Great. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to Needham Tech Week. My name is Matt Dezort, Senior Security Analyst here at Needham. It's my pleasure to welcome next to the virtual stage the management team of Fortinet. We've been joined by the CFO, Keith Jensen, COO, John Whittle, and Chief Accounting Officer, Christiane Ohlgart. So, you know, as a reminder, I want to make this as collaborative as possible as a fireside chat format.
So if you have any questions, please submit them through the queue, or you can send them to my email at mdezort@needhamco.com, and I'll be sure to funnel those in. With that, welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to have you, especially hot on the heels of the Analyst Day you guys hosted yesterday in New York City. You know, congrats on surpassing 15 years as a public company. Truly remarkable run that you guys have been on. I guess to start there, Keith, for you, maybe, you know, you introduced new near-term targets for billings and revenue, I think, to grow above 12% over the next 3-5 years. And operating margins, I think you said, above 30% with adjusted free cash flow in the mid to high 30%.
I guess to start with the growth guidance, though, you know, what were the puts and takes that you embedded in the guide for over 12%? How should we think about trajectory throughout the next few years? You know, especially with the large product refresh that you have coming up in 2025, 2026, and how did you approach your assumptions, I guess, for these targets, especially, you know, when you compare them to the last targets you laid out, I think, in 2022?
Okay. That's going to take 20 minutes, but okay. I'm going to get you covered at all. Thank you, Matt. Wow, what a beauty. So I think on the top line, I think when we start off looking at the top line, the guys will obviously look at the market growth. That's become a little more "complicated" than it was five years ago because of the breadth of the portfolio. Five years ago, it was really looking at the firewall market and what Gartner said.
Now you have the SecOps solutions, and you have a variety of them, and you also have SASE. So there's a fair amount of weighting that goes on in terms of, you know, how much do you think you'll get from the firewalls and how much do you think you'll get from SASE and SecOps.
You also look at sales capacity and making sure that, you know, your operating margin is going to support the headcount and the go-to-market spending that's needed to deliver on those. As you start peeling back the onion and you look at it a little more carefully, you know, I think we get to a more rational set of comparisons in 2025 than we've had over the last couple of years. Pretty tough comparison in 2024. We like how we're positioning for our bookings for the exit to the fourth quarter.
We'll see how we execute on that. But that's part of the input as well. I think on the operating margin part of the business, we spent the last five years kind of going through a progression of the 25% operating margin. First, we said it was a target, and then we said it was an average, and then it became a floor.
So I think you're seeing us now kind of, you know, getting back on that routine, but at 500 basis points higher with an operating margin that, and we kind of skipped over the floor part of it and just said, you know, we think we go right away to saying we're going to average it. And I would expect that, you know, we feel good about where we're at there. You know what we're going to exit the year at and what we've got into the fourth quarter.
We reminded people that we've got about 230 basis points of headwind in that from the Lacework acquisition that we expect will normalize over time as their top line continues to grow and we bring their cost structure in line with our cost structure.
Makes total sense. I guess on the margin side, you mentioned sales capacity. I guess it seems like the operating and free cash flow targets are prudent, and they leave some room for, you know, incremental investments, which you guys talked a little bit about yesterday in terms of adding quota-carrying reps, but also building out, you know, your own infrastructure and data centers.
I guess maybe talk about some of those investment vectors and specifically, like, what sort of growth should we expect in quota-carrying headcount over the next year or two, especially as you roll out SASE and SecOps?
Yeah, I'll maybe ask John to kind of come back and add a couple of comments on the sales capacity, but also what we call data centers and really are probably POPs. Kind of fast forwarding, we don't guide the free cash flow, but we want people to be aware that, you know, if you look at our history of investing in real estate and delivery assets, delivery meaning how we deliver solutions, whether that's warehousing costs or something like that, or in this case, you know, it's the infrastructure for the SASE and SecOps solutions,
and really wanted to adopt a more cost-effective approach to it, moving away from the cloud providers over time and more to our own hosted applications and our own infrastructure where we can use our own technology inside to facilitate delivery. I think the one thing that comes up on the sales model and go-to-market, you're getting a lot of that conversation, is really about the U.S. I think if you're listening to the conversation yesterday,
you heard about the dominant position that we have in other parts of the world, whether that's international emerging in large parts of Europe and large parts of Latin America. In the U.S., it's a little bit more of, you know, we're chasing the incumbents down. And with that, I think you've got to make somewhat different investments in the sales team and what you're looking for in the direct sales force, and I'll pause there for John.
Yeah, like Keith said, you know, we're going to end up with a hybrid model in terms of supporting our SASE and other cloud-delivered services, and so we will contract with third parties, but we view it as a competitive differentiator to buy our own data centers, leverage some of our facilities to deliver those services. Sometimes that can be significant cost savings that we can pass on to our customers. A lot of times when you contract with some of these third-party providers, there are no economies of scale.
You know, you don't get pricing discounts, and so it can really lock you in and decrease the flexibility that you can pass on to customers in terms of cost savings there, so that'll definitely be part of our strategy. You know, and I think we've already got that data center and POP capabilities built out pretty significantly around the world, but we'll continue to focus on that.
Got it. Yeah, definitely feels like the correct winning strategy for SASE long-term. So I appreciate all that color. I guess, Keith, shifting back to billings guidance for Q4, you talked about, I think it's mid-single-digit growth, but on the call, you talked about a subset of large chunky deals, I think, that are just taking longer to mature in Q4. You know, what's the temperature check on the progression of those deals as we, you know, progress here through November and into December?
Yeah, great point. I think we're pleased with the progress, but I don't think we're so pleased we're going to change anything about what we said a couple of weeks ago. I did get irritated with a couple of salespeople that probably told me they were going to put something in commit now after I gave guidance and not really helping me guys. But, you know, I think they're progressing as we want them to progress, but there's still, you know, work to be done to get them across the finish.
I guess what's causing that longer maturation process or slower sales cycle? Is it just because these are larger deals that you guys are, you know, going after? Is it market-driven, or is it more idiosyncratic because you're also trying to introduce SASE, SecOps, and some of these other solutions to customers?
Yeah, I think, you know, the headline is, yes, the deals are taking longer. There's more scrutiny. There's no doubt about that. When you look at the large deals that, you know, these eight-figure deals that we're talking about, and it's a, you know, it's not a massive number of customers or opportunities, but it's enough that you're paying attention to it. What's important about that is they're almost all with existing customers.
And when you talk to the salespeople and you read the notes, what's really going on is a collaboration with the customer in terms of when they know that this is on their strategic roadmap and when does it make sense for them to get started on it? Are they ready to start now, or is it going to move out into 2025 or something like that?
So what I have been impressed with is the collaborative nature of these conversations with our install base in terms of what they want to have happen. You know, is there one or two white space deals in there that are quite different? You know, you're just basically doing hand-to-hand combat right now with competition and waiting for the final decision. There's some of that as well.
Got it. I guess let's shift gears, I guess, to product revenue, which turned positive, I think, for the first time in a handful of quarters this past quarter, which was very nice to see you starting to lap some of the backlog headwinds that you guys had. And I think ex-backlog, it grew double digits quarter over quarter, which was above seasonal norms, right? So really strong sort of product momentum.
I guess what signals, in addition to, you know, the FortiGuard days of service registered statistic that you guys put out there, what else out there do you guys see that gives you confidence that product can return to sustainable, you know, positive growth in 2025, 2026?
Yeah, I think you kind of covered the three key ones. One, we've talked about the sequential growth from first Q1 to Q2, then Q2 to Q3. Looking at bookings, which is a pure number for that comparison, and seeing that those have moved back to or above historical norms, we think is a positive indicator. We started tracking and sharing the days to register the FortiGuard contract you made reference to because that gives us a sense of how fast we're placing the units into service.
And that reached a normalized level in Q2. It repeated that normalized level in Q3. We said, I think we're done tracking that now because it's back to normal. And then as we start looking forward into 2026, we see that for probably 2025 and 2026, we see that upgrade or refresh opportunity, if you will, for those products that are going into service that Christiane talked about yesterday.
And then we would layer on top of that renewal cohorts, things that were sold in that spike in 2022 under one-year, three-year, five-year contracts and how those may play out as well as we look forward. But I kind of moved off to Q4 a number of bits. Sorry.
Got it. I guess I had a question come in from a client here on some of the larger deals. I guess, you know, are they actually increasing in size while you're going through negotiation? What's the kicker on pricing and discounting as these, you know, take longer to mature?
I think they're increasing in honesty. And what I mean by that is salespeople are a little nervous about putting, you know, what it could be in the forecast. They like to haircut it a little bit. So yes, as the deals get closer to the finish line and it's harder to be less honest, you know, the deals can grow. They can grow. But at the same time, they can become smaller if they actually see, you know, how much they want to take down at this point in time. So it can go, it can and does go in both directions.
Got it. I guess let's talk about the big, you know, end-of-support asset timeline that you guys have coming up. You talked about a record number of FortiGates out in the field, I think over two times, you know, what you guys saw in 2021, 2022. How often does this base usually refresh before, during, or after the end-of-life support? I know you've talked about the bulk of these coming up in the second half of 2026, and you expect them to refresh sometime before that.
But I think refresh cycles have obviously changed dramatically over the past 5 to 10 years. So how do you think about that and any sort of change in behavior that's contemplated in that sort of thought process versus 2021, 2022?
Yeah, probably Christiane Ohlgart who's done so much research on this and brought it to our attention to talk about it in depth. And I know yesterday that one of the slides she spoke to actually showed our chart of the number of units by year over a 10-year period of time. And I don't know yet if we posted that on our website. I understand we're going to sell rights to it. And we're going to syndicate. But I think it was an extremely effective chart. And Christiane, maybe talk more about it.
So I think there are two considerations that are important, right? One is our overall product run rate has increased. So over time, when you have more models going end-of-support, which means five years ago we declared that end-of-sale, and then the customer has five more years for which they can purchase support and FortiGuard services, and then the device still works, but you can't get support for it anymore.
Then you get this accumulation of numbers, especially if it's low-volume asset or high-volume assets, low price. And that's what happened. We have a significant number of lower-end devices, about 65% of the value.
Got it.
So that's a forcing function for a change in general, but this is overlaid by normal refresh cycles because typically customers depreciate their devices over four to five years and then would replace them anyways. Because every five years, as you may have seen from Ken's presentation, we introduce new chips, we have more powerful devices. So there are other reasons to upgrade and refresh your hardware. We just see in 2026 a forcing function with significant still registered devices.
Not all of them are active. Some of them may have been refreshed already and are just sitting under an EA and under service contracts. But we believe that this will give us, as we talked about, a benefit to our product revenue growth. But our run rate is already pretty high. So it's not that outsized growth anymore that you would expect when you just look at the bar.
Yeah, no, I guess staying on that point, Christiane, yesterday you talked about, I think, $400 million-$450 million of net new product revenue opportunity over the next couple of years coming from that end-of-life support cohort. I guess how should investors be thinking about that number and the conservatism embedded in that versus past refreshes?
So I think what is embedded in this number is a certain refresh assumption, right? An average price. And then we have recommended replacement models. And I use the pricing and the average discounting for these replacement models to come up with this number. That's the product side of it.
As we said, in order to grow our service revenue, we need to sell as much services as we sold with these devices in the past, plus more. That's the opportunity to upsell into SASE specifically and, of course, other products like SecOps or so as we talk with the customer.
Did you haircut that opportunity a little bit for things that aren't pinging home and EA refreshes?
For regular churn and not active devices and what has refreshed already. Correct.
Yeah. Got it. Got it. Appreciate that color. I guess staying on product and moving a little bit to a different subject within it, what's the status, Keith, of channel inventory levels going into Q4? And how do you think about that into next year as you near this refresh? Where are channel inventory levels versus past refresh opportunities?
Yeah, there was an analyst report out there that maybe created a little bit of confusion. The headline of the response is that channel inventories are flat quarter over quarter and flat, I think, year over year, or very close to it. I think what happened there is that the channel checks are very U.S.-focused, and the U.S. is about 30% of our business, a little bit less, and channel inventory in the U.S. was up compared to prior periods, but in total, it's flat.
Got it. Got it. I guess, shifting to gross margins, Keith, staying with you, you've had a couple of quarters of record gross margins. Congratulations on that, and product has been particularly strong at nearly 72%, I think, this last quarter. Included a few hundred basis points, though, of one-off supplier renegotiations, I think. How do you think about sustainable product gross margins going forward, especially as we come up on this refresh and software becomes a bigger piece of the pie?
Yeah, let's take the larger but easier component first, which is service revenues. Two-thirds of our business service revenue is higher margins. That's been less volatile. We've been able to at this point successfully absorb some of these data center or colo costs as part of the SASE and SecOps solutions. And at the same time, be able to raise those margins. We're sensitive to the fact that delivering on our own will change that cost profile a little bit, but hopefully we'll grow the margin of the revenues at the same time.
The smaller portion of product revenue that we're talking about here really had the volatility coming off a couple of things. One is the year-over-year comparison because in 2023, we continue to have the impact of the supply chain in the form of freight costs and expedite fees that the way the accounting worked was still a drag on 2023. In 2024, we had elevated inventory charges, as you talked about, and then some reversals.
I think the easiest way to look at that is one of the first charts I think Christiane had yesterday was to provide a bridge from what were the reported numbers and the guided numbers for Q3 and Q4, I believe, or 2023 and 2024, and then take out those unusual items and get you a normalized product gross margin number, and if I recall correctly.
Yeah, I mean, we expected, depending on mix, to be 79%-80%, right, for total gross margin. And we don't expect a decline in our service gross margin. And hardware gross margin normalized is somewhere about 67%, probably, right, if you take out the reserve components. So it's a combination of mix and normalizing hardware gross margin.
Got it. So that 79%-80% that you talked about yesterday, that was part of the near-term guidance for overall total gross margin.
Yeah, the near-term here. Sorry. Gotcha.
I guess what sort of pricing and discounting behavior have you seen in the market in the second half of this year? And how do you think about financing vehicles given most of your competitors have shifted gears towards that? Any new progressions on that front?
Yeah, we continue to encourage the sales team to make use of discounting to get deals across the finish line. It ranges about one point up or down in a given quarter, but we're not standing in the way. Maybe one way to think about the business is kind of the 80/20 rule.
We want 80% of the business to go through the channel, standard discounts, rebates, incentives. But where we have the opportunity, particularly in the U.S. enterprise space, to be very aggressive on customer acquisition, I think that's where we want to deploy our dry powder in terms of discounting. And I think that message in the U.S. is resonating out there as we look forward. Discounting was one.
And then financing, again, if you look at the chart on diversification of the business, and you can see, first of all, that in SMB, mid-market, and large enterprise, very diversified, call it one-third, one-third, one-third, but also geographically, a lot of small countries. I don't know that that's a model that's conducive to offering what would be akin to consumer financing products, so to speak, because of the sheer volume and the size of them.
Better when we look at the U.S. enterprise that we're really targeting is we want to provide capital strategies, if you will, that are designed to bring the customers across the finish line. That could be extended payment terms. It could be financing through the channel or what have you. I think that what one of our competitors that really focuses on the U.S.
Enterprise has done is they use that financing vehicle for a couple of years, and now they're pulling back from it and changing their KPIs, and they're really going more to a different contractual model, and I think as, again, we look to do whatever we need to do to dislodge incumbents in the U.S., that 10% of our business right now that want to grow, that's where you'll probably see things like that.
Got it. I guess shifting gears towards SD-WAN, you guys are dominant in this market. You have been for the past handful of years. I guess how do you think about the large cohort of SD-WAN renewals that you have coming up in 2025, 2026? I think in 2021 and 2022, you booked close to a cumulative $2 billion of SD-WAN bookings. As that comes up for renewal, how do you think about that as a gateway to upsell or cross-sell SASE to your large install base?
Yeah, I think the SD-WAN cohort is somehow in the upgrade cohort included because SD-WAN is a feature and function that is part of our FortiGates that you can use when you have a FortiGate. So I think it's a compelling reason for any customer to continue buying FortiGates. So one of the reasons that we're comfortable that customers will continue to upgrade. And yes, we are actively trying to show our customers the ease of adding SSE, FortiSASE, to SD-WAN because it's a quick deployment, an easy deployment.
It comes for us with additional services. But we shouldn't forget, especially in the U.S. market, it typically requires also to displace competitors. So it's a longer journey for the customers to go from SD-WAN to SSE and may not coincide at the same time. But the discussions definitely start at the same time.
Got it. Yeah, I know you guys have quite buoyantly talked about the progression from FortiGate to SD-WAN to SASE. I guess to stay on the topic, I want to ask about the SASE multiplier.
I know you guys put out some slides yesterday, but as your customers progress through FortiGate to SD-WAN to SASE, how should we think about the multiplier on an ACV perspective from SD-WAN to SASE, especially given it's kind of a different sale versus SD-WAN, which was majority a cost savings pitch versus MPLS, right? How do we think about that? You mentioned it's a little bit of a longer transition, but how do we think about your ability to achieve those sort of multiplier effects with SASE pricing?
I think the interesting part of the SASE pricing for us is that it's employee-based. So there's not a direct relationship between the SASE services and the FortiGate. It's the size of the customer that is bringing their employees onto the SSE deployment, right, remote access, and so on. So it creates a good outsized opportunity for growth, but it also can be done in stages, right? The customer will not roll out SSE to the whole employee base most likely right away because they already have remote login capabilities that they will replace over time.
Got it. I guess staying in SASE, it seems like you guys have a really unique positioning within service providers and sovereign SASE. Maybe just talk about what the size of that opportunity to sell SASE to and through service providers could look like and how that pipeline is sort of maturing for you guys.
Yeah, maybe John will jump in here, but I think in yesterday's conversation, actually, you heard geographically Latin America seems very advanced in that area, followed by Europe and then probably the U.S., but John, you want to offer some thoughts?
Yeah, I think we kind of expected service providers to drive that market a little bit quicker, but now we are starting to see them drive it, and so we're happy to see that because I think that really meshes well with our flexible solution where it can work in the service provider context and other contexts as well, so I think we are starting to see that really pick up, which is nice to see.
Makes sense. I guess shifting gears to the other hypergrowth segment, SecOps, you guys have talked about strong ARR growth within this segment, Christiane. I think FortiEDR, FortiClient, FortiNDR, and cloud have been driving this segment. Where are you seeing the most success within SecOps landing and expanding, and how is that sort of evolving?
Go ahead.
No, I'm going to let John. This is John's passion.
Yeah, no, it's interesting because we've been focusing on these solutions from an R&D standpoint for many, many years, and we just really divided these three pillars into secure networking, SASE, and SecOps a year ago, November, and so that really focused our sales force, and so we are seeing really good growth. I think you nailed it in terms of the products. It's SIEM, SOAR, EDR, NDR, CNAPP now as well.
That's a good opportunity for us, but we're also seeing good growth beyond that with FortiMail, FortiRecon, which is our EASM product, so it's a very broad solution suite, and we're seeing growth beyond those core pillars that you mentioned, so lots of opportunity there for sure with the additional focus.
If you look at the presentation from John Maddison, I think he laid out kind of the big drivers in SecOps. One of it is FortiAnalyzer, which is going to be kind of the starting point, and that has also the highest ARR. The other products have higher ARR growth, but with our AI story, that's a good segue and starting point for our customers to go on the SecOps journey with Fortinet.
Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe double-clicking on FortiEDR, how do you guys think about that as a launching point for next-gen SIEM, especially since it seems like that's sort of resonating early with some customers that are looking to maybe think about unwind legacy SIEM solutions?
But I guess how do you think about that as a launching point for you guys? What sort of traction have you seen in FortiEDR? And I guess anything new, given there was sort of a big event in July where a competitor had a large outage, has that built any sort of incremental pipeline for you guys?
Yeah, EDR, we've seen really good growth. I don't think we break it out separately, but in Q3, we saw really good growth, whether that was attributable to the outage. I'm not sure, but we did see really, really good growth. And we see really good, we see a lot of deals that are EDR and SIEM combined as well. And that competitor you mentioned, I know they're kind of driving some of that expand motion with those two solutions as well. But we go beyond that with SOAR as well.
We see EDR, SIEM, SOAR combined a fair bit. And then not only do we see the SecOps pillars combined, but we see anecdotally we get deal flows where oftentimes there are deals where all three pillars, products from all three pillars are in one deal for one customer. But yeah, you're right, we do see that EDR, SIEM, SOAR combination a fair bit.
Got it. Makes sense. Maybe John, staying with you on cloud, you guys just bought Lacework. Congrats on that acquisition. Really exciting to see. How is that integration sort of going? Any updates you can give us, either qualitative or quantitative on that integration? And how is pipeline build going so far within your existing base of new logos?
Yeah, it's going well. We have it on the price list now. We're training the sales force up on it. So really, their sales force was a little more limited versus ours, of course. And so we really want to kind of leverage that scale of sales force. So it's important for us to get on the price list, get our sales trained up on it to grow that pipeline based on the Fortinet sales force. And we're leveraging the great Lacework team to kind of help our sales team learn about it as well and sell it as well.
And so we expect the integration to be substantially complete probably this quarter. There'll still be some work to do after that, but we're trying to drive it really, really quickly. And we are seeing some nice pipeline there. We don't break it out separately, but there's good pipeline there and good ARR as well. And so a lot of it is protecting the current customer base, making sure we maintain that ARR where it is right now.
Got it. I guess shifting to some of the vertical conversation, it was great to see the strength this past quarter in manufacturing and OT. I think service providers and retail as well had really strong bounce-back quarters. What sort of drove that? Is that early refresh? Is it share gains or these verticals just finally starting to decide to refresh old equipment? How should we think about some of your key verticals that are set to refresh?
Yeah, I think that both retail and telco is really just their cycles, if you will. They're back in spending money. I don't know that the service providers have. There's a lot of churn in that customer base, so to speak. I mean, we feel good about our position. Clearly, the telco had not been spending a ton of money for probably a couple of years. At our dinner last night, we had one of our large retailers there as well.
We had a similar question to them about, "Did you really slow down spending in the last couple of years?" And the response back was, "Certainly in the last year, absolutely." But they are now looking at it. It kind of goes back to your SD-WAN refresh question a moment ago.
One of the things that the retailers are finding with SD-WAN is that when the sales and marketing groups find out about how cheap it is to deliver technology through SD-WAN, there's become a proliferation of what's being delivered to the stores, and they're running out of capacity on the units that they installed, and they're looking for other ways of delivering that traffic or other pipes, so to speak.
It still involves SD-WAN and that routing functionality, but what was surprising to them was that there was this jump that was happening in demand and is causing them to come back during the refresh cycle, the renewal cycle, and have conversations about upgrading capacity.
Got it. That makes sense. I guess shifting to public sector, it's obviously a big topic in Q3 with the Fed fiscal year. And I think historically, you guys have been really strong in SLED in international markets, though. I guess you also just hired a new leader for your Fed business, though. So the question I think is, what's changing with this new leadership within your public sector business? And have you disclosed how big of a pie that federal piece is within?
We've talked in the past that federal probably runs maybe 2% or 3% of our business, U.S. federal. But as you point out, when you look at the entire government business, which includes SLED as well as international governments and facilities, you can start getting much closer to 10% and 12% of our business. So it's very dominant. I think that what you saw there, you make referencing to the organizational changes that we've made there is, and it's not uncommon for tech companies to do this.
We've actually split off the U.S. federal completely from the rest of the business. It has its own leadership team. It has its own infrastructure and so forth. And that's really, I think, a functional or a reflection of what today's environment is about with the threat environment and the need to have that separation.
Got it. I guess shifting gears to AI, obviously a big topic of conversation for investors and everybody within tech. Remind us what you're doing with FortiAI. Any early traction on that product you've seen across FortiAnalyzer, SIEM, SOAR? I know you talked about those, but any of that traction powered by AI? And what sort of mix are you guys using in terms of third-party LLMs and APIs or your own proprietary models?
I think that we need to distinguish different levels of AI, right? There is the generative AI where you have large language models where we currently use third-party models. Then you have machine learning that has been part of our product already for a long time. This is why you also see so many patents. Then Lacework used AI for their product as well, where we also purchased a lot of patents, right?
AI has been built into our product for a long time. Then now, over the last six months, we have been launching separate products that leverage generative AI where you get into conversational capabilities with the security. Predominantly for SecOps. We have a FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, and some other products. Because we just launched it, you don't see meaningful contribution to billings.
I think our sales team needs to get more comfortable in talking about it, but from a customer interest perspective, I would say this is definitely going to be very important to them that we innovate in that area and that basically it makes security more operational and easier to manage.
Yeah, and I think as Christiane mentioned, we've been working on elements of AI for many, many years in our products. And I think it is interesting that we noted it yesterday. We do have over 500 AI-related patents pending and issued. And that's equal to or more than some of our competitors have in terms of total patents. And so it's definitely been a focus of ours for many, many years. And we're going to continue that focus as well.
Got it. I guess with two minutes left, I'd love to turn it back to you, Keith, John, Christiane. If investors on the call were to take away three things from today or the analyst day yesterday, what would you prioritize in their minds?
Yeah, well, I think the finance presentation was spectacular, first and foremost. We felt good going in in terms of the go-to-market and the R&D strategies that we were talking about in terms of how we laid that out and have been under the umbrella of the customer journey and bringing together what we've talked about in the past, 90% of our first sales to a firewall, and then how many different customer journeys that span off of that first sale and how it provides credibility and validation of the strategy around SASE and around SecOps. I think that was setting aside the glorious midterm targets. I think that came in a strong second place.
Got it. That makes sense. And with that, I think we're up on time. So John, Christiane, Keith, I appreciate you guys taking the time to join me today. And definitely a lot of exciting stuff in the headlines for you guys with SASE and SecOps and this large refresh. So appreciate you taking the time. And for all that tuned in, thank you for the questions and hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.
Thank you very much for having us.
Thank you. Great questions. Appreciate it.