Good morning. We are going to kick it off day two of.
I got to do the safe harbor. Remember that.
Day two of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. Real pleasure to be here with my colleague, Max Gamperl, on stage.
Oh, what attribute are you You want me to do attribute?
Unparalleled.
Oh. Oh my gosh.
Lovely to have you. Thank you-
Oh, thank you.
For coming every year. It's really good to have you.
Yeah. It's so nice to see Max grow up over time, right? When I first saw him, he was such a little boy.
He's a couple inches taller, too. It's all the pushups and the pull-ups.
Are you sure it's not lifts? I'm sorry, no.
It's-
All the lifts I'm sorry.
More like blood, sweat and tears.
Yeah. It's all the abuse Max gets.
Um-
Let me jump into safe harbor real quick.
Please. Yeah.
During the course of the presentation, there may be forward-looking statements. As with all forward-looking statements, there are risks and uncertainties, and if you would like to bore yourself to sleep, read the comprehensive evaluation of them in our 20-F. As with all forward-looking statements, we only have a duty to update where required by law. Back to you.
Kip, the last couple of years, we have talked about Nadav, and Nadav specifically on his ability to sell into the C-suite.
Right at the same time, I would argue this year, it has become even more important to present a holistic vision for the future. Talk to us a little bit about how that is going, and I want to sort of contrast that with some of the sales changes that you have announced recently, and try to tie the two together.
Great. I think when you look at the selling into the C-suite, I think first of all, one of the things we did is we created our four pillars and started to communicate that right off the bat when Nadav came on board. We also moved to something we called Engage, and we did these around the world. They are engaging C-level folks. When you say how is it going from a C-level approach of sales? I think if you look at our results, it does not appear to be so well, but I think on the relationship-building side and building for the future, I think we are making lots of progress. From that standpoint, I think we definitely have a CEO that is an active seller from the standpoint of engaging companies, engaging the channel. I hear it from people that look and speak to the channel.
They say, "This is the first time I've spoken to the CEO of Check Point, and I've actually spoken to him twice in the same year." It's one of those things where it's nice to hear. It's the contrast from the past, which kind of alludes to where we are today. From there, I think you saw us go into a planning stage at the end of last year that delivered the plan for our go-to-market changes this year. It doesn't show up in the numbers yet, but I think all of this should lead to, including Nadav's activities in the future, should lead to a much more prosperous future for us.
If I were to think through, and this is a question that we get from investors, the evolution of a sales organization within a company, there's a natural evolution for any sales organization in any company. The number of times that Check Point has tweaked the sales organization just in the past three years, talk to us a little bit about what's different this time. How much of it is just a natural evolution? How much of it is a reflection with Nadav on the strengths and weaknesses of the sales org up until this point? Put it in context for us a little bit.
I think changes in the past were patchwork. In other words, they were done to meet an individual need at that time. I think what's been done through planning through last year, implemented this year as a result of expectations for AI spend in the future was done in a very deliberate way, in a way that is focused on two things: growing our logos in the Global 2000, Fortune 500 or S&P 500, however you'd want to look at it, and then also building or expanding within our install base. I would say we were asking in the past, they did it in different ways, but we were asking our salespeople to do too much. Remember, salespeople, they're coin operated, right? Whatever you incent them to do, they're going to chase.
When we incented them to go after new logos, that meant they didn't do as much refresh, especially if the same person was doing both. I think that became very evident, especially last year. That's where we moved to the new, a very distinct bifurcation between reducing the amount of accounts an individual account manager has, and their whole focus is just upselling and cross-selling into those accounts. Then we have a new customer success organization that is also part of making sure that those customers achieve success, that they're not left wondering or in a way that they have to ask for help. They actually receive it before they need to ask. Then the establishment of true hunters. I think in the past, we did something that was probably not consistent with success, and that was look at everybody on a one-year basis.
I don't think we were the highest payers when it came to hunters. Now we're able to recruit people that are more seasoned, the kind of guys that can come and make a difference, and we're paying market rates and we're giving them a two-year plan. It's not like, what have you done for me lately after a year, when a big account can take 12-18 months to actually bring over the line. I think these are the changes and obviously anytime you have changes that are this dramatic, which they truly are, and the amount of people we're hiring going forward, 300, a net 150, that's more towards next year. It's not this year. We're not expecting them to produce by December, right?
This is all planning for the future and who we have out there right now, we expect them to be active and be delivering. Different people are at different stages, but the majority of those guys should. It was more about settling into their accounts and getting to know them rather than know what they're doing. That's where we are in this year, and it's been a struggle. Let's face it, did it go as we'd liked it? No. The real truth is, we had originally planned this to be done in 2027. We weren't going to implement it this year, but it became very evident that the planning right now is taking place for AI, and next year is where the spend's going to come, and we didn't want to be in the middle of a go-to-market change when you're going to have such a robust environment.
We wanted to make sure that was done ahead of time, and that's the rush to deliver our go-to-market, and unfortunately, you take the pains that come with it.
As an analyst, we can sometimes have some limited amount of success trying to predict when the sales hiring ramp happens, and then adding six to nine to 12 months to predict when the productivity ramp is going to happen. Any breadcrumbs you can give us as part of that analysis to be able to say, "Okay, it's roughly in this period of time where we should be able to step back and say, 'Wow, Check Point's really executing on all cylinders with the sales productivity.'
I think there's a couple things. I think one, for you guys, you guys always love fair compares, right? You enter next year with a much more favorable comparison than you do from the year before. I would say, our hires that are being done right now, you're probably looking throughout the year, they'll have different elements of delivery, but I think the people that we've moved, put into position this year, I would expect to see the fruits from that as early as the fourth quarter, but really the first quarter and beyond. I'm not trying to say that 2026 is. It's a 2027 story. We have guidance for the year and everything else, but I don't think anybody's banking on 2026 as being all of a sudden we're going to deliver 6% growth for the full year.
It's not realistic, and so I think when people look at it, they look at how are they setting themselves up for next year, and I think that's really the right way to think about it.
One of the dynamics with setting us up for next year is how to think about margins.
The margin framework, when I ask you this question annually, you will tell me that, "Well, let's see where 4Q ends, and then here's how we think about-
There's a lot of truth to that.
The moving pieces for 2027." My question to you is, look, there's always going to be, when you're investing for growth, because the salespeople take time to ramp, there's going to be a step backwards before the step forwards.
I would say there's a couple things when it comes to margin. One, we're in the middle of our planning stage right now, just like everybody else, and as well, you know how the math goes, right? You got to know what the revenue is, and you got to know what the expenses are before you can actually calculate that margin. From that standpoint, I would say, look, we're in the planning stage. I think there's some obvious things that you can look at, and one is probably one of the biggest impacts to us exogenously is the shekel-dollar reflection. Between now and the end of the year, there can be a lot of movement there. There's two competing forces. I think you have things before Congress that would allow the IDF military budget to be incorporated into the U.S. military budget.
We'll see if that passes or not. I'm not thinking it does, but I'm not a politician, and I'm surely not clairvoyant. From a U.S. perspective, it certainly looks like there could be a possibility of rate hikes. So whichever way those go, opposing or not opposing, you could have pretty good moves in the shekel and the dollar, respectively. So we'll see how those plan out. I think those are a bigger impact, but I also think from an investment for growth, we've made, I should say our investors have not been shy about it. They want us to invest for growth, and so if we can find acquisitions, we're not beholding to 40% margins. We're past the stage of preserving our margins because no matter where they are, they're still going to be higher than almost any other company out there. We're an efficient organization.
The process that we have throughout the organization has not gone away, the discipline. What I would say is we're getting newfound discipline, which is a selling discipline, a more of a future look, investing for the future rather than the immediate. I would say that around your margin, and you can wait till we give guidance to determine it, but obviously I danced around it in a very nice way.
That's very fair. Let me ask you one more before I pass it to Max on product. 4Q. So your implied 4Q guide bigger than seasonal, I think. You have a stronger qualified pipeline. Tell us a little bit more about the dynamics for 4Q. Are there any other moving pieces that we should be aware of?
Look, I think Roy talked about it on the earnings call. He said, "Look," he says, "the difference between three and four could be one or two big deals that come into third quarter or go to fourth quarter." That really exemplifies it. Remember, once we finish with Q3, we give guidance for Q4. So where people have guidance at the midpoint or whatever for Q4, look, depending on how Q3 goes and depending on what the outlook for Q4 looks like, that can change, right? We don't give guidance for locking in that fourth quarter until the end of the Q3 period. I think when you look at the wall of worry, that's in people's minds. The reality is for the company, we're going to execute on whatever we see in front of us, right? Does that mean it stays right where analysts have it?
I don't know. We'll see. But you got to get to the end of Q3 before you know. Okay. All right. Give it to me, Max.
All right. Let's talk about firewalls and the impact from AI. The underlying driver of firewall demand is network traffic.
No.
There are-
No. Really? Okay.
To some extent. There are two ways that AI drives more network traffic. First, with all the data center build-outs, and second, with agentic traffic going through DMZs. Where are you seeing an opportunity over the medium term for Check Point?
For new firewalls?
To-
Or an AI Network Firewall? How about this?
We'll get to-
How about let's look at what we see today. Right now- we're going through a refresh or the ends of our refresh. The go-to-market probably disrupted that a little bit, so we're not seeing the excesses that we had probably hoped to see in the first six months.
Going into next year, I think you have your natural refresh that happens every year. I think with the advent of AI traffic, as you point out, I think your core data center is going to see an uplift. People are going to think about refreshing early. I think there's opportunities on AI factories, neo clouds, hyperscalers. Last quarter, we saw some contribution from a hyperscaler. We also saw some AI factory. The problem is we don't get to yell at the top of our lungs about AI data centers, which are just data centers. Every data center is going to have AI in it, right?
Nobody's just going to change their data center to an AI data center. Take marketing for what marketing is, right? I appreciate that when you're growing fast, you can yell AI at everything and you're going to win. I appreciate that. But the reality is AI data center is just a data center. If you're talking neo cloud or you're talking AI factory, that's a very different animal. From that standpoint, I expect that Check Point will participate in all of these to differing degrees.
On AI Network Firewalls specifically, what is the customer problem that makes a new firewall category necessary? What does it understand or control that a traditional firewall wasn't designed for?
Obviously, traditional firewalls look at IP addresses, look at different traffic, different ports, et cetera. When you look at what the AI Network Firewall solves, and we've been working on this for a while, we also incorporated all this into our SASE product. We have AI-specific threat prevention engines, and all of that is utilized both from an outbound and an inbound. It looks at prompt injections. It looks at the traffic that travels through normal applications, because that's how AI is going to be used. You not only have to look at that traffic, but you have to look at the AI traffic within it. You're looking at prompt injections, and this is where the protection and prevention approach that Check Point has always offered is manifesting itself in the AI world.
When you look at it, we have a whole AI Defense Plane that spans from protection specifically for AI applications, and this is infused throughout CTEM and our workspace apps also. So the natural evolution is for our firewall also to participate in this. So where that's different is now you're not offloading it to a separate application. You're not allowing it into your environment. If you're using a separate application, you've already allowed it into your environment, so you're allowing it one step further to be able to evade whatever security precautions you've taken. We believe that this is a superior approach, and we offered it in the form of an upgrade to all our customers so they can take existing hardware, upgrade their existing hardware with this software, have these capabilities, and your next question, I'll help you with it, Max.
Yes, that could lead to earlier refresh for our customers as they realize they want to adopt that and deploy it in a more full manner. So that might shorten the life of what they expect from their appliance by buying something that's new and robust to address their future needs. How's that? You can eliminate a question.
Great. I'll move on to the next one.
Oh, actually, I'll sub one in for the one that we just did.
Oh, no. Oh, here we go.
What do you think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to do in security? What do you, as an executive team, think is the right positioning, the right swim lane for a frontier model to complement and potentially compete? How do you prepare potentially for a competition?
I'll talk in a very large focus.
Okay, yeah.
Rather than focus on any one company. If you look at last year when there was the SaaS apocalypse, I was telling people when they would talk to me that, no, it is complementary. You are not going to take a system of record and replace it with somebody who is vibe coding, right? Subsequently, that is what you have seen. You have seen Anthropic engage with Salesforce. You have seen other companies engage with software companies. On the security side, all of a sudden, we went from SaaS apocalypse to security apocalypse, the Mythos moment, as we will say, greatest PR moment in AI history, right? So, it is pretty phenomenal. When you look from an OpenAI standpoint, we are aligned much closer with OpenAI today. We also have a relationship with Anthropic also.
But on the OpenAI side, I would say you can look at our latest announcement and how we are leveraging OpenAI and I can never remember the name of the glass.
Glass thing?
No, that is Anthropic.
Trusted Access.
Trusted Access, yes. From that standpoint, I think complementary. You are not going to take 33 years of knowledge and approach to a market and recreate it just with AI.
No, I fully agree with that. The risk that I think is worth pulling the thread on is not can the frontier models replace security companies.
It is could the incremental share of budget accrue to the frontier models because the incremental risk is tied to code and because frontier models are really good, potentially, at securing code, such that the share of whatever budget incrementally a large financial organization is allocating towards security, instead of going to Check Point and then-
What I think you are saying, let me put it in a house security moment. What you are saying is leave the front door open, but lock the cabinets.
No, I am saying both, but the front door should theoretically already be locked because of 20+ years of Check Point network security.
Yeah, but the difference is now you are in an AI world, and as we demonstrated with the delivery of the AI Network Firewall, you have a different paradigm here. What I would argue is when you talk about applications being exploited by AI and now protecting them with AI, the problem you have is the advancement in AI that we all know about. You do not want to test the application. You want to make that as infrequent as possible. The way you are going to do that is by having the best security at every level. You are also going to be protecting applications with prompt injection, runtime, et cetera. You have got to protect from all those things because take, for instance, our game. It used to be called Gandalf until we got sued by the Lord of the Rings, and now it is called Gauntlet.
Seven levels of hell, which every high-functioning individual with a low personality probably plays this game, and no offense is there, but it is amazing. I break my brain trying to play it. But we have 1.2 million users over the course of 4.5 years. The intelligence that this brings, it is not what you know today, it is what you do not know tomorrow, and that is what you are protecting for. You do not want to give AI a chance to test what you have done with an application. You want to give every chance you can to prevent that from occurring. So I would say at every level, I think security becomes more important from all stages, because AI is a journey through an organization.
From the applications, you have to be wary of your own agents doing things that are adverse to your company, as we've seen in the frontier models themselves. You not only have to protect from the outside, you have to protect from the inside, because we're talking about something that's learning and does things that are adverse. If you don't govern what they're doing, you may end up with NVIDIA having to buy Hugging Face. Or is that what it's called? Hugging Face. There's dynamics that are occurring that you don't expect from an application you built. It's got a mind of its own. We're talking about today. Imagine where it's going to be in five years. I think from a security standpoint, it becomes even more important with the models getting closer to AGI.
On product revenue, that's been a bit softer than some of your firewall peers, which you acknowledged has to do with the go-to-market changes. But how-
Go-to-market change is in something different, too. Look at my peers. They're coming off of 2021 and 2022 cohorts, and that's what you're seeing for the refresh. Remember, they didn't have the best refreshes last year. They're coming off of 2021 and 2022, and in 2023, they fell on their face. For us, we're a little earlier, and you're seeing us refresh those. It usually goes hand in hand when you deliver new boxes. You deliver new boxes, that excites people. There's usually a little lag as they bench test them, and then they start adopting. That can last anywheres. You see the bump for anywheres from, who knows, 18 months to a little over two years. Then it goes back to the normal. You see it as a nice normal cadence. I think that can all change with AI.
I think you have a paradigm here that's going to lead to, one, a lot more need for protections, especially the ones that we have in our AI Network Firewall and the rest of our AI Defense Plane. I also think the capacity needs are going to be increasing, too. Whether it's in your data center that you're putting AI into, or whether it be a neo cloud, a hyperscaler who recognizes maybe they're not that great at security and maybe they need to use somebody else that's been doing it for a long time, or your AI factories.
Do you think that unit share trends have changed because of this go-to-market disruption, or do you think the strength is primarily from refresh and there is not a whole lot of change in unit share demand?
Look, at any given time, you're going to see, at the edges, people winning and people losing. Earlier this year, we saw some wins. Last year, we saw some wins. I don't know if we're seeing losses right now or not at the edges, but you're not seeing dramatic changes. What I think you're seeing or will see in the future is the advent of people recognizing the demand function related to AI and AI traffic, which is how we started this conversation.
In a market where customers are consolidating vendors, does losing units, and without saying that you are losing any share, but in a market where customers are consolidating vendors, does losing units make it harder to win the broader account over time?
I think when you look at security, I think there are paradigm changes, right? If we go back to when we first started losing what I would call share back in the 2010 and beyond range, that was because our competitors convinced everybody that they didn't need the best security. They just needed detection and remediation. Because of our founder and our ethos, we always remained focused on protection and prevention. And lo and behold, look, we have an AI moment, and everybody else has figured out that all those critical vulnerabilities and those KEVs and everything else are really not great for business. And you hear people complain about token costs. Well, when you have so much repair to do and off of so many different disparate code bases, I imagine you're paying a lot on those tokens.
I think the difference is in an AI world, you are going to recognize really quickly, and maybe when I say really quickly, we are talking over the next one to five years. It will come at varying degrees for different corporations. But they are going to recognize what security is and what security isn't. Security isn't great marketing, great sales. Security is really definable in an AI world because you are either losing intellectual property, you are either having your business disrupted or you are not. I think those defining factors will decide who gets more uptake of their units and who doesn't. In the near term, I don't think it's really something that's going to distinguish the future. I think what's going to distinguish the future is who has the best security.
The challenge with the industry is that it's always been a combination of both. It frustrates us to no end where the best product in security actually doesn't always win. You can have products that are on par, products that are not as good from a benchmarking standpoint. But when you pair it with the magic of marketing, you end up with market share gains. I guess my question for you, do you think because things are getting more complicated, more sophisticated, the attacks are getting more sophisticated. Do you think it's easier or more straightforward for Check Point to lean on the technology excellence on prevention than it was before?
Let's start with this. Massive attacks that did big damage over the last 15 years. They took millions of dollars to accomplish, and they were very few and far between. So those who claim that detection remediation is all you needed, in a sense, probably were right during that paradigm. Even though people paid a price, they were willing to look past it, right? Because all they did was just buy the next thing they thought would solve that problem. The democratization of attacks has happened. AI, those millions and millions of dollars of attack now take hundreds of dollars. So now the guys on the defense have to be right every time. You've heard this from everybody. It's cliché now. But the outside guys only have to be right once. If you are doing detection remediation, and that's prominently how. Don't worry.
Anybody that was doing detection remediation last year is doing detection remediation today. It hasn't changed. You don't evolve. It's an ethos. It's a discipline. So there's going to be struggles for some time, and maybe marketing and all that will cover it up for a while. But eventually customers are going to recognize what is real and what is not. Time will tell. Look, I'm not trying to be a prognosticator, but AI is the great equalizer because now the guy that was a script kiddie is now using a model that's capable of exploiting some of the most sophisticated infrastructure in the world. So when you look at it from that standpoint, I wouldn't want to be dealing with a bunch of fragmented products, trying to cobble them together to deliver something that is going to provide protection and prevention.
I'd want the guy that just spent the last 32, 33 years focused on doing that. Discipline is a big deal in life. While we need to learn the discipline of sales and marketing, and we're working on that, I think it's easier to learn sales and marketing than it is to deliver a preeminent protection and prevention product.
Gabriela and I have done some work drawing comparison between the early cloud security cycle and the AI security cycle. In cloud security, Check Point ultimately chose to be more selective rather than own the whole CNAPP stack. AI security may be a bigger architectural shift, so how do you decide where Check Point needs to own the technology versus where partnerships is the better answer?
I think in cloud, you are dealing with where data was located and traffic and things like that. For us, we never believed everything was going to the cloud. We always believed it would be hybrid. I'm sure Gabriela can remember those discussions with me because everybody said it was going to the cloud. I said, "Life is-
Yeah, firewalls were dead.
Life is a balance, right?
It's a pendulum.
While we always kept investing in the firewall, right? It's sad but true. All you have to do is wait and things get in vogue again. Right now, the firewall's really in vogue. When I think you look at how we approach the cloud, it had a lot to do with that. We saw a much more firmer approach in the data center, and we believe we didn't have to be everything to everybody. I think what's different with AI is this is something where it's a whole journey, right? It's from applications, it's from code, it's from agents, and you have to address it every step of the way. Sometimes there's going to be partners that it makes more sense to snuggle up to and leverage.
But for the majority of it, as you can see what we're doing right now, we own that transition, that journey of our customers. I think the last piece we added in the firewall kind of puts the stamp on it. You'll see more stuff coming from us. Look, Lakera is only in the beginning, right? When we bought Lakera, it was a design within a very large customer of ours, and that's proceeded to be in other customers and develop other products. You're only touching just the very beginning of it. Look at this, nine, eight, seven. What's your last words, Max?
I would love to sneak one more in, but maybe we will leave it at this.
Okay. Please join me and Max in thanking Kip for his time. Kip.
Thank you.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you, guys.