All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Anthony Luscri. I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations at Fortinet. It's my pleasure to welcome you here at Accelerate 2026 in our investor briefing session today. You'll hear about Fortinet's vision for cybersecurity and how our strategic positioning drives sustained, durable and profitable growth. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements during today's presentation. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our SEC filings, in particular the risk factors in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q for additional information on factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from current expectations.
The presentations from today's event will be available on our investor relations website within 24 hours after the event concludes. In terms of agenda, it's a fairly simple one today. We'll start off things with Ken Xie, our founder, chairman, and CEO. He'll talk about some of the innovations at Accelerate this year, as well as our longer-term competitive advantages. Then Christiane Ohlgart and I will provide a financial overview of the business. The primary purpose of the prepared remarks is just to tee up the Q&A session, where we'll be joined by John Whittle, our COO, Robert May, EVP of Product Management, and Joe Sarno, Trevor Pagliara, and Pedro Paixão, our sales Leaders across international, U.S., and LATAM Canada, respectively. With that, I'd like to introduce Ken Xie.
Yes. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining. I probably only have, like, five to 10 minutes, just quickly, for some this morning slides highlight. Basically, you can see the AI definitely we feel will accelerate the convergence, because whether the edge computing or most of traffic increased by AI agent or robot is more east-west traffic. We see this really match our kind of vision quite well. We have some unique advantage, whether on the convergence or the SASE there, which I will cover. So but basically, AI is a tailwind for us. We feel we'll be keeping our salary converging and keeping the company long-term growth. This operating system, which we introduced today also very, very important.
Actually, this is the only operating system 5 Gartner Magic Quadrant as a Leader, whether in the traditional network security or in the, like, unified management, which has built-in as, like, a controller for Wi-Fi in the whole networking. It has a controller for all the switch with all the FortiLink technology and also the Leader in the SASE, in the SSE, and also in SD-WAN. You can see this is the only OS, the single OS, have a 5 Gartner Magic Quadrant, all as a Leader. Which never happened in the industry before. That's so many functions, about 30 functions integrated, and about half of that actually using ASIC to accelerate. That's a differentiation we have compared to other competitor. They have acquired different companies, separate SD-WAN OS, separate network security OS, separate SASE OS.
We have single OS with ASIC, a huge advantage to accelerate half the function there, which gave each function like a five to 10 times better performance, lower cost, and also and more function integrate together. For the ASIC, it's not only take $1 billion to invest, but also economy of scale working with Fortinet. A lot of people ask me question, why other company don't want to do ASIC? They need big investment, minimum five to 10 years, cost $1 billion. Once we have the economy of scale, we have about 60% market share on the unit shipment. That's also more benefit for us because not only the bigger yield per chip, but also each chip cost will be lower when they have the quantity.
We already reached the threshold, which we suddenly see the benefit making other competitor more difficult to catch up because all the quantity we have. You can see this show up on the right side is about last eight years. You see the product revenue growth, the unit shipment growth. We feel with the supply chain issue come up now. The story we have five years ago may repeating again because we have a much better inventory management. We have a better control on the manufacture, production, operation, and which right now a lot of competitors starting out of the stock of the product. We are the only ones still can ship in that give us advantage get into a lot of white space to replace a lot of competitors.
This is a time we feel we gain in market share, and we can grow faster than competitors. We are the number one, the most deployed, most validated SD-WAN. It's a single OS compared to network security, compared to the SASE. The only SD-WAN now using ASIC to accelerate gives us better performance, better cost, and easy to manage. This is also a huge advantage. The SD-WAN market kind of grows a little bit slow now, but we do see we gain in market share very, very quickly because a lot of other SD-WAN players, because they are being acquired by the other companies, they kind of slow down on the R&D side. They also kind of stay behind on the new functions needed.
That's also why we kind of not only launched this SD-WAN, but also the new bundle service, very easy to transition to SASE. That's tied to the SASE advantage we have. That's why using this number three kind of more easy. It's 1/3 cost and three-in-one basic network security SD-WAN and SASE in the same OS, in the same system. The three times size of total addressable market, which none of our competitors right now address, whether on-premise SASE, the sovereign SASE, and also in the cloud SASE. That's where we see it's a much bigger total addressable market for us, probably three times larger than competitors. It's 1/3 cost and also very easy migrate, much shorter sale cycle. That's the reason also last quarter, the unified SASE grew 40% year-over-year, more than double the market growth rate.
This is the investment we have not only will be for like SASE, but also AI. We also have invested $1 billion in all this infrastructure, including AI, all these things there. We have our DPU farm, we have our own AI model, we have our own kind of SASE data center, we have our own kind of, we call the Fortistacks to make it more secure. There's also like email security using this. There's like a web content security using this. A lot of service behind this infrastructure, much broader benefit for Fortinet beyond the SASE. That's also one of the differentiation. I don't see any of our competitor invest billions of dollars into this infrastructure.
Besides the stock buyback, which probably close to $10 billion, there's also we spend a few billion dollars on building the infrastructure in the 15 years. secure operation, we cover, that's more than half the products related to secure operation. It's all AI-enabled. The other thing really, because we have about 40 products in the secure operation side, it's a very, very fragmented market. But for us, most of product is all homegrown or internal development. That's from day one, they integrate, automate together. That also makes it easier to use the AI to enable all this and working together with other products, especially the FortiGate, FortiOS. The benefits are very, very easy to understand, like response in seconds and shrinking the attack surface and much better, easier operate and lower cost.
Quantum computing, we actually leading the market. We already shipping five years ago. Compared to some of our competitor just announcing some quantum. This we already shipping, and also we are kind of the biggest market share for us really is the government, the financial services. They all leverage this quantum computing already, this technology we have. That's where the FortiOS already shipping five years ago. We believe we dominate this market. The other part probably will be good growth, also leverage a new ASIC chip come up this year, is the secure AI infrastructure. We kinda able to secure all the five layers of our AI.
Besides, we also secure the biggest AI company, and at the same time, whether from OT security cover the energy and also the chip level security, at the same time the infrastructure side AI model. We also develop own model there and also a lot of application. That's where we feel we're in the best position to secure the AI infrastructure itself. Besides, we are the company we believe mostly leverage or using AI internally. Every department, every function, every position, we want people to use AI. Feel free to talk to some of the people here, and they will give you example how we use AI, whether internally or using helping partner.
We feel a company will keep up all this innovation and keep up all this long-term investment will drive the company long-term growth, going forward. With that, let me transfer to Anthony.
All right. Thank you, Ken. The next section of our short presentation here is just to walk over the business attributes of Fortinet, mainly around our fast-growing market opportunity, our sustainable competitive advantages, a diversified business model, as well as the customer journey, and then of course, our strong business model that drives significant free cash flow. First up, large and fast-growing addressable market. You've all seen this slide before. These are the strategic and go-to-market focus of Fortinet. We're focused on three primary pillars, secure networking, unified SASE, and SecOps. Secure networking, this remains the foundation of our business, driven by FortiGate firewalls and the convergence of networking and security. Unified SASE, this is a high-growth opportunity where we're integrating SD-WAN and cloud security into a single platform, providing consistent security, flexible deployment across hybrid multi-cloud, and lower TCO. Then finally, SecOps.
This pillar focuses on AI-driven security operations to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. As you saw in 2025, we outgrew each of these markets. As we outlaid in our reaffirmed three- to five -year model, we expect to grow 12% or above, continuing to outgrow these markets. These are large opportunities totaling over $300 billion. Even as a Leader within these spaces, we currently hold less than 20% of the market share in these highly fragmented segments. This provides an enormous opportunity for us to upsell and cross-sell our customer base. Now let's talk a little bit about secular tailwinds to our business. As you all know, security spending remains a high priority amongst organizations worldwide. Beyond that, Fortinet also has some particular attributes that we find valuable in calling out. One is just the convergence of security networking.
As Ken pointed out this morning, demand for secure networking is rapidly growing and overtaking the traditional networking segment. As of 2026, we hold a 55% unit market share in firewalls, and we're outperforming the broader secure networking market. You've got consolidation trends. Basically, customers are looking to reduce complexity. They're replacing disparate point products with our integrated platform. Finally, an evolving threat landscape, and this is an important point that helps drive durable growth. The move toward multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures and work from home has created a highly fragmented environment, but there are some particular opportunities that Fortinet has, some unique opportunities, with our differentiated approach. Again, the threat landscape is evolving. Attackers are increasing their speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks against an increasingly distributed enterprise environment.
A couple of these opportunities we wanted to highlight is OT. We've been in the OT market for a while. Beyond that, we have some early innings opportunities such as sovereign SASE, AI, quantum, and then finally, as Ken pointed out, the edge is becoming increasingly important as well. These are unique opportunities for Fortinet's platform to address, and we're taking advantage of these opportunities by leveraging our strong differentiation versus peers. I would consider them to be greenfield opportunities. Let's walk you through a couple of them. First is OT. There's a couple of secular tailwinds within the secular tailwind we can go over. There's the surge in connected devices. This is the proliferation of IoT and connection of previously air-gapped industrial assets. There's IT/OT convergence, where organizations are increasingly moving toward converged architectures underneath the CISO.
There's regulatory compliance with increasing standards. They're needing to adopt more robust OT security controls. Finally, there's just modernization cycles where there's legacy equipment that can't handle software or is either unsecured that needs to be updated. This is, as we've talked about, is over $1 billion for us in terms of growth. We've highlighted on the earnings call, it's been growing 20% or more. We distinguish our OT platform through a combination of proprietary hardware, a unified operating system, and a long-term investment that peers have yet to match. We feel good about this opportunity. Next is sovereign SASE. It's a key driver of our SASE pillar. This model is entirely built on FortiOS, which enables providers to deliver localized high-performance security services at approximately 1/3 the cost of competing solutions.
We believe the TAM for this opportunity increases the SASE market opportunity, making it much larger when you include sovereign deployments because they address a segment in which organizations are increasingly need to be full control over the data residency and routing. We've been particularly successful here in the public sector and service provider markets where data localization is a mandate, namely Europe and Middle East as of today. Next up is the topic of the day, which is artificial intelligence. We view this as a multi-factor, multi-vector tailwind to our business, that spans, infrastructure where AI is built, protecting the application that use it, and leveraging AI to automate global security operations.
Again, the tailwinds to this business are infrastructure upgrades to accommodate for LLMs and AI, new AI attack surface, faster, more sophisticated threats from lower-level actors, and then just increasing east-west traffic related to AI traffic. How are we addressing this? Well, this is an early innings opportunity, but at the same time, we're securing the AI data center. This focuses on the infrastructure, and we believe this is a significant opportunity in providing the throughput and low latency required to secure lateral east-west traffic. We're securing AI applications. This focuses on the software and logic layer, where we're protecting organizations from risks associated to LLMs. Finally, our AI-enabled solutions. This involves using AI to automate the detection, investigation, or mediation of threats.
Our AI-driven SecOps pillar or opportunity is currently probably the largest near-term AI revenue driver, with billings for AI-driven SecOps pillar growing 22% for the full year 2025. This is a unique opportunity where we feel the tailwinds far outweigh any risks in this segment, and we're addressing that and have been addressing through our AI patent portfolio, as well as getting out ahead of the market in terms of our ASIC development, which provides a high throughput opportunity. With that, I'll pass it over to our CFO, Christiane Ohlgart.
Thank you. Thank you for coming. I think it's a great opportunity for everybody to see our tech in action in the TechExpo, and I hope you will make good use of it and talk to our engineers because there's a lot of exciting stuff that we're announcing here. What are our sustainable competitive advantages? You know, Ken has talked about it. It's the ASIC, and we've built it into our products and consolidated functions. Why does it matter to our customers? Because it makes our products more affordable. That's a key advantage that we continue to develop on, and Ken already mentioned we will have a launch this year. We announced today FortiOS 8.0.
8.0 comes with a lot of new AI-related security features, and the benefit is across our portfolio because FortiOS spans across our products. We also have improvements for SASE and integration with SASE, and we have some new SD-WAN features that we are bringing out with 8.0. A lot of innovation for our existing customers and of course new customers that they can use. There are also some features for operational technology. Very important that we continue to innovate with our FortiOS that is so integral to our products. You've seen this slide, we talked about it, I talked about it this morning. Why is it so important? Because Fortinet has a unique approach to how we deliver cloud solutions, whether it's SASE or other cloud solutions that Ken talked about.
The fact that we have a multi-delivery strategy with our own data centers, with colos, and with cloud providers gives us the ability to be fast when we need to spin up something for customers that are buying in regions where we don't have our own data centers yet. It also allows us to manage the economics of our delivery through our own infrastructure that is purpose-built and of course more efficient than going through cloud providers. Very important for us, and we continue to build out our own data centers and colos. You've seen this slide. Why is this so important to continue to talk about diversification? Because it gives us a lot of benefits. I talked about this morning about financial stability.
We have a lot of different customer sizes that we need to cater to, so it means we need to have very complex scenarios that we can address for our customers, but we also need to have simple ways of operating our solutions. This is where we are successful in large enterprises, in small enterprises, in public sector. You know, we sell into over 100 or over 200 countries. We have customers in over 200 countries and in many industries that are regulated that have a lot of retail or other outlets. Of course, public sector is a big one for us, which is highly regulated and very important so that we have all our products certified.
This diversification gives us a lot of intel, and it also gives us a lot of financial stability because these markets may go at different speeds. One area that we've been focused on is to move upmarket. Over the last three years, we've grown with a 14% CAGR for deals greater than $1 million, which shows you that we are getting traction in the enterprise, in the G 2000 segment, and we continue to put a big focus on that. How do we do that? First of all, we have our expanding platform approach. We start typically, and you see this with our customer journeys in unified networking.
We add endpoint cloud solutions, SASE on top, and now we are also launching a simplified licensing to make it easier for customers to adopt more of our platform. Let me talk about a couple of customer journeys. You know that we've talked about the upsell from the firewall to SD-WAN to SASE for a long time. We see that happen more and more. SD-WAN is still super relevant for us because this is where customers can benefit from the advantages and also simplify their network, get more visibility, and save a lot of money. Because most of the SD-WAN providers are added on top of their infrastructure, and Fortinet is embedded. It's an efficient way for customers to improve their network infrastructure.
As a result of our upsell opportunities, you know that our billings mix has shifted a little bit away from secure networking towards unified SASE and security operations over the last couple of years. Typically, unified SASE and security operations would be more service-centric, and we have a ton of services that we sell in these growth engines. What we also see that at Fortinet, many of our customers benefit from the various form factors that we have. While we started with unified SASE and the FortiSASE SaaS solution, now we have significant success with sovereign SASE as well. Our customers really embrace our products, not always our service bundles. I talked about it this morning. Key services are important to enable the products for full security.
We do sell FortiCare and FortiGuard services with almost all our products. Let me talk about a couple of customer wins. This one is about a Major League sports franchise owner, and we didn't start on the firewall side. We actually started with a mobile IP solution. They added on more of our products as SASE SD-WAN to get full visibility for their network and protect the IP from all the scouts in the stadium. This is another example of a customer which is similar from a solution set and a journey of the customer I talked about this morning, but it's not the same customer. It's a national government who needed to modernize their MPLS infrastructure, purchased SD-WAN and FortiSASE, and created a unified management console for seamless security integration and management.
They had significant cost savings, and that's the typical benefit that we see for our customers, that when they go to Fortinet, they can save a lot of money because it's fully integrated, it reduces their cost of operations, and it's fewer vendors. The consolidation team also plays a big role. Back to some numbers. We want to make sure that you're all aware of the targets that we have for the next three to five years. We believe we will outgrow the market. Based on our weighted averages of the markets we are playing in, we believe it's at greater than 12% CAGR. We continue to have good margins and follow the Rule of 45.
Of course, we continue to expect to deliver high mid-teens adjusted free cash flows based on our business model, which is generating a lot of cash flows. Here's the Rule of 45 that we've pledged for and targeting for this year and also for the future. Where are we? For the last couple of years, our CAGR was 13%, so right in the wheelhouse of what we are estimating for the future from a total revenue perspective. Our adjusted free cash flow was a little bit higher, 16%, and we believe our business model supports these type of growth rates for the future. I know a lot of analysts think we should not grow that fast, or we will not grow that fast.
Why do we believe, why are we super comfortable that we are growing faster than the market? Secure networking TAM is not growing as fast, but we have unique benefits that allow us to grow faster. First of all, we have two other segments, Unified SASE and SecOps, which are big TAMs that we can upsell our customer base on. We have an expanding attack surface that allows us to capture more market, and we believe our technology is superior, which allows us to capture market share gains. From that perspective, we have confidence that our product revenue midterm growth is gonna be between 10%-15%. These are some updated numbers on share repurchases through our 10-K filing. This quarter, we've already repurchased $471 million.
We still have $1.3 billion of buyback authorization. Since our IPO, we've returned $9 billion, which is quite significant, and we still have a good cash balance. I think shareholders should be happy with how we allocate our capital between innovation and shareholders. What are the key takeaways? We are operating in a growing TAM. We continue to innovate, and you can see this here at the event, and you can ask our innovators in a second in the Q&A as well. Our foundations for growth have been the same. It's our ASIC for our product, which optimizes the use cases for the product. It is our FortiOS, which spans across multiple solutions. It's our cloud delivery as well as our constant innovation and investments, whether it's in AI, whether it's in quantum, whether it's in OT.
We understand what the market requires, where the risks are, and where we can benefit our customers. Really innovative and always customer-oriented, customer value outcome-based. As we said, we have a large customer base on the firewall side, so we have tremendous upsell opportunities for all our products, not only for FortiSASE, because we have a significant product portfolio, and we are constantly innovating in all our products. You know we have strong growth and profitability for the past, and we assume that we will follow the Rule of 45 in the future. That's a good setup for investors. Now let's get to the Q&A because I'm sure that with all the information you can get here, you want to hear from all the executives as well. Welcome. Come on.
Yeah. Give us a minute or two to transition stage. Ask the exec team to step up and join us on the stage.
Okay, gotcha. What? Cool. An ice [inaudible].
No, you need to bring it down, Jackie.
All right, with that, we welcome the exec team up to the stage. I'd like to kick things off. I know everyone's excited to ask questions, but I'd like to tee one up for Robert May.
We wanna target him.
Yeah. Like to pick on him. What are you most excited about today's announcements at Accelerate?
Well, I guess, yeah, there's, I mean, hundreds of things, right? I mean, even in the TechExpo, there's over 60 Fortinet booths, so if you're there, you'll see there's just, you know, really hundreds of things that we're talking about. I think the top ones you can really look to the kind of the two press releases we issued this morning. You know, of course, AI is a super big topic here, across many different things, but if you wanna just summarize at the top level, you know, there's AI for security, which means that we use AI across the product portfolio. You can see this reflected in many Agentic AI agents throughout the product line. One of the most exciting ones is around really being able to replicate what the SOC analysts do in the SOC platform.
Really providing a full ability to do a full analysis there. There's also several innovations around products and services that are helping customers secure their AI deployments. This includes the use of shadow AI or other AI tools in the enterprise. It also includes securing the AI infrastructure and identifying and controlling those Agentic AI communications in the network. Other areas that we announced this morning is around, of course, SASE and SD-WAN. There's a new SD-WAN bundle which has, you know, many different management components integrated together, as well as, you know, including SASE starter pack, allowing customers to quickly and easily get SASE up and running.
Also a lot of innovation around bringing all of the capabilities from our public cloud SASE into the sovereign SASE pro lineup there. A couple of other things maybe to highlight, one would be around quantum. Really a lot of, you know, we've had QKD and PQC for quite a long time already, whereas other vendors actually don't have, you know, one or both of those. We really also added in 8.0 a lot of extension around securing both the management plane and further extension of the data plane. That includes remote access, which could be remote VPN access or even remote access to SASE, okay? Also includes SSL deep inspection. So some things that a lot of our competitors actually don't have.
On the SOC side, maybe a couple of things to highlight would be some further consolidation. As we know, there's a lot of tools and different vendors within the security operations. On the SOC platform part, bringing together some of the core features and making it more accessible to larger sets of customers. Also on the endpoint side, unifying further several of those standalone endpoint agents that you see in the market under a single license and single management plane. These are some of the kind of top highlights there.
That's great. Let's go ahead and move to the crowd. Aaron's gonna pick it well here.
Hey, great. Hey. It's on? Yes. Okay. Hey, thanks everyone. Saket Kalia from Barclays. Really appreciate you hosting this session and having us here at Accelerate. It's always a great event. Also great to have the whole team here, so I'm gonna ask a couple of you kinda the same question, but maybe to start with you, Christiane. There's clearly a lot of noise right now just around higher memory input costs, right? Which then, of course, carries forward to pricing. The question that I get, and I'm sure a lot of us get here in the room is, how customers could potentially change their purchase decisions just around kinda that higher pricing, right?
That question comes up versus how you... Versus what was a very healthy product guide. The question for you is, how much flexibility do you feel like you've left in product in case that customer behavior changes? Since I've got Trevor, Pedro, and Joe on the stage, I'm gonna ask, are you seeing any of that behavior change from customers given the higher prices right now? A lot there. Does that make sense?
To answer your question, I think there are two different scenarios. There is new projects that require new hardware or expansion, and customers won't be able to wait. There's the ability for customers to maybe wait for price improvements when they have existing buy awards. We don't really see yet a slowdown, yeah. We believe that Fortinet, and Ken said it earlier, is in a good place. We have good relationships on the supply chain, on the component manufacturing delivery side and we are actively working through also changing our component set up to be a little bit more flexible, yeah.
No. I've not seen any difference right now. I think it's too early, Frank.
In Canada we're starting to see actually some customers asking us if we can deliver. We can. Actually we're taking advantage of that.
Yeah, same thing holds true in the U.S. It is a bit of a compelling event in some areas where companies can save a substantial amount of money from when we raised our prices on March 2nd by pulling opportunities in further, even if they don't need the firewalls today, they'll have it staged in a warehouse so they can save a material amount of money.
Thanks.
Great. If you could say your name and firm name, that would be great.
Maya? Okay, great. Thank you very much. Gray Powell with BTIG. This might just be me, but it sounds like you're more positive on the SD-WAN side of the market today than you were at least six months ago. Can you maybe just talk more about what's driving that optimism? And then on the secure service edge side of universal SASE, what are some of the main product gaps you've closed against the likes of Palo Alto and Zscaler, and just how should we think about the opportunity there over the next 12 months? Is that something that could accelerate within the portfolio?
On the SD-WAN front, I run U.S. sales. I've been in this role, running all the U.S. since January 1st of 2025, and I will tell you that the momentum that we have with SD-WAN is off the charts, across all customer sizes, some of the most demanding banks in the world, some of the most demanding retailers in the world. I'm on the road a lot. I'm an executive sponsor for a handful of very large retailers, as well as a company that processes, you know, $1 trillion worth of transactions through their network, and guess what? They're betting on Fortinet, they're betting on SD-WAN, right? If you look at SD-WAN and our number one dominance, as Ken said earlier, you can leverage that and leverage FortiOS, right?
If you look at SASE, I wasn't at Fortinet five to six years ago, but it's eerily similar to what SD-WAN is today. We will absolutely be number one in SASE in less than two years. It's the power of FortiOS. We have a massive install base, to Christiane's point, to cross-sell into, and we're just seeing tremendous momentum. If you can solve for SD-WAN in some of these very complex large accounts, you can go down market. We're seeing great success with SD-WAN across all the segments inside the U.S.
Let me add to the SD-WAN momentum. We've been the Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for a while now, and that benefits us quite tremendously when we go into RFPs. There are still a ton of companies that have SD-WAN as a separate security component where it's on top of their firewall estate or their router estate. Understanding that with Fortinet they can combine it is still an extremely important selling point. When we go into EBCs with larger customers and explain how our FortiSASE works, and they understand that it's an extension from SD-WAN, and they can actually use the same policies, it's extremely powerful. It's sometimes that a SASE opportunity also pulls SD-WAN into the whole deal cycle.
Yeah, just to echo what Christiane just said, I've been talking to a number of customers. We have two vendors for firewall and SD-WAN, and if you present and explain the cost benefit of our single OS solution, it's very compelling. Very compelling. When you have the same OS with SASE as well, and talking with a number of the salespeople out there, it used to be that firewall was our wedge into customers, now we've got multiple different wedges in terms of firewall, SD-WAN. I think you'll see SASE more and more as we have closed the gaps and functionality for enterprise.
It just gives us more opportunities to get into customers and expand across that common OS in those three areas over time because the renewal for SD-WAN may be different than firewall or vice versa, but once we get in, it gives us an opportunity to expand across those three different offerings.
Yeah, let me just one point. SD-WAN. SD-WAN actually is the first routing network protocol. You can reroute traffic based on application. It's very different than the previous routing protocol. What's unique about Fortinet is really we have SD-WAN built in with a Wi-Fi control in the FortiOS, built in with a security firewall in OS, built in with SASE. Also, kinda using FortiLink to control all this switch and Wi-Fi point. It's not only applied to the WAN, but also applied to the LAN. The local area network can also manage east-west traffic besides the north-south traffic. That's the WAN traffic. It does have a unique advantage, can easily expand both internally and externally. That's where there's not much study about how SD-LAN or some other things there, but we believe the FortiOS is super OS.
Can manage not just the networking but also security managed together. Robert May is a tech expert. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's why you see it's a huge advantage, can go beyond the traditional SD-WAN market. Also other top five SD-WAN players all come from acquisition, which they kind of slow down and also kind of keeping losing market share. That's why we feel SD-WAN has a lot of potential going forward because not only when it manage the WAN traffic, but also LAN traffic, which also eventually a lot of AI traffic also within data center can use in this SD-WAN or kind of software-defined networking to manage using the FortiOS.
Good afternoon, Fatima Boolani from Citi. Thank you for hosting us. Ken and Robert, now maybe a jump ball for you just with respect to the FortiOS 8.0 release, clearly a significant and consequential amount of innovation as it relates to AI enabling and AI integrating or rather integrating AI and infusing it across the portfolio. My question is just around the fact that this being a 8.0 operating system release, historically, what have you seen with respect to customers upgrading to the newest OS release? The related question to that is, you know, what type of a hardware refresh or an upgrade cycle is necessarily going to be a prerequisite for the average customer to enjoy the benefits of 8.0? I have a follow-up as well, if you wouldn't mind.
Okay. I can start maybe. So maybe to answer the second part of your question first, there is no hardware prerequisite necessarily for 8.0 this time. Yeah, like it's common features across like existing platforms. In terms of, let's say, the first part of your question was?
How long does it take?
The upgrade process. Yeah, so I mean, there's always. I think there's kind of three phases, right? There's gonna be the early adopters that wanna take advantage of the new features, and we'll definitely see that as beneficial with things like the bundle options that have additional components in there, as well as, of course, the AI security. They wanna get that visibility that they're missing today. The second part is when there is new hardware models coming out, they may adopt 8.0 earlier as part of that shipping version. So this would be a second wave that would come. Then of course, other customers may take more time just based on their internal processes or their kind of standard operating procedures, for upgrades there, yeah.
I appreciate that it's a good segue into the follow-up that I wanted to get your perspective on. One of the themes in some of your opening remarks was just around more flexibility around licensing and pricing modalities in your customer engagement, as well as perhaps your engagement with some of your larger service provider partners. I was hoping you could go into a little bit more granularity as it relates to the SASE starter packs, for instance. You know, how much of that is dramatically incremental and how you're seeing that, you know, show up positively in pipeline activity, conversion and uplift realization. Any additional detail around some of the pivots or changes or refinements on pricing that you're rolling out over the course of this year. Thank you.
I can let maybe the sales to talk about the pipeline part. Let's say from the technical side, what we try to do with the bundling is make it easier to, like, there's a lot of different individual components. We make it easier to adopt all of them together. Then what we kind of see is that oftentimes that starter pack is useful for the internal team to get going on SASE, 'cause oftentimes it's the IT or those teams that need to get it POC'd and up and running first, and then they roll it to the company. It's kind of a multi-stage rollout in that way.
From a pipeline perspective, I agree that Trevor said earlier that it's eerily similar to the SD-WAN adoption we're seeing in SASE in that customers back then would only have to enable a certain configuration, and all of a sudden they have SD-WAN working. Here we're doing the same thing, making it easier for the customers to adopt SASE without overhauling the whole thing, without introducing a new technology, or leveraging the knowledge that they have of the FortiOS on the FortiGates, on the Wi-Fi, on the switching, and all of the ecosystem. The barrier of entry is getting lower and lower with these bundles, and obviously customers are reacting very positively to it.
Yeah. Maybe I can add that, what we're seeing now with the maturity of our SASE products, that customers are coming to us to, yeah, work on SD-WAN projects, right? Because there's still a big need to reduce total cost of ownership and ROI with respect to the MPLS, let's say, backbones. Seeing that our SASE solution has matured so quickly in such a short timeframe are asking us for both, right, integrated into one package, one RFP or whatever. That's very interesting to see the quick adoption of the different bundles together.
Okay, Brian Essex from JP Morgan. Thank you again for doing all this. This is an amazing event to talk to customers and partners. I just, based on some conversations that I had, Christiane , I had a question on one of your favorite topics. From a services perspective, one of the things that we're hearing from customers and partners or some customers coming back for end of service saying, "Look, you know, we wanna extend these agreements.
Some partners talking about extending those one to two years. I'd want to understand how you're managing those relationships. Now I would imagine that the extended service agreements have more expensive price tag associated with them. Would love to know, like, what's a typical uplift if you do decide to extend a service agreement, and how are you managing those relationships throughout that extended service cycle?
I think I need a clarification. Are you talking about extended services after end of support?
So-
I mean, in general, end of support is end of support, right? There are customers that may ask for long time before anything is end of support. They ask for a life cycle guarantee for certain years, right? Then if we do that, we sell that we sell a premium support because we need to guarantee a longer life cycle for these customers independent of when we declare it end of support, no? That's one aspect which is more happens more often in OT because these investment life cycles are long and customers want to make sure they secure their investment for five, seven, eight years, no? That's one area. Other than that, upsell of services is dependent on the type of service, no?
Of course, any customer expects volume discounts, so large customers may pay a little bit less or get higher discounts than others have.
Okay. What you're saying is if something's coming up for end of support in, say, 2027, that's the date, you can't push that back?
I mean, in general, we don't. For certain customers, we may have an extension, in rare cases, yeah.
Got it.
It may be pre-negotiated that a customer has a pre-agreed timeframe until we support them, even though for the rest of the business we may say it's end of support.
Got it. Super helpful. Thank you.
Thanks for taking my question. Max Gamperl from Goldman Sachs. You've talked about one of the drivers of AI workloads being the growing need for internal segmentation. From what you're seeing with customers today, how meaningful has that been as a demand driver so far? How meaningful do you think the need for network capacity tied to AI could become over the next few years?
Question. Who wants to answer that one?
Me? Network capacity, you mean internally?
Yes, sir.
In my region, I haven't seen a big requirement, but then Latin America is always behind in these things. Customers are not too worried about it. I think the worry about around AI is how we can do it securely, how we can use it securely. Customers are still very reticent of using it, how we're gonna control it. Those are the main questions. I haven't heard a customer come to us worried about his network capacity at this time. I don't know if you guys are seeing it.
Yeah.
What? Data center.
Um-
Yeah.
Data, data center capacity.
Okay.
Customer capacity.
Okay.
Socket.
Data center, I think, again, in my region, we're seeing sort of move away from the cloud. A lot of companies, because what I just said, and worrying about where my data is going, are heavily considering deploying their own models internally. They're looking at data center capacity. Again.
Yeah, it's very similar in the U.S.
Hi, Joshua Tilton, Wolfe Research. I actually wanna follow up on that last question, but maybe a different lens and a little bit bigger picture. I don't even know the right way to ask this. I guess imagine five years from now, the agentic workforce is a reality and everyone you see sitting here is kind of replaced by a little cute little agent widget doing work for us. How does the baseline level of network traffic change from where it is today to that future? Is network traffic gonna 10x, gonna 100x, gonna 1,000x? And what does that mean for a business like the firewall market that prices for throughput?
I just look at my Anthropic account and see the number of tokens going back and forth. You'll see, you know, even mundane work that we do today, if you really look at what we're using, it's orders of magnitude more in this, the traffic and the tokens that we're moving back and forth. Now, if we're talking about an army of agents, every single one of them being able to communicate between themselves, right? Acting at speed, I do think that that's gonna scale, and it's gonna scale dramatically in terms of requirements, yes.
Well, I think maybe.
Yes.
Yeah. I think maybe what you're trying to ask is around where the traffic shifts, right? Like traditional SaaS services, everything go to the cloud, and so you need to keep building this bigger and bigger and bigger data center, right? With the move towards Agentic AI and, you know, with MCP and agent-to-agent communication, that data traffic actually, or the traffic shifts to the edge, right? Between the remote endpoints and inside the enterprise environment. The need for on-prem, the need for scaling that up goes up. I think that's also kind of what Wilbert was asking as well, right?
when we take the human out of the picture. Right? We check email every so often. The agent is gonna check it real time, right? There's again, a very different pattern of use when it's an agentic entity doing the thing rather than us, right? We have other things to go attend to, and if the agent is just doing that, it's gonna continue to do that continuously, right? You'll see definitely an increase.
Maybe just a completely unrelated follow-up question. In the presentation today or just being out on the floor, like, it's very clear that you guys have a ton of products, regardless of how you wanna go to market with them. You know, I think there was a stat that the SecOps team has 40 offerings that you talked about when you were on the stage. How do you ensure that, you know, your sellers, your partners are really capable of selling such a broad swath of offerings? Like, why are so many offerings not capable of driving a CAGR above and beyond 12% rate that you talked about long term?
On the enablement side, we have specializations from a training perspective, so certain partners are specialized now. I think from a why are we not growing much faster? It's scale, right? The partners have existing vendor relationships, and I think it's us driving customer awareness about our products is something that has to happen before we can grow faster.
Junaid Siddiqui, Truist Securities. Regarding the quantum-safe enhancements that you rolled out earlier today, I had a question in terms of like, what are customers thinking? What are they asking? Because, you know, we've heard about quantum for some time now. How would you say you're distinguishing yourself versus some of the competitors?
Well, for the distinguishing part, I mean, even what we've supported before the announcement today distinguishes us just having the combination of QKD and PQC, like, to secure basically, the encryption. Now, what we added or what we announced today was kind of three things, right? One was that connection from the remote endpoint to where it's going. Could be SASE or could be remote access, right? This is one part of the data plane traffic. Another part of the data plane traffic is that deep SSL inspection, right? This is also now added as a secured. The third one was around the management plane, full quantum-safe encryption as well. These are three definite differentiators overall.
To your question. I mean, because of the strength in financial services and in public sector, quantum has been a topic for us for a longer time. We've had it, and certain customers have deployed it. I think now there's more awareness because the ability to decrypt certain things is coming nearer. So more customers and in other industries are more aware and asking these questions. But we've had it in the FortiGate for a longer period, and certain customers have been using it.
Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Just on the OT security business, you know, obviously a generational amount of building of data centers right now and just ways in which you guys are finding, avenues, you know, with expanding beyond enterprise customers, to get into that market, or to get into that opportunity. You know, noted Armis as, you know, one of your major sponsors here. Just kind of any traction with that partnership or change, just given their pending sale. That's it.
Wanna talk about Armis?
Yeah. On Armis, it's funny, they have their sales kickoff here in Las Vegas this week as well. They're a good partner of ours. They are using our FortiGate as a collector for their OT visibility. We really like those guys and it's early days in the partnership, but great partnership, complements us very well on the OT side, which is obviously a big focus of ours. I guess the first question was about capitalizing on the data center build-out. I think we see a lot of demand for our solutions that we've gone through in AI data centers and elsewhere. I think it's just another one of those durable growth drivers that Anthony was talking about earlier.
Hi, Joe Gallo from Jefferies. Thanks for the question, and thanks for the event. I wanna follow up on Josh's second question. You walk around, there's a ton of optimism. You know, you have this really broad software portfolio. It sounds like you're investing for channel awareness. You said it's gonna take time for that to kinda ramp. Can you help me marry that with, like, your guidance for services revenue this year, which I think embeds an acceleration in services billings, and just kinda your confidence and your visibility into that? Thank you.
Yeah, I think we have talked about our services revenue before, right? It's based on the product traction that we see, we believe, and the new services that we're announcing, that we're focusing on. We believe that we are confident with the guidance.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, Catharine Trebnick, Rosenblatt. You have a broad range of products. Is there any plans, when I talk to the channel, it's really interesting, to simplify your messaging across this broad range of products, make it more digestible to maybe speed up even some of the deals that you're doing within the channel? Thanks.
You know, sometimes the messaging depends on the target customer. You know, I think with this broad range of products and the vendor consolidation movement that we see, when we're targeting kind of mid-market SMB, it seems like a really good opportunity to simplify that messaging around that platform. You know, that's a big opportunity for us to sell not only firewall, but sell beyond the firewall. We're seeing, you know, big opportunity there. We're doing well, and we're just scratching the surface there. I think you're right. In certain markets, simplifying that message can be really effective for us around the different products. I think another.
You know, embedded in your question perhaps, there's so much opportunity with all these solutions, it's an exercise in prioritization, and we need to figure out where the top priority areas are to focus on. It's a good problem to have. You know, we've got great solutions across the board, and we just have to prioritize the solutions that are the real, big opportunities for us.
I shouldn't sit next to Ittai 'cause he turned my mic off when I wasn't talking. It's a rough crowd. Keith Bachman from BMO. Thanks for doing this. Good afternoon. I wanted to ask two questions. The first is maybe, Ken, for you. As you think about the type of workloads, the type of customers in the SASE market that you have won over the last 12 months or so, how do you think that changes, or how do you want that to change in terms of the competitive dynamics versus Zscaler, Netskope, and others, and Palo Alto? What needs to happen from a product functionality perspective in order to grow your capabilities against the established incumbents?
I think originally we designed the SASE more for service provider, and then we started launching our own kind of a SASE one and a half years ago, because we feel if we can do the things ourselves better, definitely it will be more easy to convince service provider, which we feel they are somehow a little bit slow. In the last, like, two and a half years, definitely from the coverage of the infrastructure, whether with all these cloud providers to colo data centers, you can see it's a big jump. Also, some of the function there, which also helping drive in the sovereign SASE. We see sovereign SASE starting to catch up. I do believe eventually sovereign SASE market probably bigger than this cloud-based SASE.
Also some customers starting to see the on-premise there, which none of our competitors, whether Palo Alto, Zscaler, have all these sovereign on-premise SASE solutions because they all depend on some cloud provider to offer some of the coverage, which probably would be. In the beginning, they have some advantage because cloud provider already established infrastructure. In the last two and half years, we see we catch up. We have more than 200 locations being covered by whether our own data center or co-lo or kind of cloud provider, which also we have one sort of cost. A lot of customer base more easy to migrate. That gave us more advantage right now. We do see quite some win cases over all these competitors you mentioned, like some example we gave out here.
It's all starting replacing some of the competitor. Still is a SASE still pretty fast-growing market, and I still feel there's a room for player. Long-term wise, we feel we have more advantage. Right now, whether you compare on the infrastructure side, whether compare to the function side, we feel we're probably the same or even ahead of all the competitor compared to, like, one to two years ago. Now that's also we see the acceleration of unified SASE. In like last quarter grow like 40%. It's faster than the previous quarter. Each quarter we see some kind of acceleration. That we feel the advantage starting building up and also the long-term investment starting paying back now.
Perfect. Thank you. Christiane, maybe I'll direct one to you too. In the longer term margin framework, it looks like you're allowing for some compression in margins from where you've historically been on the operating margin side at least. Recognizing there's probably conservatism in there in some measure, but what would you want to have some flexibility in terms of spending envelopes, that might precipitate some margin compression as we look longer term? That's it for me. Thank you.
At the beginning of the year, you never know what happens, and we see tons of volatility right now, whether it's the U.S. dollar or so. Why do we commit to the Rule of 45? Because it's a good combination of being able to invest and grow. Now, invest and go to market, which then gives us scale over time and should help margins. But initially, from a revenue perspective, the revenues may not kick in right away. No. That's where the current framework comes in.
Hi. Madeline Brooks , Bank of America. Thanks so much for taking the question. The question is, if we look at the growth trajectory for the long-term targets, it assumes Fortinet's taking share in each of the markets. A lot of the really compelling value propositions of Fortinet aren't new, like your ASIC technology, FortiOS, that really tight integration. What now is the catalyst to be able to take market share and really you know, get business from competitors, even though you've had these value propositions kind of baked inherently into the Fortinet business model for a while?
Thank you.
Definitely more sales marketing investment. We have the sales team leadership team here. I say some of our competitor definitely invest much more in the sales market than Fortinet. We are more invest in some technology, some long-term kind of infrastructure and the ASIC, all the other things there. I think it's with the size we have, I think going forward, definitely we'll see more investment go towards some sales marketing side. Maybe we'll have the team try to see. I think on the other side, we also kind of probably the most kind of profitable company in the cybersecurity space right now. We also have this very healthy margin, which we feel give us a lot of long-term benefit.
On the other side, sales marketing, we kind of grow in a pace we feel maintain healthy margin, at same time gaining market share. We're not rush try to, "Hey, let's grow as fast as we can," doesn't matter what the margin. We do control the margin, which we make a healthy margin and still pretty profitable. Whether buyback share or kind of invest some long term there. On the other side, we do see the sales marketing starting also once we get bigger, us become more efficient and also kind of starting win over competitors now. Maybe we'll let the sales guys can see what they need.
Yeah, we're also hiring very fast f or the future. This is extremely important to build a stronger pipeline. We are fortunate to be able to have Ken's support in allowing us to continue to hire good salespeople across the board. We're seeing that we're gaining a lot of traction against you know, rivals from this perspective. It looks as though Fortinet is becoming from my perspective, at least from international, extremely attractive in terms of a company. I mentioned it this morning in the plenary. We have a great culture, and people are attracted by that, and I think that's a huge benefit for a company like ours.
You know, sometimes we're talking a lot of numbers and technology, but at the end of the day, you know, it's all about people and how people find themselves in companies. This is something that we've built thanks to the culture we have, and we always talk about this when we hire new sales and new people in the company.
To add to that, we are hiring a lot of direct order carrying salespeople from Cisco, from Palo Alto, CheckPoint, right? We've talked about it today. There isn't one cybersecurity company that can do all the things that we can do. Firewall, SD-WAN, SASE, all in one unified OS. I go on tons of sales calls. A common denominator, top three, through the lens of a CIO or a CISO, they're trying to do more business with fewer security and networking vendors. You're talking to a group on stage that works for one of the top five most viable security and networking companies in the world. There are 5,000+ security vendors in the market today. It's too many, right? I've had several meetings today with partners. They're trying to reduce their line cards. They're doubling down on Fortinet.
You know what? When we compete head to head with Palo Alto, when we got SD-WAN, we crushed them. Absolutely crushed them. We're replacing Cisco at scale, right? They're. I mean, the momentum in the U.S. is real. You know, when I came in on January 1st of 2025 in this role, we didn't have great growth in 2024. We absolutely crushed it. What we're doing is working. I talked about it in 2024, focus, urgency, accountability, right? Selling is a contact sport. Our people are moving. They're out in front of customers, they're out in front of partners, and we're in the early stages of a nine-inning game. I'll tell you what, there's never been a better time to be at Fortinet than now, right? Like I said, I'm on the road a lot.
I love going on calls and, you know, some of the feedback that I'm given by, "Holy cow, you can do firewall, SD-WAN, SASE, and all these other thing in one unified OS." It's a big thing.
Yeah, one thing we have now that we didn't have years ago is this, and Joe and Trevor alluded to this, the scale advantage.
This great momentum. When you think about the scale advantage, it's across multiple different areas in terms of the huge set of channel partners we have, the great sales force we have, the great access to threat intelligence that we have, and all of that gives us an advantage that we didn't have many years ago. If you look at our solution set, I think I'm gonna get this right. When I went back to our IPO prospectus, our total addressable market at the time was $5 billion. We have that in our IPO prospectus from 2009. Now, as you saw from Christiane's slide, it's over $300 billion. The solution set scale has broadened out tremendously since the IPO, in addition to all these other elements of this scale advantage.
We have the biggest companies in the world who are coming and wanting to do business with us. They wouldn't have picked up the phone when we called them, you know, 15 years ago. They're knocking at our door now. That gives us an advantage that we can hopefully capitalize on.
I just add a small detail. I think it goes back to the SASE question and the features. The ecosystem is bigger than any feature. Customers are buying into the platform, into the consolidation. Really, when they're looking into adding a new vendor just because of one feature, that's taking a back seat more and more. We're seeing customers being more intelligent and leveraging what they already have.
Maybe that one feature that is missing, we talk to Robert, and he goes and puts it in the product. Customers are more accepting of that and realizing that the value, long-term value that they get from the ecosystem is bigger than one specific feature they might get at one point in time from a single vendor.
Cool. Roger Boyd with UBS. Thanks for the question. Just on the SD-WAN competitive environment, we've seen a lot of the gen two SD-WAN competitors go through various stages of M&A over the past couple of years. I guess to what extent should we look at the past few quarters as really benefiting from strong SD-WAN replacement cycle? I think the real question is, if this is the case, shouldn't we expect that for some customers, SD-WAN to SASE is still a two-part journey, meaning a lot of the service upside is still in front of you. Does that make sense?
I think there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us in both. A lot of the SD-WAN solutions we did sell, at least in Latin America, Canada, were mostly networking. There's a huge opportunity to go back to these customers and sell the secure SD-WAN, which is it's been our messaging from the beginning, the consolidation of the two things, and that's obviously a stepping stone to then go to SASE. I think the opportunity ahead of us is massive.
Particularly on services.
Let Joe say it.
Over here. Hi. Ittai Kidron from Oppenheimer. Christiane , it sounds like based Trevor's comments, we should raise numbers on you right here, right now. So tell me how you feel about that. More specifically, can you be specific about the timing and the magnitude of price increases to your firewall portfolio? And then I have a follow-up.
The list price change went into effect on March second. But any quote that has a 30-day validity, so any quote that was done on the old list price would still be valid through the end of March.
Got it. Anything on the magnitude, roughly on average, how that evens out?
I mean, we said it at the earnings release. It was between 50% and 20% for certain select products.
Okay.
Not for all products.
Okay. Follow up on the flexibility on the licensing. You've talked about the starter packs as a way to be more flexible with customers and bundle, simplify. To my knowledge, you haven't done anything that looks like flex, like what CrowdStrike is doing or some other vendors are doing. Can you help me think about, you know, if you and I will talk six or 12 months from now, is there anything like that that can come along? You have such a big, massive portfolio. It feels like that.
We have flex licensing already. We have different ways of flexibility that customers can buy. That is already part of ours. Has been for a while.
Very good. Appreciate it.
Hi. Eric Heath from KeyBanc. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just come back, zoom out on more of a macro perspective. Contrasting this conference to last year, what do you think the sentiment is from customers, and what's the conversations like when it comes to AI? Are we starting to see, when you're talking to your customers, are they maturing along the AI spectrum? And where are we with maybe that opening up more cyber budget? Is any of that kind of coming up in conversations at all? And maybe the second part to that, a lot of stuff you talked about where Fortinet can help securing AI and all the tailwinds there, but, like, maybe where do you think you would see that materialize first in the portfolio? Thanks.
There's been a lot of work going on in the background, especially on the service providers building their DPU farms, right? That's been going on for the last 12 months, especially in international and EMEA. We have seen massive investments in some of the bigger service providers. Now they're coming to the table with us in looking how to secure those DPUs. There's a lot of interest in services that they're building, service stacks like DPU as a Service. That's where we feel extremely well-positioned in building out that security stack as a service, especially on the NVIDIA. We have this partnership with NVIDIA we announced a few weeks back.
We're seeing the first real massive, I would say, concrete projects on securing BlueField-3 DPU server farms. That is something that's super exciting for us. You know, we're seeing an extremely high opportunity there in working with these service providers. From an enterprise perspective, I think there's still a lot of confusion out there. There's a lot of companies who wanna do a lot of things with AI, but there's a lot of confusion. I think Pedro has some good insights here.
Yeah. I agree with you, Joe. I think companies are still very hesitant. I already mentioned a little bit earlier that everybody is worried about where the data is going. From an international perspective, the data sovereignty aspect of it, the sovereignty of the AI, it's a major conversation and discussion with governments all over. We're seeing massive investment in those areas as well. The geopolitics of these past few months have changed things quite dramatically. Governments especially are looking at having their own infrastructure, hosting their own models, and obviously putting those investments up front.
If I may add, I just had a meeting just before coming to this event with a Spanish government entity that they are working on healthcare frameworks for AI, and they're asking us for help. This is, you know, emblematic when a customer comes and says, "Can we go hand-in-hand and build this framework together, and then use that as a blueprint that we can replicate across the Spanish governments?" That's the type of conversations we're having today.
Hi there. It's Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. I've got one for Ken and Robert, and then one for Joe and Trevor. I guess in our conversations with customers today, there was a theme that kept on coming up again and again, and that theme is that Cisco looks to be really falling back, and Fortinet is clearly winning against Cisco in firewall right now, in our customer conversations. My question to Ken and Robert is, how much more displacement of Cisco is there in core networking this year, core network security? The second part is Joe and Trevor, this price increase that was announced or implemented last week, what's the real-time feedback in your customer conversations? You know, have customers pulled forward purchases? Are they delaying purchases? Are they pushing back? Can you just give us some real-time color? Thank you.
Maybe I can start. I guess from my side, I guess the feedback that I hear is across all parts of the Cisco question, right? It's the SD-WAN, the switching, the wireless. To be honest, the odd thing is I don't get a lot of feature requests to displace them. We actually have the features that are compelling and, you know, the products that are better in the market. When they're looking to refresh things, they're actually looking to us and coming to us. I don't know if the sales see the same thing.
Exactly, yeah.
This is generally what from my side, yeah.
Yeah. On the increases, no. Look, it's a problem everybody has worldwide. Some people maybe anticipated, others are fine with waiting. We're seeing, you know, a mix. My region is huge, so it's very difficult for me to pinpoint a clear answer for you. It's a bit mixed. You know, one way or another. Talking about Cisco, to be frank, it's not one of my main competitors. Like, Cisco wins because they have a massive portfolio. When they go in, they sell a bit of everything, right? Generally speaking, in international, we don't see too much competition from Cisco.
That's it. It's always been like that. I've been in the company 20 years, so. Yeah. Yeah. Well, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the compelling story around Fortinet is this ability to consolidate. You know, Ken's been talking about it for 20 years, you guys should know it. Yeah, the consolidation between network and security, we're there now, right? Security is bigger than networking, and that's what we've been, you know. Our mantra has been for 20 years. We're finally getting there. Maybe it's time to retire, Ken. I don't know.
It's interesting because, yes, it's. That's our advantage. We have a solid networking technologies at the base of it. I remember when I started out, our appliances were seen more like routers since we're in the U.S. than anything else, right? Because the underlying networking technology there was very strong. That's why companies like Palo Alto have never really given us a hard time when it comes down to this type of solution. You know, SD-WAN, we're just. We built that SD-WAN technology so quick. That's why Ken is adamant in saying we're gonna be Leaders in SASE, because just like we did with SD-WAN, we overtook everybody and become Leaders by far. That's what's gonna happen with SD-WAN or with SASE.
Yeah, we have a bigger market in Europe, probably EMEA is about 43% of our business right now. That's also. We're starting to divide the region for this kind of conference. Next year, just like last year, every two year we do one global, and then the alternate year will be, like, one in EMEA. Next year will be in Amsterdam, I believe.
Amsterdam.
Last year it's in Berlin. Then there's probably same size of a customer partner attending there. If you can travel there, will be welcome. There's a lot of customer, especially like lot of new AI, OT in this area. Then we'll do also one in U.S. next year, but probably will be less people from Europe, Middle East come to the U.S. This is the opportunity to have the global view, whether the EMEA or APAC, they have their own choice, whether they can come to U.S. or they can go to Europe. Definitely one conference in EMEA, one in U.S. for next year, and then we'll alternate. Then the year after next, 2028, will be again a global conference. This happens every two years.
We do it better in EMEA.
Yeah, real fast, in the U.S. we replace Cisco more than any single competitor. Not only in SD-WAN, but in switching or routing, we crush them. You know, for me, it's my mentor was employee number 11 at Cisco. We actually hired John Chambers, so he actually advises me a lot, and he's tough, very tough, and he loves it. He loves that we crush Cisco in a big way. While we're talking about SD-WAN, they have a product called Viptela, but we also replace a company called VeloCloud. We replace Versa. Cisco, we replace probably more than any single competitor in the U.S. On the pricing front, I echo Joe's sentiment there.
We have a couple minutes left. Let's go with two more questions, please.
The... Shrenik Kothari from Baird. The other big innovation announcement was FortiSOC, and there are not too many questions so far. It integrates your SIEM, SOAR analytics leveraging AI. And just in light of your earlier comments about, you know, simplification of the messaging piece as well as talked about pricing packaging in your opening remarks. Just curious, is that the angle guys are trying to, you know, have an operational and packaging simplification as part of that? Or is the grand plan also, like some of your peers have done, kind of unlocking incremental budgets by displacing legacy SIEMs and stuff? Just curious.
Well, I can start maybe. I think, yeah, there's kind of if I break it into three categories. There's the traditional products where you got large enterprise building their own SOCs, so standalone for SIEM, SOAR analyzer products. This doesn't displace that because that motion is already there, and people are still doing this, right? On the other extreme, you've got SOC-as-a-Service, which a lot of our partners offer, telcos offer, and we do have a small offering there. Our offering was more built to actually figure out how to, you know, add features quickly that were really relevant for the SOC environments. I would say the FortiSOC is somewhere that sits in the middle, right?
This is a SaaS platform, firstly, that leverages all of those technology components behind the scenes and implements a very simple licensing and simple user interface over the top. It's for that maybe mid-market or another segment of the market, right? That is, you know, able to get that up and running quickly, ramp up their SOC process, and be able to to hit the ground running. Going forward, it also provides a platform to quickly integrate more and more SOC or SecOps solutions. You could imagine EDR, NDR, DLP, these type of visibility coming into that down the road. Some ways to make that overall simpler, both on the licensing, but especially on the usability to answer your question there.
If I may add, we're seeing a massive opportunity on the mid-market. Especially for this type of solution. It's the need for that medium-sized company to have more control, whether it be, you know, in the cloud or with local solutions built in-house is pretty interesting. We're seeing a big demand there as well. As Robert was saying, if you want a high-end enterprise, we're going for the single same SOAR products. If we're looking at something platform that is a little bit more flexible, looking at FortiSOC. Finally, she's been waiting an hour.
Oh, last but not least. Hi, Alexa Rocha from Guggenheim. Thanks for hosting this and squeezing me in. We talked a lot about AI impacting customers and, you know, the benefits that they're seeing. I'm just curious if you could talk about the AI efficiencies you're seeing within Fortinet and how you're utilizing AI internally. I know you talked about, I think on the last earnings call, or maybe it was the call back, you discussed, you know, working with vendors to help offset memory prices. One thing that stuck out to me was that you said you're hiring more. A lot of other software companies out there, they're actually reducing headcount because of AI efficiency.
I'm just curious if you could talk about that, what you're seeing internally, and then eventually how that can kind of, you know, maybe impact margins in the bottom line? Thank you.
I think it depends on which function you're looking at, right? There are certain functions like customer support, where we have AI enablement and we haven't hired many people over the last couple of years. That's an area where we think headcount growth is slowing down because we can offload support cases through AI agents. In sales, I think you want that human connection. You want somebody in front of you that explains how the products work and what the benefits are. We are still investing from a headcount perspective in sales. Other functions, headcount growth may slow if we can implement AI-enabled processes.
If I may add, we are developing an internal tool for our sales, an AI tool that's gonna help go to market faster and do training not through the usual, you know, internal training that we normally do, but doing training on the job. This tool will be something that will augment the opportunities that we're gonna be building. It's a pipeline generator.
Yeah. He created a sales AI tool that's in process. The U.S. created a tool called ASK Tech. It's meant for sales engineers or anyone in the company as a tool to help in a sales call, customer support call. It's actually really, really good. That's generally available with all the employees inside of Fortinet.
Yeah, the same for R&D for the modern era. We're keeping hiring much younger AI-capable engineer to replace someone like me who get too old. That's for when we retire. I'm quite sure a lot of young AI-capable people will take over.
All right, with that, Fortinet team and myself would like to thank you for spending your day with us. We appreciate the time, and we hope you found it very productive. I'd also like to take this time to thank the team here for their time in the afternoon as well. Thank you very much.