All right, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Oppenheimer's tech conference, the second day. My name is Ittai Kidron. I'm a technology analyst at the firm. I've got the pleasure of hosting Fortinet today. With us are Keith Jensen, CFO. Say hello, Keith.
Hello, Ittai. How are you?
Very good. Good to see you. We've got John Maddison, CMO and EVP Products. Say hello, John.
Hello.
John, how do you get to be both CMO and EVP Products?
I don't, I don't know. I don't know what I did. Something bad or something.
Yeah, very good. Well, I'm sure Keith is going to arrange a double salary for you.
Yeah.
We also have Peter from IR. Hi, Peter. Say hello.
Hello.
There we go. The team is here. Guys, and for the audience, I'll start with a few questions, but needless to say, we'll have to get all of you involved in the discussion. Please, use the chat function to paste your questions in, and I'll try to work them into the discussion as they come along. Do not be shy. Keith, I'd like to get started with you, if you don't mind, especially just going back to the recent quarter. You have talked about some challenges with large enterprise customers. Can you give us a little bit more color there on what is the behavior that you've seen and what has really changed from a quarter ago? We'll go from there.
I think the, the big representative enterprise customers, so it's context with business for others. Roughly one third of our business is small, one third is mid, and one third is large enterprise. I don't think we're really seeing a change in behavior in the small enterprises to talk about, so let's talk about the mid and the large enterprise. One thing we've noted dating back to Q4 and into Q1 and again in Q2, was linearity pushing out to that third month. Obviously, in Q4 and Q1, we were very successful in closing those deals in the last week of the quarter. The real shift this time was in the last 10-15 days of the quarter. Instead of closing those deals, a number of those deals actually pushed into subsequent quarters.
I think that, you know, there's an, there's an element there of, one, the macro obviously having an impact, but also I think on some of the larger enterprises and probably the MSSPs, they went through a process in, in 2022, and maybe early part of 2023, where they were concerned about shortages of supplies, and they took that as an opportunity to, to get some things on their shelves, if you will. I'm talking about end users, not distributors in this case. They're going through a period of digestion now as we look forward to it. Maybe, you know, this would be a good time to bring in John.
John does something on the order of 10-12 EBCs with large customers every week, and he could probably give a little more real-time information in terms of what he's hearing back from large customers and what budgets may look like for the rest of the year.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'm finding in the, the much larger customers that their strategy is consolidation, and that consolidation really means, you know, you've got to put some architecture in place. So they're kind of delaying maybe a point product solution decision, or just saying, "I'll just do a year, because in a year's time I want to make a bigger decision around my architecture." So the larger enterprises, the consolidation, the architecture, the platform approach, has shortened how long they want to do the deal for, because they think it might change in the next 2-3 years.
John, I want to press on that point. Good. I just want to reconcile what Keith has said and what you said. Keith has talked about customers have built a little bit of inventory that they need to kind of work through, but you're talking about there's some architectural decisions that need to be made, and until they're made, right, correct me if I'm wrong, they're just gonna slow things down a little bit because they don't want to over-commit to something that might not fit their architectural plan. Am I getting this right, like?
It's definitely both, because we definitely saw people wanting to make sure they could operate their business. If they didn't have gear a year ago, then that was a big issue for them. We're definitely seeing that. I, you know, I think it's not exactly one thing, it's, it's multiple things that happened at once.
Okay. When you say,
Itay, I would actually add to that. I think you also had his backlogs been coming down for three consecutive quarters. You have inventory going into, into companies that, you know, they ordered six months ago, and now they're getting, so we're eating up their budget, and we're also eating up their IT time to deal with, with installing that product. You know, and to John's point, they may take what they get now and then, and then wait to sort of decide what they're going to do a year from now from an architectural perspective.
I, I guess, Peter, the follow-up question would be, how long does it take to digest this inventory to come back to more of a normal cadence of purchasing? On the flip side, for you, John, how long would you expect this whole architectural debate to kind of take before there's greater consensus on what they need to do and so they can move forward a little bit more judiciously?
Yeah, I think they... You know, I think that it's not like they've stopped completely. They're making those architectural decisions. You know, when I look at a typical enterprise customer, they may have 50 different solution, you know, products and solutions and services, at least. You know, they just can't change everything all at once, but they, they, they definitely want to get to a more of a platform approach. It's interesting to me that even the, the Gartner folks are starting to realize that, you know, these so-called Magic Quadrants for point products are starting to now produce Magic Quadrants for platforms, which to me is a true, you know, is a true sign.
Although Gartner, I don't think, has always got the future right, they kind of look in the rearview mirror, they do tune into the enterprise and what's being sought there. You're starting to see this decisions around a platform approach. The consolidation is a byproduct of that. I can't give you a timeframe because I think it's more a question of how, you know, how do they decide on which products they wanna, you know, converge and consolidate first? I think that's a continuing process, but I just saw some people just hesitate.
I'm not gonna make this decision on SD-WAN, because I'm gonna make a decision on single vendor SASE at the end of the year, which includes SD-WAN and SSE and Zero Trust and CASB and all those things.
Got it. Okay. Well, maybe then that's an opportunity to go into the next thing, as John, when you say consolidate, there are multiple domains within the security space. When you say consolidate, what is the specific area of consolidation? SSE, is that the, and SASE, is that those are the two areas of consolidation that you're focused on?
I think there's multiple areas, and so, you know, we look at the business from, you know, if you look to the most obvious one, because we're in, when, you know, a larger part of our business is network security, the larger one is in, in networking, and the big player right there now is to converge what people call Security Service Edge with SD-WAN. Security Service Edge has already been a convergence of Secure Web Gateway and CASB and remote ZTNA, and then you're gonna add in SD-WAN. You may add in, you know, digital monitoring. So, you know, what the, the single, the Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, is the name of it, that everyone kind of says, and not, not everyone knows what it even stands for, but that's okay. Secure services access.
Yeah, that is probably the biggest play inside networking. Look at endpoint. If endpoint, our endpoint agent, our endpoint agent can do endpoint protection, can do EDR, it can do... It's a ZTNA agent, it's a SASE agent, it's a vulnerability scanning agent. Those are, in a lot of people, in a lot of companies, those are six different agents they have on the endpoint. I think the convergence and consolidation is happening across all the infrastructure. We can think about the cloud, where, you know, the cloud vendors want to be the platform. There's platform vendors out there, CNAPP vendors out there, who want to be the platform. I think it just happens all over the place, network, cloud, data center, on-premise, access and consolidation.
Okay, very good. Maybe you could talk then, John, about the, the portfolio. Help me think, in what areas do you feel you have a very competitive solution set? When you look into the different components of SASE, Secure Web Gateway, right, ZTNA, all the other elements that are going into that platform, how developed are, are those use cases for you, and how has the customer adoption been so far? Clearly, you have very strong presence in firewall, but I'm just trying to gauge how far beyond that, you know, have you gotten into the, into the full spectrum here.
Yeah, well, we've invested, you know, all, mostly organically, to be honest. I mean, although we did do a SASE acquisition, but most of the technology in our SASE is our existing operating system, and we built new consoles, et cetera. You know, when I look at it, we've got 50 plus products, and the, the key going forward is not necessarily. Yes, you have to keep the individual products developing and adding features and functions, but the key long term would be how do they integrate together? One of the most, one of the theories, not theories, but more, we say that long term, the, the enterprise is gonna be hybrid for long term.
It's gonna be some cloud, it's gonna be some data center, people are gonna be out of the office, although I'm looking today, maybe some more people in the office going forward. You got to deal with that hybrid world. We think traffic will be coming, will stay off the network, will be on the network, go from on the network to off the network, from off the network to on the network. One really important integration, for example, will be between our SSE, our fully SASE and our SD-WAN solution. The ability to simply just move traffic efficiently and securely on and off the network, depending on where the user is, depending on where the application is. So it's not so much I'm building, you know, adding features to SD-WAN, I'm adding features to SSE.
I'm just making these things work better together. Our key, because I think we've got everything we need inside the portfolio. Let's say 50+ products, we're in 8 Gartner Magic Quadrants, so some of them are definitely enterprise class. The key going forward is making it work together as a platform.
John, maybe, John, maybe you... 50 product is kind of overwhelming, and I know internally, you, you're a proponent of talking about, say, five pillars inside the organization and how to, how we bucket those into solutions. Maybe for the audience, talk a little bit more in that context than product, if you will.
Yeah. We, you know, we have what we call Secure Networking, and that's probably the foundation of the company, Secure Networking. Our founder, Ken, started the company 23 years ago, and the thesis that Secure Networking will be bigger one day than just networking. Right now, if you look at the Gartner projections, that's 2030, Secure Networking will be bigger. What is Secure Networking? Well, let's say what networking is. It's kind of routing and switching. It's layer 2, layer 3. It just makes a decision to connect you as fast as possible. Whereas Secure Networking takes into account other things, content, applications, users, identity, and other capabilities, and zero, you know, the posture of a device, like Zero Trust. You take all these things into account, that's becomes...
Secure networking is Next-Gen Firewall, it's ZTNA, it's secure SD-WAN, it's Secure Wireless LAN, it's ZTNA and SASE. We think that, you know, it's definitely a core market of ours, and I think that's growing. Then we also see, you know, cloud security, so security in the cloud, that is. We also see security operations, which is the CISO world. Coming on top of that, and then we also see what we call OT, operational technology or cyber-physical, which is a new marketplace, I think, that's sprung up because of access and connectivity. Those are the marketplaces we kind of talk about. Within those within those kind of solutions for us, there are maybe, you know, five, six, seven, eight products, which then we will make work together.
I know a good example is security operations, where we have our SIEM, our SOAR, our EDR, and in some recent ESG report we put together, the ability to automate and the ability to find things much more quickly is the ability to connect things together and make sure they interact and share threat, intelligence, and policy, et cetera.
Got it. Keith, firewalls are still clearly a very much dominant part of your business, so help me understand, how do you bundle effectively across these five domains that John mentioned to, to create more, more uptake? What are the strategies you're implementing there?
Yeah, I think the firewall, as John alluded to, remains the cornerstone of the company. It's no great secret, I think, that well over 90%-95% of our first sale to a customer is a firewall. That firewall could be across a variety of use cases. It could be, you know, form factors. It can be virtual, it can be physical, you know, it could be for SASE, it could be for SD-WAN, it could be for secure edges, micro-segmentation. They really provide a compelling entry point, particularly into the enterprises, and then that then creates the opportunity to move into these other marketplaces inside of organizations. I don't think you've seen us start in those other marketplaces traditionally as our first sale, and then move to the firewall.
Rather, it still remains the firewall sale.
As in the future, as John talks about moving to architectures, is anything in your pricing or bundling exercise can change to drive greater non-firewall adoption within your portfolio?
Yeah, I think when you get outside of the. Great question. When you get outside the firewall, you know, the physical firewall, particularly, you know, with its upfront model, as you start to see us move into these other marketplaces, you know, whether it's cloud or it's things that we're doing with the CISO or SASE products or SaaS products, you see a much greater mix of SaaS-type models for cash flow and for revenue recognitions. Many of those other solutions that we talk about are not upfront solutions, but rather, you know, they're over time solutions, whether, you know, in terms of how they're consuming it or how they're paying for it.
Got it. Okay. How developed is the, the cloud, the SaaS business for you guys at this point?
Yeah, so we... You know, if you some people say, you know, cloud security. For us, that's a lot of different technology investments. You know, a lot of our products have SaaS consoles now. We just talked about building out our own global network to provide SASE services. We've got products that work inside the clouds, cloud native, WAF. We're actually investing in a lot of different cloud technologies. The way they're realizing for the customer sometimes is through a SaaS implementation or sometimes as products that work inside their cloud footprint.
Yeah, I think if you look at, at one example, just kind of, you know, on the top of everybody's mind right now is SASE. John's talked before about, you know, SASE starts with, for us, SD-WAN is one of the key components and then adds three or four other technology in it, into it. You heard Ken talk about it in the, in the May earnings call about, you know, really bringing that now to the market. A data point that I've shared with others is that if you look at SD-WAN, which has shown to be a very positive product for us, back in, say, 2019 or in 2020, we were talking more about how fast the pipeline was growing for SD-WAN.
Then we followed that on quarters later about how fast it closed, and now you've seen numbers from us about the billings and bookings and revenues. That's kind of the maturity curve. It's interesting, looking at the SASE pipeline now and keeping in mind, we really haven't been talking about it for more than, say, a quarter, is that, that SASE pipeline growth looks very, very similar to what SD-WAN pipeline growth looked like back in those earlier days in 2019, 2020. I think the focus right now on SASE is 2, well, 1, we know we have a very significant SD-WAN footprint, which provides the door to open up, if you will, to make SASE calls and continue to build out the delivery model for SASE.
To, to talk about the size of the cloud business, when we talk about our core and our non-core business, core being the firewalls and the product and services that go with them, and then the non-core being the products that are there and the services that also get attached over there. The non-core is about 35% of our business as of this last quarter, and cloud is a, is one part of that. That's where all the cloud-
Right.
-revenue would be. It's cloud, it's networking, and it's other security capabilities. Those three buckets are about a third each, so that puts your cloud at, call it, you know, low double digits of % of our business.
Got it. Awesome. That's great. Let me press on this then. Keith, let's say you and I talk two, three years down the road, what % would you expect this to be of your business? Meaning non-firewall as a % of your business. Well, how do you... How far do you think you can push it in a two, three-year timeframe?
Yeah, Peter just made the comment that, you know, it's about 35% of the business now. In, in a given year, you know, that, that everything other than the firewall has been taking the mix about 1 point or 1.5 points per year. I think with some of the new architectures that, that John talked about at the beginning of the conversation, and SASE would be a classic example of that, you know, I think that creates a further opportunity to see a further mix shift, if you will. You know, and I'd like to see that can move a little bit faster than what it has. I'm really happy to see it be a third of the business now.
I'd love to see that mix shift continue to, to take a little bit of, to de-risk, if you will, the pure firewall part of the business. If you look back and say 2014, 2015, this was a firewall company. Mm-hmm. There, there wasn't a platform solution. To see where it is today is, is exciting, but I think there's significant opportunity going forward.
If you go back to 2018, the, the non-firewall part of the business was 25% of the business. Over the last 5.5 years, it's moved to 35% of the business, and it's always been growing faster than the core business because of all the other opportunities. Now, one of the confusions sometimes that investors have is if they think about SD-WAN, and they go, "SD-WAN is all firewalls." That's not true. Their SD-WAN is firewalls because that's where the operating system lives, but there's also non-firewall stuff that drives that non-firewall side of our business as well, that happens in an SD-WAN sale. There's a lot of different parts of our business that, that, that feed and help feed that non-firewall side of the business.
Got it. Okay.
Mm-hmm.
If it took you, 5 years to get 10 points higher on the mix, it sounds like based on Keith's comments, that hopefully can be accelerated, the pace could be somewhat accelerated, then I would say in 3 years, you're somewhere in the mid-forties, low forties. Yes?
It was only, I think, 18 months ago that we were talking about non-FortiGate or the platform or the fabric or whatever term you want to use for it, being a billion-dollar business unit growing at over 40%.
Mm.
5th quarter, we're now, with the numbers we just put up, you know, it's now on the runway to being a $2 billion business with those same growth rates.
Yeah. I, to your point of getting to a, a higher percentage on the non-FortiGate, keep in mind, our core business is growing really well. If our core business was declining 10% a year, yeah, we'd get to 40% real quick, right?
Right.
Our core business, which is bigger than our non-core business, is still growing at a very healthy rate. Therefore, it should take longer for the non-core. I don't want the non-core to be 50% tomorrow at the expense of my core, right?
Right.
You gotta be careful about how that mix plays out and what you all wish for in terms of what multiple you wanna put on the non-core because you think it's worth more, even though it's just a part of our business.
Right. Yeah, you want it, you want it at 50, the right, for the right reason.
Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Okay. Very good. Well, well, then let me ask you this: from a go-to-market standpoint, Do you anticipate any changes over the next 12 to 18 months that try to incentivize greater non-firewall type of sales? Like, clearly, the firewall business for you is dominant, and you're doing extremely well in that category, in the market overall. Not that you're not doing any, not well, at the non-firewall business. Clearly, it's growing faster than the firewall, but it's coming, it's growing faster also off a lower revenue base, and it seems like proportionally going forward, customers will spend much more in those categories in the future.
In order to accelerate, as we just said, Peter, in order to get it the right way, and then accelerate the non, firewall business, is there anything that you're doing on the sales motion, on either from a go-to-market approach or from an incentive standpoint in order to drive greater adoption there?
Yeah, I think-
Oh, carry on, Keith. Okay.
I, I think Ittai has been guilty of eavesdropping on some of our internal conversations about compensation plans and so forth. You know, I, I think that when, you know, when you, when you come to market with a product, you know, comp plans are fairly straightforward. As you mature and you start to talk about 50 more products, you know, there's a temptation to let salespeople get to their number, you know, and, and kind of say, "You pick the number, your path to get there." I think now, and it's not dissimilar to what you've seen with large enterprise software companies, you know, the Oracles, the SAPs, the Salesforce of the world are saying, you really now need subject matter experts that have their comp plans tied very specifically to certain products, if you will, as opposed to just everything.
I think there's, you know, that is happening in the... As part of our real-time conversations now. John, I interrupted you.
No, no, I was gonna say the same thing. I think, you know, I think one of the biggest challenges is when you're competing, you know, we'll ask our, one of our salespeople to compete one day against CrowdStrike at Endpoint, against Cisco and SD-WAN, against Palo Alto in the data center, against somebody in the cloud. I mean, it's just a lot of different technologies, and so we definitely, you know, as we get a bit bigger here, we have to make sure we've got the specialization in those areas to help our sales teams through that.
Does that mean, John, like, overlay technical support?
I don't like the word overlay. Don't use that word.
People need to be accountable. No more overlays.
Yeah, I think it's, it's that balance of you don't want to go too far, you don't want to get too much duplication. You know, a lot of, a lot of companies, I went through this in a previous company where they almost create separate divisions and companies, and you duplicate everything. That's, that's definitely not where you want to go, but we want to be able to help our sales teams to compete against, you know, point solutions to obviously get the value of the platform across, but you still need to have a certain amount of features in that point product to win that business.
Got it. John, can you talk about the competitive environment? You're not the only one clearly going after the platform approach. As you said, sometimes different players have different starting points in their process. Help me understand, who do you see out there most frequently, and how much are they well developed from a portfolio standpoint, right, in competing with you?
Yeah. I mean, people often ask who are our competitors, and I mentioned early on, we're in 8 Gartner Magic Quadrants. If you have the, if you have 8 different vendors in those Magic Quadrants, that's 64 vendors straight away. Well, now, obviously, there's multiple vendors appear twice or three or four times. I think the most people we compete against the most are Cisco and Palo Alto Networks. They've got the same intention of building this platform from slightly different angles. You know, Cisco's coming from a networking perspective and trying to bolt on security. I think Palo Alto is more of a pure cyber software, cybersecurity company, and trying to see if they can add a bits of networking to, 'cause they need that. They're very different.
We're kind of in the middle of where we have this, obviously, cybersecurity heritage, but a very strong networking portfolio as well. I, I know Cisco's been adding some bits and pieces over the last few, last few months, but, you know, probably I think we have the most extensive portfolio across both cybersecurity, networking, and especially OT. If you saw the recent Westlands Advisory research where, you know, we were the only leader in the platform category across OT. I think those three are the ones who come up with the most, if we're talking a big enterprise deal. Once you go down, and you, you go into a point solution, you know, there's all the endpoint vendors, all the SD-WAN vendors, firewall vendors, it goes on.
I think what we're definitely seeing is that customers want a consolidated platform approach long term, and that's who we-- those two I mentioned before, Cisco and Palo Alto, are the ones who are probably closest to us in terms of getting to that platform approach.
Got it. Got it. Got it. Keith, on the US enterprise, I mean, as I think about the evolution of the company over the years, the US has, has been an area that's been somewhat underrepresented, but you've made great progress and worked more to get deeper, deeper into the market. Can you talk about the opportunity there, and kind of in what inning are you, do you think, in, in getting your, quote, unquote, "fair share of the market?" And what are the specific dynamics of that market that, that you can try and leverage in order to improve your position there?
Yeah, I, I think it's still very early innings, as I like to say. You know, I think the good news is we've, we've left spring training, and we've broke camp, but there's still a lot of opportunity there for us. You know, when I compare some of the geographic performances, you know, when I look at Europe and Latin America and Asia Pacific, and I see, you know, our market position being number one. Worldwide, you see now Ken talking about and John Maddison talking about, you know, having a number one ranking in firewall from revenue and on units. Great, great relations with the channels there. In the US, you know, I, I think there are some incumbents there that are still, you know, formidable competition with Cisco.
Palo Alto Networks came out with a, a clear focus in that space in the very beginning. I think there's still a ton of opportunity for us there. You're really looking for a number of things. One, you want to get your message out about, you know, your third-party validations to key decision makers, whether that's Gartner Magic Quadrants, whether that's for firewalls or other technologies. It's also about access. I think you've seen us, you know, do a lot of things here to get access to the right people, the right, at the right level. You know, we would talk about the Fortinet Championship, which was kind of a big move for us about three years ago.
You know, that really, I think, you know, made us a topic of conversation at that level that we want to, to be talked about. I think you see us now sometimes with our price advantage, getting opportunities to meet with new customers, because those new customers, for us, are uncomfortable with the price points that they're seeing on renewals and so forth. Sometimes I worry that we're just brought in there to be a competitor, if you will, for pricing. I think the team has shown the opportunity that even when that is the case, to use that to leverage out someplace else. You may be brought in for a data center refresh or something, but they've been able to establish the context to have the conversation then about SD-WAN solutions, about SASE architecture, about micro-segmentation.
Anyways, I've said a lot there. I said, I think there's a ton of opportunity for us in the enterprise.
Got it. It sounds... I, I guess I'm trying to tie this to where we started the discussion, where enterprises are working through some inventory, and to John's point, are going through architectural decisions. Is, is as much as it weighs near term on business, does it also, on the other hand, create an opportunity? Like, again, if they are going through the discussion here and now, wouldn't this be a great opportunity to be right there at the table with the right portfolio, with the Magic Quadrants kind of in the right place, to, to validate your position in the market and help on that front?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I sent a note out, a John a note last night. He sent me some previews on some third-party recommendations that are coming out and, you know, just to congratulate him, you know, and that is a very important tool. You know, some people kind of distill enterprise selling down to something as simple as, you need to have third-party recommendations, a price advantage, and access. You know, clearly, we're checking the box on having the, the third parties, and we've checked the box on price advantages. Now it's really about getting to your point, Ittai, about getting that message out, you know, at the right level. You know, it's a long road if you start trying to enter an enterprise through your inside sales function or email campaigns or something like that.
You know, it's really about getting direct access to those decision makers.
Got it. John, I'll ask you, now that Keith has identified this great opportunity, do you feel you're appropriately staffed on the go-to-market side to, to address this, or you feel like you need some more, more people and to get this going?
Yeah, well, the opportunity, you know, if you take the, you take what we call Secure Networking, which is not all networking, if you take cybersecurity and OT, it's a $122 billion TAM this year alone. It's, it's a, it's a fantastic opportunity. I think you can always, you can always improve the go to market, in terms of, you know, making sure your brand is associated with enterprise platforms, and you can always improve. There's the sales teams that you have to try and get more at bats or be at the table more often. I think that, I think that Keith mentioned is being at the table is probably the biggest problem for us, you know, especially in, in the US. We need to improve that for sure.
There's always improvements to make, but I think we've got all the ingredients. I think, you know, when you'll start to see the new Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, there's a new Forrester Wave for Zero Trust Edge. These are now platform assets coming from the analysts. When we start to see those come out, it'd be very obvious who's in the conversation about a platform and who's not in the conversation about a platform.
Got it.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't take anything away from what John just said, but to kind of give context to the opportunity again and tying together some of the earlier conversations, you know, we've been extremely successful with SD-WAN and the, the place, the use case that really identifies as retail, you know, lots of stores and deployments. If you kind of pull together some of the numbers that we gave in the call, and going back to your original question, you know, retail, which, you know, was a, was a large part of our business and still is, it had growth last year of almost 100% as a vertical, about 97%, and that is largely SD-WAN solutions. If you fast-forward to today, that growth in the second quarter was basically flat, right?
By itself, you know, that's about 4 points of growth. The good news, so that's part of that digestion that Peter talked about earlier, you know, these large retailers that may have an 18-month or 24-month appointment schedule that did not want to get caught shorthanded and took down some of the inventory in 2022. You know, they'll, they'll work through that, but we have gained access to those companies. While they're going through that, that deployment phase, we know their people, we know the CIOs, we know the CISOs now, and we can have those conversations that John referred to earlier about architectural design and what comes next, right? What are you talking about with SASE, and how does that work with the SD-WAN solution that you just acquired from us?
Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a large European financial organization. The CISO literally gave me a spreadsheet of 40 vendors that they had in different places. They had a list of, you know, these point solutions are not strategic. They can be replaced. I have strategics at this end where I really like them, I've got to keep them. Then there was a question mark about a bunch in the middle. The exercise we're going through was, you know, how many of these, how many of these vendors can you replace? Then when, when we looked at it, we could replace at least 20 inside that.
Now, they're not gonna replace 20, okay, because they do it once, and then they've still got to go through a process and RFP, but it was pretty, it was pretty startling to them that we could replace, we wanted to, do 20 of those point solutions with a platform inside their environment.
Interesting. Keith, I want to talk about your 25 targets, $8 billion revenue, $10 billion billings, 25% operating margin. I just kind of want to make sure, after this last quarter, are you still subscribed to this target? what kind of what do we need to see over the next few quarters to make sure that, that you're able to hit it if you're still subscribed to it?
Yeah, I think that what we'd really like to say about the, the, the targets for 2025 at the moment is, you know, coming off of Q2, you know, we need to restore credibility to those numbers, and the only way to restore that credibility is putting up numbers in Q3 and Q4 that show the growth returning to where we need it to be. That's... That will go through now our, our normal planning process for 2024 here over the next four or five months as we exit the year. I think you'll really see us say something much more formally about targets when we, when we have the February earnings call for the fourth quarter, when we have both those Q3 and Q4 results, and we have the 2024 plan in place.
Got it. Okay. Great. John, on the market side of the equation, there's been a lot of discussion on how the use cases for firewalls have evolved and expanded, right, over recent years. Help us think about, you know, two or three use cases that have become very prominent perhaps over the last couple of years. You know, because historically, firewalls have been considered a mature, fully penetrated in a way, type of a market. It sounds like the use cases are evolving, and because of that, there's still a lot of wind left in the sails of that opportunity. If you could shed some more light there, that'd be great.
Yeah. Yeah. I think people just think of firewall as a firewall. Now, even, you know, even five, six years ago, there was two distinct use cases. One was the perimeter of the data center, and then the internal segmentation firewalls. Very different types of firewalls. One is really high performance, lot of ports, one is about inspection of the internet traffic. I think what was, what was definitely very obvious, if you move more and more applications to the cloud, that kind of perimeter firewall was gonna get less and less traffic. That's very obvious. The segmentation firewalls didn't really change much because you still had networks and buildings that connect everything else. I think the use case that a lot of people missed was the distributed firewall. The smaller firewalls, we call them entry-level firewalls, that sit at branches or retail, even campuses now.
Our campus here has, has firewall sitting in the front of it. That use case grew really fast. Even though perimeter was probably slowing down or even, you know, just stationary, that, that distributed firewall use case grew very fast over the last 5 years for us, and we actually then used that to kind of branch out into SD-WAN. It was the same kind of device. We've put SD-WAN and distributed firewall together. It's very, very cost effective. We have a Forrester TEI, which, well, Total Economic Impact, which shows a 300% return. I mean, blah, blah, blah. I think there's... That marketplace is still 95-- Those are all hardware devices. It's still, according to Gartner, about 95% of the firewall marketplace. The other 5% is the virtual firewalls, which is basically the same device, but inside cloud.
Firewall-as-a-Service, which is what you put inside a SASE implementation. There's container-based firewalls. There is rugged firewalls you put inside OT environments. There is cloud-native firewalls you put inside there. This other 5% is growing much, much faster, 50%, 100%. You know, will it get to 10% of the marketplace in the next 2 years? Maybe, maybe not. You know, the use cases, I was talking to a customer, and he when we went through all the different, I think it was 13 different use cases, they realized they had 8 different firewall vendors. They just That kind of blew them away. They go, "We can't have 8 different firewall vendors.
There's eight different consoles, eight different policy engines, trying to you know, trying to make sure everything's secure. I think the firewall marketplace is becoming much more dynamic than it was five years ago in all those different use cases. You need to be able to have a single console across all of that, single policy engine, and the same security stack, no matter what the implementation, where it is, whether it's at the network edge, whether it's in the cloud or is it the data center.
Got it. Awesome. This is great. I want to keep you guys on track. I really appreciate the time. This is fantastic. Good luck, and good seeing you guys, and thanks for joining us today in the, in the conference.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys.