global bank that's adopting a zero-trust strategy to protect over 100,000 employees with our high-end ZIA and ZPA bundles. They've purchased every module we offer in the ZIA pillar, including firewalls, sandbox, ASP, DLP, and browser isolation. Fast user experience and enhanced cybersecurity were the key factors for our win. Our second new logo win is a Fortune 500 asset management company that purchased ZIA and ZPA to secure over 30,000 employees. And third is a Fortune 500 insurance company that purchased ZI and ZPA for 26,000 employees to enable work from anywhere. These wins illustrate when companies are ready to embrace the cloud, Zscaler is the only cloud native multi-tenant platform that meets the needs. With security as a major requirement, these financial services customers only considered a proxy architecture. that can provide SSL inspection at scale and rejected firewall-based architecture. We now count eight of the top ten global banks and seven of the top ten insurance companies outside of China as our customers. Next, let me highlight our progress in the enterprise market segment. which includes organizations with 2,000 to 6,000 employees. We started focusing on this segment at the start of fiscal 21, and the results have exceeded our expectations. This segment includes over 12,000 organizations representing $8 billion of our serviceable market for user protection. Deal sizes in this segment are growing, as customers adopt more of our platform. I'm excited to see our first seven-figure upsell win in our enterprise segment, where the customer is buying all four pillars of our platform, ZIA, ZPA, and ZDX for 6,000 users, and ZCP workload segmentation for almost 3,000 servers. Our ARR with this customer now exceeds $1.5 million, validating a significant opportunity in this market segment. To further penetrate the segment, we are developing targeted marketing programs, significantly growing our sales team and doubling down on our summit partner program to recruit and enable channel partners to drive further sales leverage. Finally, we continue to invest to capture a large federal opportunity. With a sizable Fed sales team and the highest FedRAMP certifications, we count well over 100 government agencies and federal integrators as customers. In Q4 alone, we added over 20 new federal customers, including four with over $1 million in annual contract value, each purchasing ZIA and ZPA together. Driven by the President's recent executive order, we're seeing increased interest in our zero trust exchange across all levels of the government. We are among a select group of companies chosen by NIST, a national standards body, to run a pilot program in support of the executive order. We are excited about this opportunity to help our country dramatically improve our security posture while significantly reducing legacy IT costs. Next, let me highlight our technology innovations and emerging products which are expanding our opportunity. We started with a highly scalable multi-canon globally distributed cloud capable of providing inline inspection of internet and SaaS traffic with CIA and securing access to private applications with CPA. Over the past year, we extended our platform to protect cloud workloads and to manage digital user experience. We're very excited about the early traction of our emerging product the next growth engines for us. Our emerging products contributed high single digits percentage of a new and upsell business in fiscal 21, which is well ahead of our expectations. ZDX is the fastest growing solution in our history and a natural compliment to ZIA and ZPA. With a single lightweight endpoint agent, It is frictionless to turn on ZDX to provide end-to-end visibility to help resolve performance issues for every Zscaler user. In Q4, one of our largest ZDX deals came from a Fortune 500 tech company that purchased the entire ZIA portfolio as well as CPA and ZDX for all 60,000 employees to support work from anywhere while embracing zero trust architecture. We were pleasantly surprised to see so many large enterprises adopt ZDX so rapidly. Other notable ZDX wins include a Fortune 500 pharma company for 70,000 users, a Fortune 50 energy company for 55,000 users, a Fortune 500 European bank for 39,000 users, an industrial manufacturing company for 28,000 users, and a healthcare company for 25,000 users. I believe that every ZIA and ZPA customer will embrace ZDX as user experience is one of the highest priorities for a CIO. We are receiving very positive feedback from customers. A Fortune 600 healthcare executive indicated ZDX contributed to an 18-point gain in employee net promoter score for the IT service desk in two quarters. After having disrupted perimeter-based security with our zero-trust exchange for users, our next big opportunity is to bring zero-trust to workloads with Z-scaler cloud protection Every organization is building their applications in the cloud and will look to implement zero trust security to protect workloads. Our zero trust exchange securely connects workloads to workloads and process to process using business policies, eliminating the need for traditional networks and associated cyber risks. Solutions within our ZCP pillar include workload posture, which includes CSPM and CIEM, ensures proper configuration and enforces least privileged access for multi-cloud environments. Workload communication, powered by ZIA and ZPA technology, secures app-to-app and cloud-to-cloud communication and Workload segmentation achieves micro segmentation without legacy network segmentation. We have over 300 ZCP customers and are seeing increasingly strong interest from new and existing customers. Let me highlight a few ZCP wins during Q4. An existing ZI and ZPA customer in the consumer goods sector with over 100,000 employees purchase workload communication for 25,000 workloads, and workload segmentation for 10,000 workloads. This customer has a large server environment on a traditional network. Implementing our zero trust for workloads will reduce their cyber risk by minimizing lateral threat movement while securing their app migration to the cloud. We are also landing new logos with ZCP. For example, we landed a Fortune 500 professional services company, where ZCP was the main driver. This customer purchased workload communication for 6,000 workloads, workload segmentation for 500 workloads, as well as the entire ZIA bundle for 40,000 employees. Our team collaborated with CrowdStrike our technology partner, and of Global SI, our channel partner for this deal. Let me conclude some thoughts on our vision and strategy. We envision a world in which the exchange of information is always secure and seamless. In today's hyper-connected digital world, our Zero Trust Exchange secures any-to-any connectivity for users, applications, workloads and IoT and OT systems regardless of their location. At our analyst day in January, we laid out our audacious goal of serving 200 million users and 100 million workloads. In order to achieve this goal, we focused on attracting and developing talent and creating a culture of excellence. We hired over 1,100 employees over the past year and enabled them to be productive and successful all during the pandemic. We're investing in our people through learning initiatives and building a culture where a global and diverse workforce can deliver excellence, powering our customer success. Our employees are engaged and completely aligned to our mission. For our last employee survey, 96% of employees understand and believe in the strategic direction of the company. I'm proud that we are recognized as a great place to work in the 2021 Glassdoor ratings. We are focused on driving broad adoption of all four pillars of our platform. The breadth and depth of our platform is resonating with customers. and their purchasing of high-end bundles to consolidate their security and networking point products. I believe Zscaler is the go-to platform for vendor consolidation, cost savings, increased user productivity, and better cyber protection. As we demonstrated over the last 12 months, we built a sophisticated go-to market machine that delivers business value and measurable outcomes at the CXO level. I'm extremely proud of our go-to-market team and how we executed our sales strategy this year. Even with significant growth in our sales force, sales productivity has increased over the prior year, exceeding our expectations. Our Summit Partner Channel Program consists of hundreds of cloud-focused resellers system integrators, and service providers that are contributing to our deal win and increasing sales leverage. As our market share, reputation, and brand awareness continue to strengthen, a growing number of cloud and SaaS providers are integrating with our platform, further strengthening our strategic position with our joint customers. Our expanding ecosystem is contributing to our sales velocity and broadening our reach. I believe we are on the right track to capture a material share of our $72 billion serviceable market. We also see additional opportunities to bring zero trust to IoT and OT systems. Moreover, 5G. which pushes computing further to the edge, opens up additional opportunities for Zscaler. To pursue these markets, we have a two-pronged innovation strategy. One, investing aggressively in internal R&D and scaling our world-class engineering organization, which continues to rapidly deliver new products and features. We recently opened a new R&D hub in Israel and are expanding our R&D centers across the U.S., India, Canada, and Spain. Two, making highly targeted acquisitions to enhance our platform and shrink time to market. During fiscal 21, we completed two acquisitions. Trustome strengthens our GCP pillar and positions us better to pursue our shift left strategy. And Smokescreen enhances our active defense capabilities with honeypot technology. Through internal innovation and highly targeted acquisition, we will further expand our leadership in the SASE and Zero Trust security markets. In summary, with all these drivers and innovations ahead of us, You can see why we are very excited about our future. Now, I would like to turn over the call to Remo for our financial results.

Thank you, Jay. As Jay mentioned, we are pleased with the results for the fourth quarter and full year 2021. Revenue for the quarter was $197 million, up 12% sequentially and 57% year over year. VPA product revenue was 17% of total revenue. From a geographic perspective, we had broad strength across our three major regions. Americas represented 51% of revenue, EMEA was 38%, and APJ was 11%. For the full year, revenue was $673 million, up 56% year over year. This was an acceleration from the 42% growth we delivered in fiscal 2020. Our total calculated billings grew 70% year-over-year to $332 million, with billing duration in the middle of our 10 to 14 months range. We're also pleased that year-over-year growth in short-term billings accelerated to 71% in the fourth quarter from 61% in the previous quarter. Our strong billings performance was driven by a record number of new seven-figure annualized contract value deals in the quarter as we sold more of our platform offering. We saw strong growth in our top five verticals, finance, manufacturing, services, healthcare, and technology. Remaining performance obligations for RPO were $1.553 billion as of July 31st, up 98% from one year ago. The current RPO is 49% of the total RPO. Looking at our pillars, ZPA was 27% of our total new and upsell business in fiscal 2021. Our emerging products, which include ZDX and ZCP, are tracking ahead of our expectations and contributed high single digits of our total new and upsell. We are seeing strong customer interest and we expect emerging products to contribute low teens percentage of our total new and upsell business in fiscal 2022. The adoption of our emerging products is pacing ahead of ZPA in its early years. We have a large opportunity with all our pillars, and we will continue to expand our portfolio to strengthen our leadership position in the zero trust security market. Our strong customer retention and ability to upsell the broader platform have resulted in a consistently high dollar-based net retention rate, which was 128% compared to 126% last quarter and 120% a year ago. As we have highlighted, this metric will vary quarter to quarter. While good for our business, our increased success selling bigger bundles, selling multiple pillars from the start and faster upsells for the year can reduce our dollar-based net retention rate in the future. Considering these factors, we feel that 128% is outstanding. We have a strong base of large enterprise customers, which provides us with a significant opportunity to upsell our broader platform. We had 202 customers with ARR greater than $1 million, up 87% from 108 in the prior year. We also had 1,480 customers with ARR greater than $100,000, which compares with 973 customers last year. Our new customer ads accelerated in fiscal 21. We organically added approximately 1,000 new logos in fiscal 21, excluding acquisitions, and we ended the year with over 5,600 customers. Expanding our field engagement with smaller enterprises with 2,000 to 6,000 employees and the increased investments in our partner program are contributing to higher new customer growth. Turning to the rest of our Q4 financial performance, total gross margin of 80% declined by 1 percentage point quarter-over-quarter and improved by 1 percentage point year-over-year. Our total operating expenses increased 15% sequentially and 60% year-over-year to $138 million. Operating expenses as a percentage of revenue increased by 1 percentage point from 69% a year ago to 70% in the quarter, primarily due to increased hiring and higher compensation expenses, as well as $2 million in expenses related to Trustome and Smokescreen operations. Operating margin was 10%, and free cash flow margin was 14%. We ended the quarter with over $1.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Now, moving on to guidance. As a reminder, these numbers are all non-GAAP, which excludes stock-based compensation expenses and related payroll taxes, amortization of debt discount, and amortization of intangible assets. For the first quarter of fiscal 2022, we expect revenue in the range of $210 million to $212 million, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 47% to 49%, gross margins of 79%. I would like to remind investors that a number of our emerging products, including ZDX, workload segmentation, and CSPM, will initially have lower gross margins than our core products because we're more focused on time to market and growth than optimizing them for gross margins. Operating profit in the range of $18 to $19 million, other income of $400,000, net of interest payments on senior convertible notes, income taxes of $1.2 million, earnings per share of approximately $0.12, assuming 148 million fully diluted shares. For the full year fiscal 2022, we expect revenue in the range of $940 million to $950 million, or year-over-year growth of 40% to 41%. Calculated billings in the range of $1.23 billion to $1.25 billion, or year-over-year growth of 32% to 34%. We expect our first half mix to be approximately 42% of our full year billings, which is in line with the average of the last three to four years. Operating profit in the range of $85 million to $90 million. Earnings per share in the range of 52 to 56 cents, assuming approximately 149 to 150 million fully diluted shares. Please note that our share count guidance now includes dilution from our convertible debentures. We have a cap call with a strike price of $246.76. Every $10 increase in our stock price above this strike price will add 250,000 to 300,000 shares to our fully diluted share count. For your modeling purposes, I would like to discuss the anticipated T&E and M&A impact to fiscal 2022 operating expenses. In fiscal 2021, we saw a 280 basis point benefit to margins from lower T&E compared to fiscal 2020. With plans for in-person meetings and events in the second half of this year, including sales conferences in Q3, using Flive in Q4, we expect T&E as a percentage of revenue to be approximately 250 to 300 basis points higher in fiscal 2022 as compared to fiscal 2021. As mentioned previously, the recent acquisitions of Trustome and Smokescreen are expected to have an immaterial impact on revenue in fiscal 2022. We expect to incur approximately $13 million to $15 million in operating expenses to further invest in these products and incorporate their technologies into our platform. This is incorporated into our guidance. Let me conclude with comments on our investment framework. We will balance growth and profitability based on how our business is growing. At our analyst day, with consensus estimates at that time reflecting approximately 30% revenue CAGR, we outlined our target of achieving 20 to 22% operating margins in fiscal 2024, which implied 300 basis points of margin expansion per year. Since then, we delivered outstanding results with revenue growth exceeding our expectations. If we continue to have high growth and strong unit economics, we'll prioritize investing in the business, which would lead to lower than 300 basis points of margin expansion per year. To that point, our fiscal 2022 guidance of 40 to 41% revenue growth and 9 to 9.5% operating margins reflects approximately 150 to 200 basis points of margin expansion after adjusting for the increased T&E and M&A expenses. We remain confident of reaching 20 to 22% operating margins in the long term, but growth will continue to take priority considering our strong business momentum. With a huge market opportunity, and customers increasingly adopting the broader platform, we're committed to investing aggressively in our company. Operator, you may now open the call for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please limit yourself to one question due to time constraints. Our first question comes from Alex Anderson with Neato. You may proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you very much. As we're looking out into the new year, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on the type of expansion you're planning relative to the sales capacity. You've been extremely aggressive over the last year. In fact, as I understand it, increased your targets three times over the course of the year. Certainly, the environment is extremely robust today. Can you talk about, you know, where you're going as we go into the new fiscal year?

Thanks. I'll start with that. Alex and Jake can come in. You're right. I mean, the thing that we called out in the call is that we're seeing strong momentum, you know, for our business, in particular in the second half. And you're absolutely correct. We did increase our field quota sales reps by number in fiscal 21 versus fiscal 20. As we go forward, we'll be making continued investments in our sales organization, as well as marketing and also channel. But that's only a piece of it. And again, we'll be increasing the number of headcount for DART's field quota sales reps in fiscal 22 versus fiscal 21. But more broadly speaking, the opportunity is so big, we're going to continue to invest throughout the company to really position ourselves to move forward and really be a substantial company that's operating efficiently. That's across all areas, R&D, G&A, or cloud. When I started with Zscaler, we were doing about 35 billion transactions a day. We're upwards, I don't know what the number is now, but I know it's well north of 160 billion transactions per day. It is critical if you're a cloud company like Zscaler to provide a reliable service that customers can rely on to ensure they're operating efficiently and securely. So our focus is going forward. This can be broad throughout the company, but we'll continue to invest in sales and marketing and we'll increase our field rep sales headcount more in fiscal 22 versus fiscal 21. Primo, well said.

I don't think I need to add a whole lot more. We are hitting on all cylinders and very excited. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg with RBC. You may proceed with your question.

Yeah. Thank you for taking the question. This is Matt Swanson on for Matt. If I could just dive in a little bit more to the federal opportunity, you know, great color today on the call, Jay, but when we're thinking about that zero trust directive, you have really unique visibility both into the federal space with a hundred customers. And then obviously as a zero trust leader, What do you think the gap is right now in the current federal environment to achieving a zero-trust framework? And in any sense, you can give us kind of the magnitude and the duration of the opportunity. Suppose, you know, three months from now, that mandate became mandatory for all federal environments to get to zero-trust. How big is that gap?

If you think of where the federal market is, it's largely today. doing network security. It's largely castle and moat, depending upon firewalls, VPNs, and the like. The good thing is that Biden administration has recognized that zero trust architecture has to be done. So it's great to see that the EO is focused on implementing zero trust. And look, where we stand today is we started investing in federal market about three and a half years ago. and got all the certifications that are needed. And we also have the right architecture. And we have built the sizable team. We already have pretty good business, but we are barely scratching the surface of the federal market. I think a lot of thing has to do with education. Good thing is the EOs and some of the new meetings that Biden administration is having with high profile CEOs alike is raising visibility in the space. We are participating in some of these new pilots. On and off, we are excited, but we also know that some of these federal deals take their own time.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Keith Bachman with Bank of Montreal. You may proceed with your question.

Yes, thanks very much. I wanted to ask a little bit about the net retention rate. It was very strong this quarter. But you seem to be signaling that there may be some tension on the number. So I was wondering if you could comment on how investors should be thinking about the net retention rate as we look out. In particular, I did want to reference some of the information you provided at the analyst day where you talked about significant expansion on the annual price per user. both in the user protection category and the workload protection category, as well as just seat growth. So I'm a little bit surprised to hear you almost downplay the 128 number, but if you could just talk a little bit about how investors should think about that over the next fiscal year. Thank you.

I'll start, then Remo can add on. I think our comments on net retention rate have been consistent since we went public. And here's the real thing. If I were a one-product company, then it matters, new logo, upsell, all those things. We have such a big platform that's growing rapidly. We have lots of internal debates. Should we really pay sales rep more for new logo versus upsell? The answer is we really want to grow the overall new ACV, whether it's coming from upsell or it's coming from new logo. So the message is not to really say downplay net retention rate. The message is the net retention rate by itself is not a good indicator. What we're doing is good. We are proud of 128. I'll be proud of 125, too, because if I can sell a bigger platform up front, I'm okay with a lower NRR. That's the message. We are happy. We're bullish. But this matrix by itself is not the best thing as a leading indicator.

I'll follow on with that. Jay's absolutely 100% correct. We talked about on prior calls, the only time we understand the importance of net retention rate, because of basically our compensation structure, which we pay the same for new and upsell, we really don't look at it until, you know, we have projections of what we're going to do during the quarter, but we really look at it at the end of the quarter. Now, having said that, if you take a look at what we talked about at the analyst day, and you're absolutely right, Keith, you know, with the the opportunity to sell at a higher price point, and we talked about for the users, for 5,000 users, we expect to have basically a price point about $145 per user. We are seeing that. And so we are seeing basically companies that are buying ZIA, the ZIA add-on, ZPA and ZDX, we're seeing those type of dollar amounts. So the other point, which we haven't talked about, the average revenue per user is increasing substantially. And so what we're seeing is that we're seeing customers buy our broader platform. We're seeing customers who are actually buying ZCP and not buying the user protection initially. So all indications are that things are going well. The net retention rate, the positive impacts are the new products. If you take a look at the number of global 2000 companies have both ZIA and CPA, it's 44%. So I wouldn't take, you know, our comments related to net retention rate, that it's going to go down. We don't, we really just don't focus on it. And we're just trying to really condition our investors to really think about the broader platform we have both new and upsell and basically our top line growth.

Perfect. Many thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity. You may proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you. Congratulations on the strong quarter and year. Maybe just building on that last answer a little bit, you've highlighted the enterprise segment targeting 2,000 to 6,000 employees as your fastest-growing segment. Do these smaller customers with faster sales cycles, do they have a similar land as your larger customers and have a long runway for upsell, or do they – landing with a large amount of your platform?

Overall, across the board today, whether it's new enterprise segment or larger one, more and more, they're buying bigger and bigger platforms. It is true that enterprises, probably 2K to 6K, tend to go a little bit bigger from the start. But it's a good, it's a shorter sell cycle. And these guys at the same risk of, and similar taxes like the others. So we are actually surprised to see how much traction we're getting in this segment in the past few quarters since we focused on it.

The focus also on enterprise is through our summit program we put in place a year ago. So we're seeing strong traction through our summit program. And the summit program is geared towards those customers in that 2,000 to 6,000 range. So, you know, very positive, you know, feedback, very positive results, as Jay mentioned, over this past year. We're excited that this is an opportunity. As Jay mentioned, it's our fastest-growing segment, and we're excited about that opportunity.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Ruchegger with FAIR. You may proceed with your question.

Yeah, hi, guys. Congratulations on the strong quarter. Jay, this is probably more for you, but when you look at these publicly traded firewall vendors, they're clearly experiencing very strong demand trends for their virtual firewalls for cloud applications, cloud environments. And I'm just wondering, how do you reconcile that with your comments around the benefits of a proxy? I mean, doesn't it you seem to suggest that there could be different approaches, different architectures to securing cloud?

You know, I think about this quite a bit. If you recall three, four years ago, we were asked this question quite a bit, and this was being asked, why are these proxy vendors like BlueCore still posting good numbers? I was telling them that we are barely making money and impact, a lot of traffic was still going through those proxy appliances in the data center. If you look at the local breakout business that's done out there, we are the primary vendors out there. Others, yes, have come out there, but majority of the enterprise traffic still goes through hub and spoke network. It still goes through data center. It still goes through those firewalls. If your traffic year over year goes up by 33%, you'll end up getting more data-centered devices, whether it's firewalls or other stuff. I think then you get to a certain level, whereas traffic shifts significantly, the spend will shift. That's my personal view, so not surprised at why the legacy devices like firewalls are still growing. I think it's a matter of time.

Right. That's helpful, Jay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Greg Powell with BTIG. You may proceed with your question.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the questions, and congratulations on the strong results. So, yeah, I'm curious. How are you thinking about the potential to increase pricing on renewals, particularly now that cloud-based network security is more mainstream and the sales process is less evangelical than, say, three or four years ago?

How are we looking at increasing the renewal price? Is that one of the questions? Yes, exactly. Right. Our biggest increase in price is coming from selling bigger bundles. And there is some increase in price on each module, but the pace at which we're expanding our portfolio is quite significant. And as customers see the value, and because we show business value, the increase in and price per customer from ACB point of view becomes a natural thing. I think if we were to compete on price, if we were to compete on, say, I am a better firewall than those firewalls, then it gets hard. We don't really compete to replace a given firewall or proxy. We are an enabler of secure digital transformation. The sale is often driven by the CIO to head of infrastructure to head of security, When they look at the amount of money we can save them to replace all these legacy firewalls, security, and networking devices, the ROI is very impressive. To justify our price becomes a lot easier. So value-based, business value-based pricing is what we have advocated. Did it make sense?

Yeah, I think so. And maybe I could have asked the question better. I guess my understanding was like, you know, four or five years ago, you had to be more aggressive just because, I mean, like, sassy wasn't even a term back then. People were less comfortable having security in the cloud. Today it's more mainstream. So I thought that would give you more ability to increase prices. That was my question.

Yeah, I would think, yes, we have done some price increases on the original products. but a big increase has come from adding a lot more modules. If you look at the time of IPO, three and a half years ago, it was largely secure web gateway with a few things. It was largely a business bundle sale, a professional bundle. Today, what we're selling is very different than what we sold three years ago, very different than what we sold one year ago. The SASE market that Gartner talks about is a very expensive market. It includes everything you need to have at the what used to be the network security level. Look at even ZSkidder private access. It's not just a VPN replacement. It eliminates the need for entire inbound DMZ. That's a big thing. So as we expand the platform, it further differentiates us. It further consolidates point products. We love the fact that the market is moving so fast, so rapidly, and we're innovating so fast. That's why we think it'll be very hard for some of the me too's to come from behind and catch up with us.

Understood. Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Hamza with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed with your question.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. Um, uh, Jay, perhaps the question, uh, for you. So, you know, last year, um, Zscaler saw a huge uptick in demand with the Zscaler private access solution. To what extent are those customers who may have bought perhaps smaller licenses or perhaps temporary licenses last year are coming back now as they renew and signing larger perhaps ELAs as you guys progress to the next few quarters?

So last year, when customers needed to buy ZPA, and I shared with investors during our earnings calls that there are very few, if any, temporary licenses. There are very few actually one-year deals. Most of the deals were done with us on a multi-year basis. And when they bought ZPA during the pandemic, most of the time it was not for a subset of users. It was really done for most of the users. So from our point of view, the sales that got made last year were really made for a long term. Is that impacting us in the short term? Not really. But having said that, are we selling more and more ZPA to every ZIA customer? Absolutely. Now the market thinks that ZIA and ZPA together should be bought because once you have both of them together, You can access any application from anywhere. In fact, Gartner has further clarified SASE's positioning. It's kind of interesting. SASE was a good news framework, but it was confusing to some degree because it kind of got interpreted as if the network and SD-WAN and security must be with a single vendor. Not true. In fact, Gartner has a new position paper that came out about a month or two ago, which basically said the security part of SASE is secure service edge, SSE. And there's a new MQ that will come out, magic quadrant that will come out in X months. And the second part, they decoupled the network part of it. They're calling it wireless LAN edge. And that's where the SD-WAN part sits there. We have the most comprehensive offering of what Gartner is. calling now Secured Service Hatch. That's really what gives us differentiation that allows us to compete and win and charge good prices and really make sure ZISZP gets sold to every user, not just a subset of users.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Shah Aliyah with County Company. Can you proceed with your question?

Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon and congrats on results and guidance. Jay, I want to go back to the typical competitive landscape question. I know we've been kind of discussing that as of late. Just wanted to check out if there's anything new or anyone new that has come to mind as of late, someone that you have been seeing in a more pronounced way operating within your markets. Thank you for that.

See, overall, if you ask me, has the landscape changed significantly in terms of players out there? Not really. The biggest change in the landscape is in the workload posture market in the cloud protection area. When it comes to SASE, ZIS, EPA competition, there's not a whole lot. Now, there is a fair amount of noise that's coming out there because when legacy network security vendors are getting disrupted, they must do something to make noise so they really don't become extinct. That's why, I mean, we do hear every so often when a customer says, oh, I am doing my firewall VPN in the cloud. That is zero trust, right? Now, zero trust and firewall or VPN in the cloud don't go together. So if you ask me, one of the main things we need to make sure is we clarify that you can't build a zero trust architecture with firewalls and VPNs. The good thing is Smart folks like NIST and Gartner are helping that area. But our momentum is building, business is doing good, and we want to keep on investing aggressively, as Remo said, to take a big share of this increasing and evolving sizable market. The last point I want to make is the number of modules we sell today on average, versus a year ago, versus three years ago, has increased significantly. which is very good. It's no longer the status quo siloed firewall or secure web gateway market. Did I make sense? Got it.

Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for that.

Thank you. Our next question goes from Sterlizati with JP Morgan. You may proceed with your question.

Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. Hey, Remo, I want to ask a nitpicky question. Obviously, the results are fantastic, well above guidance and expectation. But given that current RPO has accelerated for three straight quarters, short-term deferred revenue accelerated, billings calculated remained at 70%, why would revenue actually tick down a couple of percent? Why wouldn't it tick up?

Charlie, you know me pretty well, I think, for 20 years. You know, our philosophy related to guidance is to be prudent, and we're continuing to be prudent with our guidance. Everything you called out is 100% correct. But, you know, what I've tried to do at Zscaler since I've come here is basically I don't want to look back. I want to look forward. I want to give ourselves the ability to really run the business. So you're correct. We're being prudent with our guidance.

I was asking about the current quarter, the quarter you just reported, the 56 and change versus. Oh, I see.

I got it.

I got it.

Okay. I got it. I'm sorry.

Yeah. Something that may have impacted.

No, I I've got it. Thank you. So it's really linearity based. And if you take a look at it, um, in Q4 of 20 last year, related to the COVID impact that we had, we had strong, uh, Billings growth in basically the first part of the quarter. This Q4 21 went to more normalized. So that is what impacted, primarily impacted the revenue of growing 57% in Q4. Now, when you take a look at Q3 20 versus Q3 21, just the opposite effect occurred with COVID. In Q3 of 20, What happened was that the world basically, I don't want to say stopped, but really slowed down in the March timeframe, even early April. So the linearity in Q3 last year was lower, where Q3 of 21 this year, the linearity was more normalized. So we had 60% revenue growth in Q3, 21 versus Q3, 20. And we had 57% revenue growth in Q4, 21 versus Q4, 20. directly related to, you know, the impact of COVID. That makes sense. Thank you. In addition, you know, Sterling, there's one other element, which is basically when you take a look at the large number of deals, you know, that we have, that we called out, you know, the million-dollar type deals, a lot of those deals have ramps. So with those ramps, you're not going to get the full revenue in that current quarter. That's a smaller part of it, but that is a part of it. The majority of it is related to the linearity.

Remo, thank you. Appreciate it.

No problem. Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Essex with Goldman Sachs. He may proceed with your question.

Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. Jay, I'd love it if you could characterize the nature of enterprise adoption on your platform. primarily from the perspective of enabling meaningful change and digital transformation and a shift in architecture versus, you know, maybe more evolving with a large enterprise and enabling them to get started down that journey. Is there any difference this year versus last year? And maybe if you could characterize the environment of, you know, basically enabling a big architectural shift as opposed to enabling, I guess, a slower migration towards your technology platform?

Brian, great question. The biggest shift got caused by COVID. Before COVID, enterprises used to think about adopting Z-scaler with network transformation, branches being broken into local breaker and the like. With COVID, since network got out of the loop, Enterprise said, I'm going to download this lightweight agent and I'm ready to go with ZIA to external applications, ZPA to internal applications. That mindset is still there. I love it. Because one, when you don't have to deal with the network, your sales and deployments go much faster. So our phase one these days is get everyone turned on from wherever they are. Phase two ends up being, let's do local breakout for network transformations. And then phase three ends up being let's look at the cloud workload protection and the like. So it is evolving, and it's evolving where things are moving at a faster pace.

Got it. That's helpful context. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Eric Suppler with JMP Securities. You may proceed with your question.

Yeah, thanks for taking the question, and congrats on a very strong quarter. Hey, Remo, I think you had mentioned that pricing is around $145 for an organization of 5,000 users. Can you remind us where that was about a year ago? And then also, you had talked about some accounts that have been buying the full breadth of modules for ZIA. What kind of discount do you give to that customer when they buy the full breadth of modules?

Yeah, we're not, you know, first of all, I don't want to get into how much we're, you know, discounting customers because that's more competitive. When you take a look at those 5,000 users, the $145, that's how much that we're seeing customers of 5,000 users paying for the full complement of our offerings. Now, with that, ZDX is new. Okay. ZIA, which is, you know, $25 of that $145. Okay. largely the CIA add-ons are new, you know, related to browser isolation, DLP, and CASB out-of-band, and that's around $30. If a customer buys the full transformation level, you know, which is we have three bundles, pro, business, transformation, it's about $45, and ZPA is about $45 also. Where has it gone from a price per user basis overall Year over year, we're seeing between 35% and 40% increased price per user on a year-over-year basis. So that kind of puts in context of what we're seeing. And again, that increase in price per user, it's related to customers buying more of our platform and also expanding their business with eScaler.

And do you think that 35% to 40%, is that sustainable going into next year given the accelerating expansion of portfolio?

I don't want to comment related to the expansion because I don't want to make those type of forward-looking statements. But if you step back and take a look at the importance of the platform that we're selling and also the more customers buying more of our platform. In addition to that, with the new products, we talked about our emerging products represent high single digits of our new and upsell business. As we go forward, we're seeing the emerging products represent low teens, basically, of our new and upsell business in fiscal 22. As the market evolves and as the comments are made, We're not in the same place we were four years ago or three years ago or even two years ago. And so my expectation is that we'll continue to see increased pricing, but I don't want to quantify it. And we'll just, you know, report on it, you know, as we go forward.

That's great. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Our last question comes from Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. You may proceed with your questions.

Hey guys, this is Justin on for Rob. I just want to double click on the commentary around the federal business. I know you guys usually put it around mid single digits of new ACV in prior quarters. Any sense if this was higher in the current quarter and then maybe some assumptions for the federal business in the pipeline and the guidance for next year? Thanks.

I'll start it, Jay. So federal in the current quarter was mid to higher single digits in Q4. As Jay talked about, the federal business for us with the executive order from President Biden, as well as, you know, federal embracing zero trust, and also our investment with our certifications and our field organization that we have in federal. You know, we feel very good about it. Now, how's it going to play through in fiscal 22? You know, we'll see. We feel there's a very big opportunity, and we also feel that a substantial portion of our business but it takes time with federal, but we're well positioned. And with that, I'll turn it back to Jay.

Yeah, I think pipeline is good. We have all the certifications, the right architecture that federal government recognizes requiring zero trust architecture. We are investing and pretty positive and confident.

Got it. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

With that, I would like to thank you for joining us today and your interest in ZSkiller. We look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you. Thank you.

Goodbye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.