2021 financial results video conference. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode during the formal presentation, which will be followed by a question and answer session. Joining me remotely today on the call are Gil Shwed, Founder and CEO, along with our CFO and COO, Tal Payne. As a reminder, this video conference is live on our website and is recorded for replay. To access the live web conference and replay information, please visit the company's website at checkpoint.com. For your convenience, the replay will be available on our website. If you'd like to reach us after the call, please contact investor relations by email at kip@checkpoint.com. During the course of this presentation, Check Point's representatives may make certain forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 include, but are not limited to, statements related to Check Point's expectations regarding our products and solutions, expectations related to cybersecurity and other threats, expectations regarding our 2022 initiatives, our ability to continue to develop platform capabilities and solutions, customer acceptance and purchase of our existing solutions and new solutions, the market for IT security continuing to develop, competition from other products and services and general market, political and economic and business conditions, including as a result of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC.
The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to Check Point as of the date hereof, and Check Point disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. In our press release, which has been posted on our website, we present GAAP and non-GAAP results along with the reconciliation of such results, as well as reasons for our presentation of non-GAAP information. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Tal Payne for a review of our financial results.
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Wonderful.
Wonderful. Okay, great. Thank you, Kip. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone joining us on the call today. I'm pleased to begin the review of the fourth quarter. Revenues for the quarter, $599 million, which is $17 million above the midpoint of our guidance. Quite nice. Earnings per share reached $2.25, 3 cents above the top end of our guidance, which was $2.22. Now, before I proceed further into the numbers, let me remind you that our GAAP financial results include stock-based compensation charges, amortization of acquired intangible assets and acquisition-related expenses, as well as the related tax effect. Keep in mind that as applicable, non-GAAP information is presented excluding these items. Now let's dive more into the numbers, and I will start with the revenues.
Revenues for the quarter, as you can see, $599 million, 6% increase year-over-year. On the right side, you can see the billing. Billing grew to $851 million, 14% growth in our billing. Very significant acceleration from the 8% you see in Q4 last year. Deferred revenues is some kind of a mirror of the billing. We can see growth very strongly as well, 15% growth, reaching $1,707 million. Moving into the drivers. First let's talk about product and security subscription. Continue to accelerate, reaching $371 million and 9% year-over-year. Products increased nicely, with Maestro continue to be differentiator and drives wins with customers.
We've seen strength in many product categories in SMB all the way to large enterprise this quarter, so that was a nice quarter for the products as well. Subscription revenues, in line with our expectations, continued to accelerate, reaching 14% versus last year we can see 10%. It's already $204 million a quarter, where the main drivers are, we can see the double-digit growth in Harmony, very nice growth there, and double-digit growth also in the CloudGuard. The focus on those area bear fruits already. Moving to revenues by geographies. Revenues by geographies, 49% of the revenues came from EMEA, 40% came from Americas, and 11% from Asia Pacific. As you can see, EMEA had a great quarter and led the revenue growth.
I know when you calculate, you will see lower results in America and APAC, so I'll just give you a highlight regarding the booking. All regions had a great booking and growth with a strong growth. Great result with new customer and in many countries in those regions. As usual, there's a gap between the revenues and the booking as a result of timing and the timing of the booking. Examples of reasons, the delivery of the goods, the consumption of Infinity products. The customer need to pull the product in order for us to recognize revenues. Rendering of the services, of course, is over the period of the service, say, one year and so on of providing the service. Moving on. Gross profit remained strong at $524 million. The margin is 88%.
Very nice. Still one of the strongest in the market. We deliver to our customers with higher costs relating to the supply chain constraints. Let's talk a bit about that. As you know, there's a supply constraint in the market which affects all of us. Many components cost increase, leading to higher cost of the goods sold and slightly lower margin, which is between 1%-1.5%, depends on the quarter. We believe it's temporary situation until the supply chain go back to normal. Maybe in the second half of next year, I think most of the people think it's gonna be resolved towards the end of next year. Just taking that into account as part of the guidance as well for next year. Now, our new pillars, CloudGuard and Harmony, continue to show great results with double-digit growth.
The gross margin on Harmony Connect and Harmony Email Security is lower than the average on the Quantum, therefore, it's also part of this reduction. All in all, very strong result and taking into account the fact that while there's a lot of constraint, we still meet the target and deliver to our customers. Operating expenses highlights. You can see operating expenses reached $239 million and 11% growth. Its main two drivers, as usual. First, we were very successful towards the end of the year to recruit on plan in the headcount, so we accelerated the growth and reached the 9% that we were aiming for the year-over-year growth. Most of it came towards the year-end, so we will see it also as part of the higher run rate that we start next year.
The dollar effect, the dollar weakened against the currency also this quarter, which affected the results. Mainly, you can see it in the R&D expenses as the Israeli shekel, and where our R&D is in Israel. That's the effect you see here. Resulting in operating expenses increasing by 11%. Operating income, strong at $285 million. We can see the operating margin, 47%. We planned to be at 47% before, but we reached it only now, that is 47%. We start to see also the results already in the booking, as you can see. Net income margin also very strong at 49%. Financial income in line with the guidance that we provided.
I remind you the yield on the cash is lower as a result of lower interest rates, therefore the $10 million. The taxes, you see the breakeven at 0% as the statute of limitations lapses on the provision at Q4. Typically, it's also lapsed this year in line with our expectation, bringing our tax rate in Q4 to a typical around 0%. GAAP net income was $260 million, which is $1.98 per diluted share. Cash flow and cash position. Our cash is at $3.8 billion, very strong. $294 million, our operating cash flow. It represents an increase of 1%. It includes the hedge effect, the balance sheet hedge income of $4 million.
Last year, since the dollar weakened even more, we made a $26 million income in the cash flow. If we exclude the hedge effect, which happens every quarter, the operating cash flow was super strong at 9% growth year-over-year. That's quite significant. During the quarter, we continue our buyback. $325 million were used to buy shares, 2.8 million shares, for an average price of $116. Moving to the full year. We're very pleased with the result of 2021. This just shows our results versus the original guidance from the beginning of the year. We can see the revenues for the year reached $2.167 billion, an increase of 5% year-over-year, $37 million above the midpoint of our guidance.
Looking at our non-GAAP EPS was $7.02, again, above the high end of our guidance, which was $6.85, 17 cents actually above the top of our guidance. A few more details. If we calculate the billings for the full year, we see also a double-digit for the full year, 11%, which is almost $2.4 billion. Deferred revenues, we discussed already, quite strong at 15% at the year-end. When we look at the full year and what caused this success, our focus on Infinity strategy and the three pillars, the Quantum, the CloudGuard, the Harmony, showed great success. Subscription revenues led the growth with 13% growth year-over-year versus last year, that was 10% growth, reaching $755 million. Already, around 35% of our revenues are coming from the subscription.
The growth driven mainly by the success of the CloudGuard and Harmony, both again, double-digit also for the full year. Infinity revenues, which include two or three pillars that we sell to customers, had a great year with a triple-digit growth, which also fuels that growth. Looking at the full P&L, just a few highlights. I don't want to repeat everything, but just a few highlights. Gross margin, strong at 88.7%. Operating expenses increased by 7%. Bear in mind that the majority of the increase in the headcount came towards the end of the year, so the effect on the P&L was at a lower rate, but expect to come more towards next year. Well, in the beginning of next year. The effect on the margin next year just from that item is probably around 1%.
The weakening of the dollar had $20 million effect on the full year. Those results are quite impressive when you take into account that we got a hit of $20 million just from the currency effect. During Q4, the dollar continued to weaken against the shekel, reaching around 3.1, which means that we predict next year a negative effect on our operating margin. Nothing to be concerned about. It always fluctuates, but it's part of the guidance of course, and that's about 1% effect on our operating margin. Still very strong operating margin with 48%, non-GAAP operating margin. Looking at the financial income here, you see the drop again, completely in line with what we expected.
Lower interest rate. The portfolio is invested in lower interest rate than the 2.5% that we used to have historically. We see the lower interest rate. Tax expense ended around 14%, as a result of the index, which was higher than everybody expected for this year. Looking into next year, the guidance remained the same, meaning for the financial income, we expect it to drop. Maybe 1-2 million for the next quarter or two, and that's it. We expect it to stabilize on those levels, around $7 million-$8 million a quarter. Tax is expected to be 17% Q1, Q2, Q3 as we predicted for this year, and around 0% in Q4 for the same reason, assuming there will be no surprises, the statute of limitations lapse in Q4, and will bring us to the 0%.
Average for the year, somewhere between 12%-13%. Of course, this can be 1% more or less. We close the year with a net income, a GAAP net income of $860 million, which is $6.08 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for the year is strong at $942 million, $7.02. We talked about how it is versus the range, 4% growth and $0.17 above the high end of our guidance. When we look at the operating cash flow for the full year, again, very strong cash flow. Operating cash flow was $1 billion, almost $1.2 billion, very much in line with the operating profits. It's nice to see the link that we have between our cash flow and our P&L.
Very untypical, but for us, it's continuous, so that's nice to see. Very strong collection, healthy DSO. Excluding the effect of the hedge and the acquisition-related cost, that is good, 6%, so that's very strong. We purchased about 11 million shares for the full year for $1.3 billion, average price of $109. I'm just reminding you the last quarter we announced the extension of the buyback program in an amount of $2 billion, additional $2 billion, again, up to $325 million for 2022. Next year, we expect the average diluted share to be somewhere around 127 million shares, starting in 129 million and going down by the year-end to somewhere around 125-126.
That's also the forecast for the number of shares. Moving to the summary. Strong year. Change in the trajectory, which is nice to see. Revenues in the top part of the guidance. CPS exceeded the guidance. Strong billing. Growth across all the focus areas. Harmony, double digits. Cloud double digits. New customers growing nicely. Continue to have strong profitability. Very pleased with the year. With that, I will turn the call over to Gil for his business highlights and insights. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Tal, and I'm very pleased to see everyone here and share, especially as we had this amazing quarter. I really mean that. This was a very unusual quarter. I mean, it was probably our strongest quarter ever, and I'm not just thinking about the external financial results, but about the internal measures that we see internally. Now, every quarter, I usually speak about the last quarter achievement. This presentation, I'm actually going to dedicate primarily to speak about our strategy getting into 2022. We're entering, I mean, on the foothills of this amazing quarter that showed really business growth, real business turnaround in all three pillars, by the way.
In the cloud, in the Harmony, and even some very, very good metrics of our core business, the Quantum Network Security business that's probably contributed a lot of growth last quarter. All the regions, EMEA, APAC, and the Americas showed very good internal metrics. On top of that, we're entering a new year with a renewed strategy, a lot of energy, a lot of investment. What I wanted to do here is share with you the key initiatives with which we start 2022. I mean, that's where we start. I picked here four of our major initiatives, and there will be more. The number one objective, of course, is continue with accelerating our growth.
The next 20 slides will go into each of these four initiatives with a new message, new logo, new branding, which I'll speak about in a second. We are continuing with a lot of innovation, and I think we're starting the year with new products and leapfrogging the industry with unprecedented price performance. We're going to create a new structure that we call the Check Point Rockets, and I'm going to share and speak about that. Last and not least, continuing and growing our investment in our frontline sales force. Our internal goal, which I hope we'll be able to make, is grow the frontline salespeople by 25%, supporting more customers, reaching more customers, and of course, delivering growth this year.
Mainly, actually, this investment will translate into results, hopefully by the end of 2022 and in 2023. Let me start with the first message or the first initiative here. Our new positioning, our new branding, Best Security. Now, Best Security, by the way, has always been the Check Point differentiator. I think that's our reputation. That's what we do, it's what we do for 29 years, delivering the best security. One of the things that's very, very important is to show that message and to explain it to everyone, understanding why it's so important.
You see here, we start the year with a fresh new look, new logo, and a new message that says, "You deserve the best security." First time in 29 years that we changed the logo, and I think so far it's being accepted with a lot of enthusiasm, showing all the new energy. The most important message is understanding why is that so important. I think we know it. I don't need to go too deep, too much into that, how much we're dependent on the Internet, how much we're dependent on cyberspace, and we need to keep it secure. I think the latest attacks that we've seen on ransomware, the Log4j vulnerability. All showed us how important it is. When it comes to cybersecurity, you can't get good enough, you can't get second best. That will get you breached.
You know, when you drive a car, you can say, "I want to pick brand A, brand B, brand C, each one have its qualities, different prices, different positioning." At the end of the day, all three cars will get you to your destination roughly at the same time, roughly at the same shape. In cybersecurity, that's not the case. If you pick second-best security, you will get breached. If there is one small thing that's open or like almost our entire industry does, letting zero-day infected file come through. If you let these files come through, that's where you'll get the ransomware. With Check Point, that's the small difference, which is actually huge, you won't get breached because we won't let these files through. There's many, many examples of how we deliver this best security.
We believe that there's only one vendor that delivers the best security to protect against all these fifth-generation cyberattack, and that's us at Check Point. Again, I can take now two hours, and by the way, you can register to our Check Point Experience, CPX 360 conference that just ended today, watch the presentation and understand better why. I will try to summarize some of the differences even in one slide. It's all based on our Infinity architecture. Now, if you've seen this slide before, the Quantum, CloudGuard, and Harmony Network, Cloud, User, and Access, all based on the same platform, all working together, all threat-centric, translating each information piece about a vulnerability to an immediate protection on all the different pillars. When you see what it means, that's when you see the security coverage that we provide in Check Point.
If you look at the different attack vectors, mobile devices, network attacks, email, the number one vector in which malware gets in, web servers, also, I mean, can't underestimate their importance, endpoint devices, the cloud. I think here are some of the best players in the marketplace. Some of them are our direct competitors, some of them are not our direct competitors. You can see that no one comes even close to give you the full coverage and the full spectrum of prevention and protection against all these types of attacks. Now, let's see at the Check Point Infinity, and you can see full coverage to mobile, full to network attacks, including zero-day for unknown and prevention for unknown, corporate email, web servers, endpoint devices where we score amazing results and amazing scores on every review and every test, and cloud, which we just expanded.
Only Check Point Infinity can actually deliver that, and that makes the whole difference between being penetrated or preventing the attack. I think that's the message that we want to convey. We want to get our customers secure. We feel that each one of your organization and each customer deserves the best security, and we are here to deliver that. I think you can see that in this expansion. If a few years ago, we were known to be the network security company, and we were scoring now for 22 years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for firewall in the leaders quadrant. This one is actually a different vendor, G2, which captures audience, customers feedback, real feedback about product. You see, we're not just scoring now in the network security or in the firewall sector, we are scoring in nine categories.
We are leading in nine categories, all coming. You see, by the way, in many of these categories, there is more than one Check Point technology in the leaders quadrant. We are capturing, and we are leading in the entire Infinity architecture framework, securing the entire enterprise. I think that's a huge difference. Customers love Check Point, and our leadership now extended into all these areas, cloud, endpoint, mobile, management, intrusion prevention, remote access, firewalling, everything. I think we use that, and we continue to use that to drive innovation. Now, of course, if I would give you our roadmap, that would be another two hours. I want to point here one important product that we just launched at the beginning of 2022 that can change the dynamics of our industry.
I think it's one of the most important, if not the most important, network security product launch in the last decade. Let me talk a little bit about that. We call it Quantum LightSpeed. Focusing on the data center, focusing on where data moves very, very fast, where people need super fast, low latency data security. Here we're going to introduce the world's fastest data center firewall, 20 times better in security price performance than before and much better than the competition. If you try to see where the markets were until now, again, the car analogy, and you can see the three leading vendors here, and you can see the differences. With Palo Alto, you would get for roughly $200,000, 58 Gbps.
Check Point before, much better, 78 gigabits per second at almost $140,000. You can see how Fortinet gives almost three times better performance, almost 200 gigabits at $40K. Huge difference, I think that's what Fortinet built itself on this huge gap in price performance that they can deliver. We are going to change that and change the dynamics in our marketplace and say that you don't need to compromise with the new Quantum LightSpeed. That's where LightSpeed would come in. 250 gigabits, $45K. That's by the way, the low-end model, that's not the highest end here. 20% better than Fortinet, 20 times better than Palo Alto. That's unbelievable.
That's a lot of work done by our development team, and for the first time, utilizing ASICs in our core products to accelerate this firewalling performance. First time for Check Point, we've partnered with NVIDIA, the world's most successful ASIC providers these days, to deliver this super high performance. Our product line for Quantum LightSpeed is four models from 250 gigabits to 800 gigabits. Hyper fast throughput, ultra-low latency, less than three microseconds. It's 10 times faster, before it was 30 microseconds. Scalability with Maestro up to three terabits per second. No one in the industry actually can deliver that kind of scalability and that kind of price performance. We are very, very proud of that. We think that can change the dynamics, at least in the data center part of the network security industry.
That's, I think, a very good place to start the year with. Then we move to our next initiative, and we call it Rockets. What are Rockets? Rockets will be kind of new types of internal organization, what we want to drive and invest in places that are strategic, what we feel that there's a high potential for growth. We want to focus with agility and growth. We want to align all the resources. If in the past, Check Point was a very unified company, everything is together, one R&D, one sales organization, one marketing. We want to create new structures that will reside within that have the ability to move very fast.
Developers tied with marketing, tied with sales, to drive growth in all these areas, and to be able to invest much more and much faster in key areas. It's not the entire business is moving to this direction, we are trying a new model here. We start with three areas: cloud, which is a big area for us, hundreds of people. Harmony Email, that's an emerging market, very important one based on the acquisition that we did recently. A new one that I won't spend too much time here, maybe next time, MDR, MPR, Managed Detection and Response, or the way I would like to call it, Managed Prevention. This is kind of automatically managing the customer assets. We detect things that are not working and immediately prevent the attacks.
I think we can create here a new industry or take on a new industry that we've even been playing in before. This is a small startup which starts from few people and no revenues. Again, the Harmony Email is tens of millions of dollars, and the CloudGuard is over $100 million. Each one trying a different model in different way to try this new model. Let me focus a little bit on the CloudGuard Rocket. I think we're very proud of what CloudGuard delivered today. Our preemptive prevention was the only one that handled Log4j before it was known. I mean, once we've seen attack on Log4j, without a signature, without the attack being known, our AI technology blocked it. That's based on new CloudGuard technology, CloudGuard AppSec introduced around a year ago, exactly the right time, exactly the right place.
The technology that protects APIs and web servers really blocked Log4j before it was even known. This is one example about how our CloudGuard Rocket is being able to address so many areas. You can see the list of them, workload, posture management, the AppSec, the network in the cloud, a lot of threat intelligence, and we continue to expand that. We continue that with the fifth acquisition in recent years, and that's expanding our cloud presence to what we call code security or developers-first security. That's a new area that puts inside the new type of customers for us, developers by developers. I think it has a lot to do with the challenges that code in the cloud has. Now, we found this company, Spectral. It's a small startup.
We really fell in love in the platform and the technology, and we felt it has wide range of use cases that we can go into because it's such a good technology to analyze the cloud code, scan the infrastructure code, look at code tampering prevention, and maybe the first application, which we call secrets prevention, something we may understand, even us that are less developers these days. For example, if you leave the keys to your application or to your safe box on your desk at the office, the chances of somebody taking advantage of this are very slim. It's a mistake. You shouldn't leave the key written on your desk, or the physical key on your desk. But again, the office is isolated and protected in many layers, so nothing will happen. In the cloud, it's completely the opposite.
A developer puts a secret key that enables access to the other application inside the source code. That source code is being shared on public repositories, and within minutes, there will be a bot that will scan the network, will find the key, and will take over our servers. We see it, again, a lot in the cloud. We know how to detect that, we know how to block it, and the developers that will use it can install that in few minutes, and within seconds, get very accurate results and block that. We are also getting into that with a nice open source community. There's over 30,000 downloads of the Spectral open source version of the product.
I think this is great because it lets us play into a new audience, not only the CISOs and the security administrators will support us, but we can get to the developers from the time they start developing the code. We are very happy with this acquisition that we just announced and completed this week. To summarize, and again, there is many much more that I can speak of because we do so much more in all the aspects of the business. We're entering 2022 with a lot of energy based on our accelerated results from Q4, 14% billing growth, which is a great number. Again, I wouldn't share it. I mean, the billing you can calculate, and you do calculate on your own.
I think this time it's really an indicator to a lot of the internal things that we see in the company, which a lot of the internal indicators, strong financial, double-digit billing growth. We're accelerating our innovation. Two examples that I just talked about, LightSpeed and Cloud Code Security. We are going to accelerate our investment. You know, it would be very easy to say, "This is our growth rate. We will keep doing that. We will keep monitoring resources and delivering and get our profit margin to go to the sky." We have the highest profit margin in the industry, and we decided to actually take the money that we make and invest all the excess one and make the right investment in growing further and changing the mode of operating, of operation into high growth.
We are going to expand the sales force. I mentioned that 25% is our internal goal. Check Point Rockets when we can make very focused investments in the growth areas. I think we really think that our business can grow faster. It's not going to be easy. It will take time for all the initiatives to show the results. We are more optimistic than ever about what we think we can deliver here. Before I open the call to your questions, that's the time for a projection. I think I already stated some of the assumptions that we have in the projections. We feel that our billing can keep growing and growing at a nice rate. Our internal goals are definitely for double-digit growth.
Not all of that will translate immediately into revenues, partly because we are growing the subscription part of our business and the deferred revenues, partly because there is risks associated with the supply chain and others that may slow us down on some things. Even the introduction of Quantum LightSpeed, which is great because it can enable us to capture new markets and new market share, has some risks in it. Let's not forget that. Because when we are bringing to the market 10-20 times better price performance, where it can also be price cannibalization that can hit us right away. Again, that's the right thing to do, to capture the market and to win in these segments. We will be a little bit more...
I mean, the translation of the billings to booking may be a little bit more conservative, but we feel that we can drive very nice growth in the revenues as well, much faster than we projected in the past, of course, and we will invest a lot in the business. If we start with that, let's look at the projection for the full year. For the full year, we actually have here quite a wide range, again based on everything I just said, plus the uncertainty about the economy that we are seeing every day. Between $2.2 billion-$2.375 billion, that's the range for the revenue. If you translate that's a 6% growth target at the midpoint and 10% growth at the high end.
I mean, as you know, my regular caveat, projecting the future is very challenging. There's always a high level of uncertainty. Again, there's the potential of better results or even worse results in our projections. I hope it's to the better part, but you can never know. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be between the range of $6.90 to $7.50. GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately $1.22 less than that. That's for the full year. For the quarter, the range for the revenues is expected to be between $517 million to $547 million. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be between $0.48 to $0.58. GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately 32 cents less.
That's kind of conclude our presentation, and we'd very much love to hear your questions. Who's going first?
Well, we're waiting for Kip. He's probably gonna do that.
My apologies for that. Please, everyone that's going to be asking a question, don't raise your hand. We already have a list, and you'll be selected. I will call out your name and also call out the person who's in the hole. Please limit your question to one so we can get as many of the panelists in for Q&A as possible. Our first question is gonna come from Patrick Colville of Deutsche Bank and will be followed by Gregg Moskowitz from Mizuho.
Thank you, Kip. Thank you for having me on. I mean, congratulations on a really excellent set of results. I guess the standout was, you know, the guidance you just gave, very impressive, no doubt. Can you just kind of pick apart the factors behind that? You know, I guess the contributing factors are probably the cybersecurity spending environment, the product mix and suites.
Any changes around pricing. Can you just kind of give us some color around, you know, how those factors are playing into that guidance?
Tal, that's for you.
I'll say the following: We came into the year with the expectation of 3%, but we have seen through the year an acceleration. If you look at the billing, both short-term and long-term, but even if you look at the short term, we see billing growing, so it's starting to translate into the P&L. We start to see our revenues increasing from 3% to 3.5% to 4% to 4.5% to 5%, even higher in Q4. We came in more optimistic because we see a really nice business. You see in the revenues, that's why I talked about it, that some regions look weaker than the other, but actually billing, the three of them finished strong.
Hopefully it's an indication that we're starting to see the results of some of our investment. We invest in CloudGuard and in Harmony. While it's starting from small numbers, it's starting to have also an effect on our revenues. That's nice to see that as well. Taking all of that into account, we feel that the midpoint's moving up to the area of that, whatever it was there, 6%, right? That's the beginning point. The range, you take into account, and that's something very hard to calculate, and I think Gil was very open about it. How much each risk translates, very hard to know. We do know that we're going into a year that there's higher risk when it comes to the supply chain, because we see like Q2, Q3, Q4, we see more and more issues.
We solved all of them. We're working on them daily, closing items, new problems opening, solving them. It's a very fast run with the shortages. We assume it will continue probably the first half of the year and start to elevate towards the second half. I'm not sure it will happen, but I'm hoping it will happen. That's relating to the shortages. Macroeconomic, I don't know what will happen. I hope it will continue to be strong. COVID, travel is going back. More and more people travel. How much it will affect, we took an assumption midpoint. We didn't assume a full return to 2019 level. We assume stronger levels of travel than this year, hopefully, but we don't know. We see different waves showing up in different regions with different reaction. Travel is somewhere in the middle.
Currency, we took the current rates. If it will change dramatically, I'm not talking only about the expenses, it also change customers' behavior with their budget. I'm assuming that what we know right now about the currency will stay, so it affects the expenses, but hopefully no effect on the revenues. The assumption there is no additional shift there. Growth in the CloudGuard, growth in Harmony, growth in Infinity, definitely part of the assumptions there. I hope that answer your question.
Yeah. I mean, that's excellent. Thank you so much.
All right, next up we have Gregg Moskowitz from Mizuho, followed by Adam Tindle of Raymond James.
All right. Thank you, Kip. Nice to see the great results. Just terrific to see the improved growth and execution at Check Point. I have two related questions, if I may. So, you know, from what we've heard, some of your competitors are also doing pretty well. And I guess my question for you, Gil, is, within network security, is there anything that you can pinpoint that perhaps is driving stronger demand? And then, you know, for Check Point specifically, I believe you said that internally you're expecting double-digit billings growth for 2022. Now, obviously there's a sales productivity ramp, but my question there is how reliant is your growth projection on your ability to expand your frontline sales force by 25% this year?
That's an excellent question. First, I mean, I think that many of the initial numbers that we enter are based on the existing sales force, but we're pushing very, very hard for the sales force to hire fast and actually even hire at the beginning of the year. Usually, when we say 25% growth or 5% growth, we do that growth along the year. This one, my message to the sales force is, hire sales people as fast as you can in the first quarter. Again, I'm not sure if it will be able to make it. It's hard to recruit people these days, and such growth is not a trivial growth to an organization our size, but still that's the message. I think if everything works, we are set to very nice numbers, but I think not everything will work.
I think we won't be able to recruit all the people. They won't all be productive. But I think that we can get to the numbers that we've set, to the range that we've put in based on what we have now and based on the productivity we have now. That's kind of the general. I can tell you, we just finished our CPX conference. CPX conference is for customers, partners, and employees. We had three in APAC, in Europe, and in the Americas. Today, the European one is going to end, and it went very, very well. 25% increase in attendees, excellent scores, excellent feedback, excellent energy. I think we're starting the year on the right track.
Thank you.
If I can highlight for everybody also, if you'd like to see the CPX event, you can actually sign up and register, and we'll have video on demand. Next up we have Adam Tindle, followed by Gray Powell from BTIG. Go ahead, Adam.
All right. Thanks, Kip. Just a clarification for Tal, and then a question for Gil. Tal, sixth consecutive quarter with accelerated billings. You're now approaching mid-teens growth in the billings metric. Just wanna dispel any skepticism there. You've talked before how billings can be impacted by duration. Was there anything notable in the quarter on that? I think you also implemented some price increases here in the early part of 2022. Any sense of pull-forward in Q4 ahead of that price increase based on what you're seeing here for billings trends in early February? Gil, if you could just talk about that broader decision for price increases and any customer or partner response based on your conversations. Thanks.
Okay. That was a long question. I'm not sure I remember it, but I'll try. First on the billing. The billing was strong. You can see also when you calculate the short-term billing, you see a double-digit growth, right? I think it was 10 or 11%, which is also an acceleration from, I think, 6% last quarter. I can find the numbers, but you can calculate them. The growth is, if you look total billing or even short-term billing, you see that it's good. Even if some of it came from 1T, which it always does, you can see that it's accelerated also in the short term. Long term is a good phenomenon.
It's not the focus, but it's a good phenomenon because customers are going with you for the long run, so that's always good, but both of them increased. The second part of the question, I don't remember. If there was maybe an effect on the price increase. Remember, we sell to the distributors, they will sell to the end users. It's very hard to know what caused the billing. I would say probably there was an effect. I don't think it was hundreds of millions, right? It might have been maybe $10 million. Yeah. That probably was some effect of the trying to avoid increasing the pricing.
Remember that our price increases would start from January first. Again, the impact is that maybe some of the people did the purchases or the renewals a little bit earlier. Again, I think we wouldn't be proud of the billing growth unless we felt it's meaningful. Let me put it that way. As you know, every quarter, we're trying to play down the billing number because again, in many cases, it doesn't represent. This quarter, I think we've seen some very good indicators, so we're not just showing these numbers because they are impressive, but because at least last quarter, I don't know if you predict the next quarter, but last quarter, we've seen very good internal metrics.
Thank you.
All right, next up, we have Gray Powell from BTIG, followed by Matthew Hedberg from RBC.
Hi, great. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the good numbers. Yeah. How should we think about the upsell opportunity with Avanan? Did that acquisition contribute meaningfully to the improved billings growth in Q4? Just, you know, how should we think about that acquisition in the context of your 2022 outlook?
Just look at the total number now. They had an effect, but very small one. Of course, it's a very small company, but we definitely believe in them and believe that they will grow significantly next year. That's why Gil said we announce it as one of our rockets, the Harmony Email Security. They are a major part of it. Also, we consolidated it, of course, with Check Point Email Security. We believe it's a fast-growing, we want to invest in it. If anything, it actually increased our investment, which is different profit profile than Check Point, which is part of the margin plan for next year, because we want to invest in it as we believe it's a very nice and fast-growing market.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Next up is Matthew Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets, followed by Sterling Auty of JP Morgan.
Hey, thanks a lot, Kip. Congrats guys on the results. By the way, I love the new logo and branding. It's great. You know, Gil, what really stood out to me is the 25% sales force growth expectation. I'm curious, yeah, how does that relate to maybe prior targets that you've had? Because it seems like it's a substantial uptick from what you've done historically. Then, you know, can you talk about the challenge of finding good sales talent these days? And is that maybe an inhibiting factor as well? The number, the target looks really strong.
First, it's you're right. It's much, much bigger than what we had before. In the last few years, the numbers were all single digit growth, and in many cases we didn't achieve them. Some of them, we didn't achieve them because we weren't investing, and some of them because the general tendency of the sales force is actually, you know, the salespeople, they like to, you know, keep their territories very big, so they keep the opportunity for themselves. And if they got the budget for hiring, they like to hiring support people that will help them. Over the last few years, if I actually analyzed our growth in the sales, big parts of it came in the form of creating overlays that can support our strategic products and more technical help to the salespeople.
In some areas, particularly in Americas, we almost didn't increase the capacity, the salespeople. We need more salespeople. This investment is not just an investment. It's a big change internally in the mindset of people. Yes, we want to go and attack. Yes, we want to go and find new customers. Yes, we want to go and serve our big customers, and not only the big customers in all segments better. It's a big change internally. I think it's doable. I think the target I've set for the people is that they can hire all the people in the first quarter. I don't think that we will necessarily achieve all of that in the first quarter. I think there are good people. Many people do want to work for Check Point.
They understand that sometimes working for another company, I mean, there's a lot of promise, for example, working for many startups, but on the other hand, trying to build your reputation and you know, establish yourself in the marketplace is not as easy as it sounds. I think that we do have a good cadence. We do have a good pipeline of salespeople. It will probably take us some time to hire that, but I think the change should be meaningful. Some of it this year, some of it we may realize this year, and a lot of it next year.
Thank you.
Thanks, Matthew. Next up is Sterling Auty from JPM organ, followed by Joel P. Fishbein Jr. from Truist Securities.
I want a full name like that, Kip. Thanks, guys. Tal, can you help us? I wasn't completely clear. What was the magnitude of the price actions that you took?
was instituted during the December quarter, what was instituted after, and how should we think about that, impacting the gross margins in light of the EPS guidance that you gave?
Actually included as part of that, right. Let's talk about it one second. First, the price increase was announced in December or maybe in October for the beginning of 2022. That's one.
There was no price increase in the fourth quarter. This starts on January first, just to be clear.
Yeah. That's one. Secondly, we didn't do an increase. I know how many people increased significantly more. We increased, I think, only 7%, so it's not a huge increase. That's part of the next year. You will start to see that, and that's why to the question, maybe some of them put it before. It's not like 30% more increase. It might have shifted the millions, but not. That's why I said don't expect it to be $50-$60 million increase, right? It might have been $10 million, right? Just throwing an expectation. But it's very hard to know. For next year guidance, we took into account everything. On the one hand, you have that. On the other hand, you have price competition is regular.
You have LightSpeed, which might pull the ASP actually down, and you have the higher costs. The increase in the cost is higher than 7%, so it's included as part of the margin, right?
Got it. All right. Thank you.
All right. Our next caller is from Joel P. Fishbein Jr., and then it'll be followed by Philip Winslow from Credit Suisse.
Thanks, Kip. Gil, just one for you. Log4j has made a lot of noise, but we really haven't seen a lot of breaches, you know, from it right now. What do you think the potential impact is of that for the overall market? Also, you know, you hit on it a little bit in your prepared remarks, but I'd love to hear how that could be a accelerator for you guys to your overall results.
We are not relying on any specific breach, you know, as an accelerator for our growth, but it will have an effect on the market. It's one of the most challenging vulnerabilities ever found, not only because it's easy. For two reasons. First, it's easy to exploit. Second, it's on interfaces that are open. Many vulnerabilities are on interfaces that are behind closed doors, that are internal to the data center, but there is a higher level of protection. But Log4j is almost on every web server and many web services out there, and it's really easy to exploit. One string causes a remote code execution. So that's the worst part. Now, I think the industry created a lot. And by the way, that's evident. Usually, you know, you see vulnerabilities every day. We see that inside the industry.
The most of them, you don't find an exploit. Maybe there are exploits that are being used rarely, so we don't see them, but you don't see the exploits. In Log4j, within 48 hours, we saw, like, 60 different variants of exploitations. It was very, very easy to understand how to use that to attack systems. I think that enterprises around the world did the right thing and patched it and tried to fix things and so on, and that's great. I think there remain tens of millions of servers out there that nobody touched because nobody knows that they're there, because nobody's managing, or nobody in the handling. They will be the source of infections for probably many years. Because again, the attackers are not just on day one.
On day one, they showed that they know how to do it, but. Maybe I'll explain. When you look at the attack, there's multiple steps. There's a model, the MITRE model, which shows how it works. First is collecting intelligence, second is finding the entry point, and then infecting it with the malicious, the malware. This is the new entry point. It's an easy entry point, and this can be used in the future by many hacking groups, whether it's by many criminals, and I'm sure it will be used, and it will have impact on the industry.
Thank you.
All right. Our next question is from Philip Winslow, followed by Jonathan Ho of William Blair & Company.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Great to see y'all are doing well. Gil, a question for you on cloud security. If you think about the commentary we've seen from the hyperscalers in the past couple quarters, it was accelerating shift of workloads to the cloud, but also just the mission criticality of the workloads that are shifting, not just to a single cloud, but multiple clouds. When you think about the impact of that to Check Point and just sort of call it attach rates of security in the cloud, what are you hearing from customers? Maybe if you give us just more color on CloudGuard in particular, that'd be great.
I think cloud security is very high priority for every customer. We see that every conference or every interaction. It's not a giant industry at the moment, and it's unclear, by the way, how it will shake up. There is plenty of startups that are targeting it from multiple directions. The big cloud providers, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are investing in that. I think we shouldn't be blind to that. They are investing in creating on top of that. By the way, that's one of the big confusions. The big cloud providers are investing in making and are doing good job in making their platform secure. They're not usually taking care of the customer application. That's the customer responsibility.
Now they are making investment in securing the whole thing and making security also part of their business, even in some cases in multi-cloud environments, 'cause one of the arguments for our industry is that we will deal with everything. There is investment there. I think it still remains a very important area for us to protect, a very important opportunity in the marketplace. How it will shake up, I still don't know. I mean, we've seen markets that have taken. I mean, I'll give you another example. Mobile security is a good example of a market that I think for me, it's evident that people will need to invest, but companies are not investing in mobile security enough. I think that cloud will change that because the structural impact of that is much, much bigger.
It's not an individual device, it's the whole company, it's the whole assets. I think the benefits of Check Point remain very important. The fact that we are connecting the private cloud to the public cloud, the fact that we are connecting all the different elements, but it's still a very interesting and a very challenging market. I mean, we'll continue to invest in that, and I think we're expecting some good evolution in that marketplace.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Philip. Last question is gonna come from Jonathan Ho of William Blair. Go ahead, Jonathan.
Thank you for squeezing me in, and let me echo my congratulations as well on a strong quarter. You know, I wanted to touch on sort of the LightSpeed comments around cannibalization that you made. You know, one thing I did wanna understand a little bit better is that I don't think I've ever seen Check Point play the sort of price performance game. You know, does this sort of shift signal a shift in your own strategy going forward? You know, how do you think about the potential impact just given that the ratio dramatically changes with something like LightSpeed? Thank you.
First we've been competing in that, and not necessarily on our release price, but we have been very competitive. By the way, we win many of the big data centers, especially of the big financials, when we compete head to head with the other companies that are making price performance their only business. I think that's the reason that we feel the light speed can change these dynamics. Again, there is some risk, and we've put in place the measures to try and contain it for cannibalization. Because, again, when you sell 10 times more or 20, 10 to 20 times more performance for the same price or for a much lower price, it can change the behavior. I think overall it's the right move for us, and we want to win that.
Let's put it that way. The opportunity in the data center is far bigger today than, for example, cloud security. In five years from now, I don't know, but in 2022, the data center market is bigger than the cloud security market. It's a market that's ours. You know, we know the customers, they love us, they use us, and so on. Expanding our market share in the data center is an important opportunity.
All right, guys. Thank you very much. We appreciate you attending today. We'll look forward to speaking with you after the call and in the coming days and weeks. Again, if you guys would like to revisit CPX, go ahead and sign up. We have it on video on demand for those of you that missed it. We'll see you in the coming weeks. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.