Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Fortinet second quarter earnings announcement conference call. At this time, all participants lines are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session, and to ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Peter Salkowski. Thank you, and please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Peter Salkowski, Vice President of Investor Relations at Fortinet. I am pleased to welcome everyone to our call to discuss Fortinet's financial results for the second quarter of 2020. Speakers on today's call are Ken Xie, Fortinet's Founder, Chairman, and CEO, and Keith Jensen, our Chief Financial Officer. This is a live call that will be available for replay via webcast on our investor relations website. Ken will begin our call today by providing a high-level perspectives on our business. Keith will review our financial and operating results for the second quarter, provide some additional details regarding our second quarter performance and some insights into how July performed before providing guidance for the third quarter of 2020. We will open the call for questions.
During the Q&A session, we ask that you please keep your questions brief and limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question to allow others to participate. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our SEC filings, particularly the risk factors in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q for more information. All forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. We undertake no obligation and specifically disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements. All references to financial metrics that we make on today's call are non-GAAP unless otherwise stated.
Our GAAP results and GAAP to Non-GAAP reconciliations is located in our earnings press release and in the presentation that accompanies today's remarks, both of which are posted on our investor relations website. Lastly, all references to growth are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. I will now turn the call over to Ken.
Thanks, Peter, and thank you to everyone for joining to this call to review our second quarter 2020 result. We are very pleased with our solid second quarter performance. Revenue increased 18% to $660 million, with product revenue up 12% and service revenue up 22%. Secure SD-WAN climbed to 12% of a total second quarter billings, the first time it's been over 10%. In today's environment, enterprise are focused on effectively and cost efficiently deploying security across their physical and digital network. To meet these challenges, Fortinet was founded on the vision of bringing security and networking together in what we refer to as security-driven networking. Gartner supports a similar concept, which they call Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE. Fortinet is an industry leader in building, integrating, and automating security product and service into a Fortinet Security Fabric, including FortiSASE.
With the recent acquisition of OPAQ Networks, Fortinet has enhanced its FortiSASE solution with expanded cloud delivery, including firewall-as-a-service and zero trust network access. Additionally, FortiSASE was built to be partner friendly, empowering MSPs and big global customers to easily integrate or build FortiSASE platform into their own offerings. A critical component of Fortinet's secure fabric platform is SD-WAN. We recently announced the new FortiGate 80F, which expand our SD-WAN portfolio for branch offices and work from home. The FortiGate 80F, powered by the latest FortiSoC4, can deliver Security Compute Rating as much as 25 times higher than industry average appliance using generic CPUs. According to Gartner worldwide SD-WAN equipment market data for the first quarter of 2020, Fortinet has the highest revenue growth and was the top three for market share.
We attribute this growth to our ability to deliver secure, high performance SD-WAN anywhere from home to the branch to the cloud. Security investment remain a priority for enterprise and service providers, demonstrated by the strong growth of our high-end FortiGate appliance during the last quarter. Today, we released the FortiGate 4400F, the only firewall in the industry capable of securing hyperscale data center and 5G networks. Powered by the NP7 network processor, the 4400F delivers the highest performance with Security Compute Rating of up to 13x higher than our competition. The release of our several new appliance powered by our latest FortiASIC SPU together with cloud and software-based virtual machine to deploy security anywhere, we are able, Fortinet, to capitalize on this investment and put us in a strong position going forward.
Before turning the call over to Keith for a closer look at our second quarter performance and our guidance, I would like to take a moment to welcome the over 400 people who joined Fortinet during the second quarter, as well as welcome the OPAQ team who recently joined. To thank our employees, customers, and partners worldwide for their continued support to manage our response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Please.
Thank you, Ken. Let's start the second quarter review with revenue. Total revenue of $616 million was up 18%, driven by Non-FortiGate product and service revenue growth of 25%. Non-FortiGate revenue growth benefited from very strong demand for virtual machines and our work-from-home solutions. FortiGate product and service revenue growth was 16% and benefited from record levels of billings for our secure SD-WAN solution. To a large extent, our second quarter revenue growth, together with the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, affirms the benefits of our diversification across geographies, customer segments, and industry verticals. At the same time, it illustrates the level of revenue predictability in our business model.
Our continued growth in this environment is a result of our strategic internal investments made to expand our global sales force, invest in our channel partners, and extend our cost for performance advantage as we update our product offerings and penetrate adjacent security markets. Product revenue grew 12% to $212 million, benefiting from strong demand for secure SD-WAN, high-end FortiGates, and FortiGate virtual machines. Our work-from-home solutions continue to provide a tailwind to growth. Our growth rates and industry reports suggest we continue to take market share in both the firewall and SD-WAN markets where we have contributed leadership and innovation. Moving to service revenue. Service revenue grew 22% to $404 million, representing 66% of total revenue. Over 90% of service revenue was from deferred revenue at the beginning of the quarter and continues to support our revenue growth and predictability.
FortiGuard security subscriptions revenue increased 22% to $223 million. FortiCare technical support revenue increased 22% to $181 million. The revenue mix shift from 8/5 support to our higher priced 24/7 support was nine points, with 24/7 support now representing 64% of the mix. The shift to billings. Total billings increased 14% to $711 million. The total billing growth was negatively impacted by approximately two points by training and professional services and other miscellaneous products, which are products not classified as FortiGate, Fabric, or Cloud. Earlier this year, we announced our decision to make our Network Security Expert, or NSE, online training and certification program free to the public. While this decision resulted in a reduction in training billings and training revenue, we're very excited about the demand we are seeing with our NSE training.
As of this week, the number of NSE registrations for 2020 is well over 500,000, and the number of NSE certifications issued is up over 200% to nearly 200,000. Looking at billings by product segment, FortiGate billings increased 14% and accounted for 73% of total billings. FortiGate billings include our secure SD-WAN solutions, and as Ken mentioned a moment ago, SD-WAN passed over the 10% threshold for the first time ever, representing 12% of total billings. Non-FortiGate billings also increased 14%, with strong demand from our virtual and work-from-home solutions, offset by smaller contributions from switches and access points, and as I mentioned, billing declines for professional services, training, and other miscellaneous products. Our geographic performance aligned with the path of the pandemic, and with it highlighted the geographic diversification of our business. APAC, being further along, outperformed all geos, followed by Europe, while North America was impacted more.
Our North America results include the United States, where we saw headwinds from the education and local government verticals, where the COVID-19 pandemic remained an issue. By comparison, the retail segment was by far and away the strongest performing U.S. vertical, with growth well over 40%, as we saw the continued expansion of the SD-WAN solution. The U.S. SMB segment provided strong growth, illustrating the strength of our U.S. channel programs, the remaining opportunity in this market, and solid execution by our channel partners and the Fortinet channel team. Looking more at the Americas, our analysis and discussions with our channel partners suggest that certain transactions were delayed into the second half of this year, as these companies focused on their capital structure and other immediate priorities. Moving now to worldwide billings by industry verticals.
The diversification of our business model was again on display, with our top five verticals continuing to account for about 2/3 of total billings. Worldwide government sector topped all verticals with 19% of total billings. Service providers and MSSPs accounted for 15% of total billings. Financial services with 14% of total billings, had a very strong quarter with billing growth of 33%. Despite COVID-related concerns, the retail vertical posted worldwide billings growth of 27%, accounting for 10% of billings as it continued to benefit from SD-WAN and the strong U.S. performance I mentioned a moment ago. We saw strong growth in retail sub-verticals such as drugstores, groceries, and portions of the wholesale industry. At the end of the second quarter, total deferred revenue increased 24% to $2.3 billion. Short-term deferred revenue increased 24% to $1.3 billion.
Looking now at deals by dollar size, the number of deals over $1 million increased 28% to 59%. Secure SD-WAN accounted for 13 of these deals over $1 million. This performance illustrates our continued ability to move upmarket into the enterprise segment and the continued acceptance of our differentiated single unit Secure SD-WAN offering. Moving back to the income statement. As shown on slide four, gross margin improved 260 basis points to 79%. Product gross margin improved 340 basis points to 61%. Product gross margin continued to benefit from the lower cost structure of our newer generation of FortiGate products and over 40% growth in software products. Services gross margin increased 120 basis points to 88.5%, reflecting the benefit of a FortiCare revenue mix shift to 24/7 support.
Operating margin for the second quarter increased 370 basis points to 27.3%, benefiting from the improvement in gross margin and lower employee travel and marketing program expenses related to the shift towards virtual events. Total headcount end of the quarter at 7,756, an increase of 23%, driven by the increased investments we've made to grow our business and reflecting a continued decline in sales and other attrition rates. With our continued growth, strong operating margins, and free cash flow, we do not anticipate any COVID-19-related layoffs in the foreseeable future. In fact, we plan to capitalize on our many opportunities by continuing to hire and invest in our balanced growth strategy. Given the strong operating income performance, net income for the second quarter was $135 million. Our earnings per diluted share increased $0.24 to $0.82 per diluted share.
On a GAAP basis, we reported net income of $112 million, or $0.68 per diluted share, versus GAAP income of $73 million or $0.42 per diluted share a year ago. Moving to the statement of cash flow summarized on slides seven and eight. Free cash flow increased 21.5% to $216 million. The average contract term in the second quarter continued to be within the range we provided at the Analyst Day, declining one month year-over-year to 26 months and moving up one month sequentially. As we stated on the first quarter call, we expected to leverage the strength of our balance sheet as a competitive advantage to support our partners and our customers. Average contractual payment terms increased to 62 days, or 17% sequentially, in line with our expectations and reflecting our decision to provide geographically targeted extended payment term plans.
Capital expenditures for the second quarter were $31 million, including $21 million related to construction and other real estate activity. We estimate capital expenditures for the third quarter to be between $50 million and $60 million, and for all of 2020 to be between $165 million and $185 million. Delays related to the new campus building have moved a portion of the previously expected 2020 CapEx spending into the first half of 2021. We expect full-year cash taxes to be approximately $40 million and our full-year non-GAAP tax rate to be 22%. In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 1.4 million shares of our common stock for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $146 million. In July, the board authorized an additional $500 million for our share repurchase authorization and extended the term to February 2022. As of today, the remaining share buyback authorization is approximately $1 billion.
Before moving to guidance, we wanted to offer some additional thoughts related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We have, and we plan to, continue leveraging the strength of our balance sheet, which may increase DSOs and inventory levels. The economic and business impact of the pandemic seems in line with the ability of different countries and geographies to reopen and avoid temporary shutdowns and uncertainty. For example, after strong billings growth in April, we saw slower growth as we completed May, then followed by a bounce back to strong growth in June and again strong in July. At the same time, the remaining Q3 pipeline points to a good level of improvement in both the U.S. and worldwide. In the second quarter, our channel partners reported some deals being delayed into the second half of the year.
The concept of delayed, not lost, seems supported by the increases in our pipeline as well as the July selling activity. Clearly, there remains an elevated level of uncertainty about future pandemic events and economic conditions. As we look forward, I'd like to review our outlook for the third quarter, summarized on slide nine, which is subject to the disclaimers regarding forward-looking information that Peter provided at the beginning of the call. In the third quarter, we expect billings in the range of $705 million-$730 million, revenue in the range of $630 million-$645 million. Non-GAAP gross margin of 78%-79%. Non-GAAP operating margin of 25.5%-26.5%. Non-GAAP earnings per share are $0.76-$0.78, which assumes a share count of between 168 and 170 million. We expect a non-GAAP tax rate of 22%.
For 2020, due to the continued uncertainty associated with the economic impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are not issuing full year guidance at this time. Finally, along with Ken, I'd like to welcome all the team members who have joined us, including the OPAQ team. I'd also like to thank our partners, customers, and the Fortinet team for all their support and hard work during these difficult and unique times. I'll now hand the call back over to Peter to begin the Q&A.
Thank you, Keith. Chris, we'd like to open the line for questions, please.
Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.
Great, thank you guys for taking my question this afternoon. I want to start on the SD-WAN side of things and the success that you're obviously seeing there through the metrics, now over 10% of billings. Just what that pipeline looks like. Have you seen more of a rush given COVID work from home and the opportunity to replace a lot of these solutions relative to branch types of solutions? Are you seeing as much of robust demand, I guess, in that forward pipe? Thanks.
I think it's SD-WAN is a long-term benefit for both enterprise and also SMB, and because it also lower the cost of connect to the internet. At the same time, make it more efficient. For us also, between building with ASIC security together, so they can also have additional security, additional benefit, and cost much lower compared to some other competitors. The market grow about 50% year-over-year. We see a lot of potential, a lot of pipeline. We do believe we're keeping gaining market share, because our solution is a very unique, huge advantage compared to other competitors. With additional sales capacity we added, like we add high-comp 23%, even during the pandemic, take a little bit more time to train the new salespeople, and then they maybe take a little bit more time to gain a new customer.
We do see a huge potential going forward.
Then secondarily, I guess, focusing on the SASE opportunity and some of the dialogues from previous calls, maybe you could touch on the OPAQ acquisition. Was this customer driven? Was this opportunistic from your perspective, offensive, defensive?
We have this FortiSASE, like I mentioned, even in the last time, the earning call. We do believe it's a part of the whole infrastructure. It is a cloud delivery. We already have some other cloud delivery, but OPAQ definitely keep enhance this, and we're making more broad, more flexible for customer, for the partner to leverage the product infrastructure we're building. We do see this is really enhance the offer we have. At the same time, we do have the broadest offering, both on the platform and also on the function and also on kind of different form of deployment compared to other competitors we see is keeping enhanced opposition.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani with UBS. Your line is now open.
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the questions. Ken, maybe a bigger picture question for you. Is the combination of SD-WAN adoption in a more durable work from home environment maybe is giving investors the sense, and perhaps it's misplaced, but giving investors a sense that the traditional enterprise branch office, is potentially at risk from either a refresh footprint perspective and a cannibalization perspective. I'm wondering if you can help us parse through sort of some of the puts and takes as to what happens to your branch office footprint, and what some of those misconceptions might be as customers adopt SD-WAN and/or stay at home more permanently in shelter in place situations. I have a follow-up for Keith.
Yeah. The enterprise also including some branch office, we do see some slowdown, especially in the U.S.. It's on the other side, if you look on our product, which come out like the SoC4 come out one years ago, we started building a product, like from 100F to 60F with 40F, then we just announced the 80F last week. We can see the ramp up, especially in the SMB, including the U.S., as they go up like over 40%. It's very strong. International usually a little bit behind on the U.S. to adopt some new product, including some both the low end SoC4, and also the high end NP7, which starting release about like early this year. Starting ramp up.
That's where we see the benefit of the new product, which easily have a performance like 4x, 5x better and the same cost, which we use in the, we call Security Compute Rating, to benchmark compared to the other competitor is a huge advantage. We see when we have the new product, the growth starting come up very quickly. After the testing, evaluate and adopt the product. On the other side, the SD-WAN also give the additional cost benefit together with the new product cost performance benefit. That's what helping driving the SMB we see starting growing quite well. Also last quarter, after we announced the high-end product, like one to two quarter, we starting to see the high-end also starting ramp up leverage NP7. That's the trend.
I do believe sometime enterprise take a little bit more time during this pandemic to do some deployment. We do see a lot of evaluation going on. We do see some other interest, including combined, we call security networking together, we call security-driven networking. Sell the whole infrastructure, that's where the sales probably will more engage into the networking team and also, traditionally, more sell to security. Now it's the networking team also starting engage together with us to call the security-driven networking. That's we see the trend going on quite well. Also, like Keith mentioned, it's region by region, right? It's APAC starting grow up rather quickly, over 20%, and seems the pandemic there, situation maybe better recover, maybe better. We also see Europe probably also growing over 10%. The U.S. a little bit slow.
We do believe later this year, next year, that once things over, with the new product lined up, with the additional sales capacity we build, which will continue to invest, we'll see very strong potential going forward.
Yes, Fatima, this is Keith.
I appreciate.
I think Ken does a great job of covering off some of the diversification considerations, whether it's by geographies and where different geographies may be, and also by verticals. It's also important to note that SD-WAN is also a significant component of SASE and also for work-from-home solutions.
Fair enough. Keith, since I have you, any comments on the billings performance specifically this quarter? Just double-clicking into FortiGate billings, because that includes both your traditional sort of network security, perimeter security and the secure SD-WAN piece. I'm wondering if you can kind of qualitatively talk to sort of what drove the bus this quarter, and how you're thinking about the secure SD-WAN versus non-secure SD-WAN FortiGate pipeline for the remainder of the year, and what's baked into your 3Q guidance. That's it for me. Thank you.
A lot of topics, Fatima. Maybe I'll start with the last one.
I try.
I know, you do a good job. Look, I think when we look at the pipeline for Q3, which is what we've guided to, I think we feel very good about the SD-WAN opportunity. Clearly, we saw perhaps in the U.S. in the month of May a bit of a pause, maybe some projects as we got towards the end of May. Clearly as we exited Q2 and we've moved into Q3, we can see that our customers are making plans to continue moving forward with their SD-WAN build-outs. The additional opportunities that we've seen in the pipeline made us, let's just say, comfortable talking about crossing over that 10% threshold for the first time. Now we'll see how it actually comes into play. I think I've lost track of some of your earlier comments. I'm sorry.
Fair enough. I'll get back in queue. Thanks so much.
Okay.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shaul Eyal with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Congrats on the quarter. Keith or Ken, U.S. was the fastest region this quarter. Next week will mark the middle of the quarter, the third quarter. Can you talk to us about the performance so far within the U.S.? What the pipeline is looking like?
We do see some enterprise customer has a good interest about this SASE, and just like some other cloud or some other platform of deployment infrastructure. That's where we make it as the whole infrastructure security offering. The dollar or the amount of revenue, whatever, is still relatively small, which may not impact much of the total billing or revenue there. There's an interest about this, customer want to make sure has some kind of a flexibility, and also broad offering. That's where we see the OPAQ acquisition keep enhance what we have on the FortiSASE and also offer more broad, both on the product, on the deployment, on the infrastructure side, to meet customer demand.
Yeah. I would add to Ken's comment, just pulling back and looking at it even maybe a little more broadly, and to the comments that were made in the prepared remarks, we're very pleased with what we saw in terms of July selling activity, and the pipeline build worldwide as well as in the U.S..
Yeah, at the same time, like we said, we also keeping supporting our partner, including the service provider and even some big global customer, they also want to build in their own SASE, just like the cloud. Sometimes they have the private cloud or they leverage public cloud or the hybrid cloud. It's a similar thing we're seeing here in SASE, which we're also supporting the partner and the customer try to have their own version of a SASE, which is based on the service of zero trust infrastructure to deploy some security function.
Understood. Thank you so much for that. We'll talk later.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sterling Auty with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. You mentioned continued tailwinds from work from home, we have seen the growth rate on the product side and to a certain extent, the billings ex the adjustments you mentioned start to fade. I guess my question is, do you expect that those trends can continue on for multiple more quarters, or do we face further deceleration in the back half as some of the work from home tailwinds fade further?
We do see the enterprise service provider, the high-end continue to grow, maybe because the new product is announced early this year. Also some SMB, some other part also have very healthy growth. Also even some of the product target for work from home continue to grow in, like we mentioned, the FortiToken, FortiAuthenticator, some other product.
It's probably not as a rush buy like we experienced in March, but it's still pretty strong above the total network security growth.
One follow-up. We've heard from multiple companies about accelerating digital transformations. How did the digital transformations and shift to the cloud impact your business, either positively or otherwise?
W e see pretty strong in the retail. If retail, they can order online, they can do whatever, deliver or some other, definitely they have a lot of benefit. That's where we see very strong growth in retail, probably benefit from the digitalization. Some other vertical or even some other region have a certain similar sense. Especially we say, that's why we call the security-driven networking. It's combined security networking together. Even the sales, traditionally, they're more engaged with the security team.
They see a lot of interest from the networking team, partially because SD-WAN is a part of FortiGate function, other part they do see these two, the networking security working together, whether the NOC, network operations center, or the SOC combined together, it's also a trend there. That's where we see quite a good progress combining the security network together, which we designed from our beginning, not just SD-WAN, including the Wi-Fi. Obviously Wi-Fi a little bit slow right now because, especially enterprise Wi-Fi in the office, not many people go to office. We do see a lot of interest going in that direction. Also the 5G, we see very strong interest at ramp-up.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for taking the question. Keith, I was wondering maybe if you hit a little bit more on billings, maybe a little bit softer than we'd expected in the quarter, and then, kind of nice guidance for next quarter. Maybe some of the dynamics behind that. In particular, interested in large deal dynamics, particularly U.S. financial services, where we've heard about some weakness in the quarter. Understand retail is really strong, but maybe a little bit more color on that and how it might impact billings.
I think the financial services strength that we saw in the quarter was outside of the U.S. Obviously, New York got hit, or the Northeast got hit pretty hard with the pandemic in the second quarter. That financial services growth number that we gave on billings, I think it was 33%, that's really an international growth number, and it kind of speaks to the diversification of the business. We've talked before about our diversification. The U.S. represents maybe 25%-30%. Obviously our largest country, but not a majority as it is with some other businesses. We did feel the effect, particularly towards the middle part of the quarter there, with some of the things that were happening and the uncertainty in the U.S. on our total numbers.
We were very pleased with what we saw, as I said earlier, related to Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. The other part, really, starting like the second half of last year, we started ramp up the hiring and sales capacity, additional marketing lead gen. The pandemic actually slowed down some of the new sales, becoming like more productive or whatever, reach the productivity level for what they expect. At the same time, some of them maybe take a little bit longer time to reach the new customer, especially in the U.S., we do hire quite some sales and the capacity. That's actually the pandemic slows things down a little bit, but with the additional hiring, with additional new product position we have, we do believe once the pandemic starting get better, especially in the U.S., we will see very strong growth potential.
Got it. Maybe, Keith, just a quick follow-up quickly. Nice kind of cash flow in the quarter, better than we thought. Maybe some of the puts and takes outside of billings and change in deferred that drove that and outlook for the rest of the year from, particularly from a working capital perspective?
Yeah, I think the other part of it is that collections were very strong, and I applaud the collections team.
For the great job that they did working with our channel partners who bring the cash in. I think we were perhaps a little more successful in that than we planned. Yeah, I think when you look at our free cash flow numbers, you're going to get from quarter to quarter a little bit of volatility, because we try not to over-manage the timing of payments and things of that nature. It's probably better to look at a couple of quarters, string those together to look at terms. In terms of the key drivers, yeah, it's billings. You can get something with inventory and payables. I think the margin part of that really is a large driver. That outperformance on the margin line really manifests itself in many ways, one of which is in the free cash flow.
Right. Very helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Hamza Fodderwala with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Keith, I just wanted to dig in a little bit on the comments that you made around some of the sales cycles towards the end of the quarter. I'm wondering how did those deal cycles progress towards late in Q2? What, if any, deals sort of had slipped out in Q3 and whether or not those have been closed so far in July?
Yeah. Fair question. I think the thing that we've seen with the pandemic, and I'll pull this up a little bit. If you go through the guidance setting process, obviously you start with the pipeline, then you start making certain assumptions about the close rate. While I felt good about what I was seeing in April, nonetheless, we made some adjustments to our expected close rate in the quarter for the second quarter. As we got to, kind of leading to your question, the last week of the quarter, I think we saw perhaps a few more deals that did not get the final signature that we expected them to get. Then your follow-on part of your question is, what are we seeing in July?
That's why I'm making the point that I think we're very pleased what we're seeing in terms of July sales activity, whether you measure it based on growth or linearity against our target, as well as the pipeline and as well as considering what we might call pandemic-related close rates.
Got it. Just a follow-up question, if I may. On the government vertical, obviously that's a big one for you. Could you comment a little bit about on how that grew, from a year-on-year perspective, and what you see the pipeline, especially with the U.S. federal close coming up?
Yeah, keep in mind, our government business has three components. It has a U.S. Fed, it has international governments, and it has state and local governments. I would say that the performance was strong across at about 26% growth, 25% growth, but that was not driven by state and local government. State and local government suffered. The U.S. Fed part of our business is not a huge part of our business. You're really looking at while the U.S. Fed did well, we had nice, very attractive growth internationally with our government segment.
Got it. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.
Excellent. Thanks so much. You guys continue to execute well, putting up better results than your nearest competitors. The diversification of your business is on full display this quarter, which is great to see. Can you comment at all just in terms of the competitive dynamic that you're seeing out there and maybe anything that you can share in terms of the pricing dynamic as well?
I think with the 73% bins come from FortiGate. With the new release of today's the high-end and most high-end product to support hyperscale. We see the performance gap keeping increase, we are getting much better. The same time, in the last few quarter, the SoC4 base like from 60F to 80F to 100F, 40F is also starting to see a huge advantage, the interest of growth in the field, especially you can see the SMB, they usually buy this low-end SoC based product. Also it's growing quite well. That's also on the product we see because we're keeping invest long time in this ASIC, which has a much better computing power handle security function compared to the general purpose CPU.
The, we call it Security Compute Rating, come from like a 25x better to today's product, like 13x better than the competitor. It's a huge advantage. Plus additional function like SD-WAN, some other part. We see it's quite a huge advantage and more gap compared to the competitor. They probably will keep pushing some software or some other form of deployment, which because they have difficult time competing with us into this appliance or some other base. For us also, we're positioned to have the whole infrastructure solution, not just the appliance-based, but also in the cloud and in the software base, also offer different kind of deployment, different kind of service. We also see quite good healthy growth from that angle. That's where we call the fabric approach, the fabric solution revenue still almost double compared to FortiGate growth.
We still see pretty healthy, like once you get in an average of FortiGate, then it can more easy to expand into the other non-FortiGate growth. That benefit the Fabric advantage still helping us grow faster above average, because it's really the consolidation is still the trend in the whole industry there. Customers want to reduce the management cost, they prefer consolidate some of the vendors, which we are starting to see more benefit for us, because most product function we do develop in-house, which make it integrate and automate from day one compared to some other competitors depend on acquisitions, more difficult to integrate, automate. That's what we see. We continue to invest long term, both on the product technology infrastructure side, and we do believe it's a long-term game.
That's where so we're keeping gaining market share, and we do see the gap at a bigger and we have more advantage right now.
Brad, it's Keith. I would continue on with Ken's comments there a little bit, and keeping in mind, I made a reference to it in the text that we're seeing a new cost advantage evolve within the E-series, and we expect it to continue with the F-series. I think that the company, Ken, has done a tremendous job with the ASIC advantage of driving down the cost in subsequent generations of the chip, at the same time, driving up the performance. That gross margin performance that I mentioned earlier in the script, that actually came with just a small headwind with discounting for the first time. You may have been asking a discounting question. Discounting was the first time we've seen that in several quarters. About a half point, if you will, perhaps, increase in discounting.
That cost structure that's coming with the ASIC advantage that I made reference to is more than enough to outweigh that.
Thank you both so much for the very thorough answers. I would just say that the competitive differentiation of your strategy continues to shine through. Congrats, and thanks for taking my question.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi. Your line is now open.
Hi, two product questions. First, just on the I think last quarter you had some real strength in the remote access, things like authenticators and tokens. Just curious how that continued into this quarter. Also on the SASE side, when are you talking about having an integrated SASE SD-WAN product in the market?
I'll take the first one. In very round numbers, I would say if I got a benefit of, call it, very round numbers, $10 million in the first quarter, I probably got half that benefit in the second quarter on those three work-from-home products.
Okay. The SASE we're offering to the customer, to the partner this quarter, and it's part of what we call the Fabric Forti SASE solution. We do see the interest both from the existing customer, from new customer, and same time, a lot of our service provider partner also very interest in this. Even some global customer, they also want to build their own version of SASE, which we are also supporting them behind.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tal Liani with Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Yes. Hi guys. My question is more general about the market. The data shows that the firewall market has been slowing down tremendously in the last few quarters, six or seven quarters of decline. What is your experience with the market? I'm trying to understand if your continued growth is a question of continued share gain or new products that are compensating for firewall weaknesses. What's your view of the overall market and the drivers for firewall 7 in the market? Thanks.
Yeah, the traditional firewall, they are most securely called a border, which is positioned between the internal network LAN and also the internet. That part is, like I said, there's a no longer enough. There's a multiple way you can bypass that. Also a lot of application, a lot of things also go beyond the company network. They go to the cloud or go to some other part, like mobile access. That's where the traditional firewall, we do see the growth slow down. That's where we keep expanding beyond, like we expand to the WAN. That's what we call security-driven networking. That's the SD-WAN built into the FortiGate and make it part of the WAN solution, and also part of cloud solution. Same time, internally also expand, go to internal segmentation, like a switch, with a Wi-Fi access point.
That part also growing very well and quite strong. Like I said, we keeping saying now we say it's a third generation of a network security infrastructure, from the traditional connection base to when we Fortinet, we call the content application-based security. Now it's more like the whole infrastructure security, including both the traditional gateway and also go to the internet side and the WAN connection, the cloud solution, and the SASE, and same time go internal, for the segmentation, for the switch, for the Wi-Fi. It's the whole unit and plus the endpoint of different application. It's the whole infrastructure security, we feel is a new trend, which we prepare all this using the fabric, using ASIC, increase the computing power to address the network speed issue. We keeping doing this for about 20 years since we found the company.
We starting to see the investment we made, whether from ASIC, for the technology, for the product side, for the infrastructure side that will benefit us and differentiate Fortinet compared to some other competitors. Still, relatively, it's the same approach compared to the early days on network security. That's where we see is a gap, and the advantage we have is getting bigger and bigger going forward.
Got it. The migration to SASE, isn't it going against your core offering?
No, it's a part of the whole infrastructure security, and like SD-WAN, because for the SASE, really, you need access to it, right? That's where SD-WANs and other parts really have the capability to access that. we are building into the FortiGate and has huge performance and functionality advantage, and at the same time, the service model leverage the infrastructure we have, the customer base we have. That's where the OPAQ acquisition can enhance this part. that will be address some of the new things the customer need, and at the same time, the partner also see how we can, working closely with them to supporting the customer better, give them the additional flexibility, no matter what kind of format of security deployment they want.
Got it. Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one on your telephone, to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Our next question comes from the line of Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Your line is now open.
Yep. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess first one, you guys mentioned a couple of times about certain deals just getting pushed out from June into the September quarter. Any sense you could give in terms of the deal size or the verticals where you saw this happening? I guess if you didn't have any of these issues, what would the June quarter revenue look like?
Yeah, I don't know that there was a common-- Well, first of all, large deals for us would be $1 million, right? They're not 10, 20, or $30 million deals. You're probably looking at some number of those transactions that moved. I don't know that there was a common theme, in terms of verticals, if you will. I do think that it was a bit more of a challenge in the U.S. than it was in other geographies on that close rate for the last week of the month or the last week of the quarter.
Got it. I guess, last quarter and this one, you've talked some amount about perhaps using your with strength as a way to essentially accelerate your share gains. Could you just touch on what impact would that have on your free cash flow or even your margins, perhaps? Just trying to get a sense of how much you're willing to flex your model and what sort of share gain aspiration would you have from these dynamics that you would take on.
Yeah. There's probably three places that you could see it. One is looking at the inventory, because in this environment, we like to keep a little more inventory on hand. When you look at the inventory turns, I think the number was 2.2 in the quarter, and that's probably down about one. bh .
Just one correction on the contractual payment terms. It was 62 days.
I'm sorry.
Perfect. Thank you.
I'm happy. I'm happy it's only 62. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. This does conclude today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back to Peter Salkowski for closing remarks.
Thank you, Chris. I'd like to thank everyone for joining on today's call. Fortinet will be attending the following virtual investor conferences during the third quarter. We'll be doing the Oppenheimer conference next week on August 11th, the Citi conference on September 9th, and the Colliers Securities conference on September 10th. Event presentations will be webcast, and links for these webcasts will be available on the investor relations website of the Fortinet IR site. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Take care, everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now.