Thank you very much. The rooms are still full. That's great. First day of the conference, we're gonna speak to empty rooms, so thank you very much for joining us. I have Tomer Weingarten here hosting, and I wanna talk about one. I will just say I always start my sessions with just stating our views, and one thing we don't have any doubt of, that this is, that endpoint, and it started, starting with endpoint, but endpoint are the most strategic places on the network. And we heard in the morning, we heard Nikesh from Palo Alto talking about that 85% of the information in the network, you can find it either in the endpoint or...
So it's extremely strategic, and then you look at who are the players in the space, and there are really only two legitimate players, like people, companies that are really having next generation solution with the bells and whistles. Yes, and a sort of kind of lower version of it or something that is just to check the box, but if you're looking for something in the high end, there are really only two companies in this space. So with that, that's kind of the we like SentinelOne despite the pressure on the stock, and we think. Yesterday, we hosted a dinner, and I said that if you focus on cybersecurity, you have to look at SentinelOne. Timing. I don't care about whether it happens this quarter, or next quarter, I care about the next three years.
I'm sure that one of the leading companies in this space, that is in one of the most attractive spaces, will eventually get to the right place. So we're gonna talk about this, how you get to where you wanna be, and that's why I'm hosting Tomer today, and thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
So, Tomer, I wanna, I'm gonna start with, it's great to have you here right after your report. With the kind of high-level question about the numbers. What did you like in your quarter, and what are the things that you think you need to work on? Just at a high level.
Sure. You know, I think we obviously showed very, you know, landing at 40% in this environment is quite significant. Really like the forward motion, and to me, forward motion is kind of the new and upsell business. These two, you know, were glaring positive. Really like the free cash flow generation. So obviously, you know, the ability to jump in a single year from, I think it was negative 40- 18%. This is not like a couple of $1 million; this is significant margin.
That was obviously a big moment for us, not just in terms of showing it, I think, but for us internally, knowing that the work that we've been doing for the past year has resulted in tremendous efficiencies and have generated a very what I believe is a very compelling, you know, business model at the end of the day. Negatives for me were just our execution on renewals, on enablement, on our work with the channel, on process ordering, quoting, like, a lot of the system works, you know, that we talked about also, to get better. I mean, we, we achieved, you know, pretty significant scale in a pretty short amount of time, and a lot of that work, I think, was not happening as fast as we wanted it to happen.
So there was a pretty big conversation this quarter, this past quarter, to revamp our systems, to put a more seamless process in place, remove the friction, and I think that's gonna already start showing better signs the next couple of quarters. And the second half of the year, I think is just, you know, robust pipelines. Our conversion has been very, very stable. Our win rates have been very, very stable, despite, I think, all the smoke and mirrors people feel sometimes and what people think sometimes, and the odds that they ascribe that we have or don't have to continue and expand, none of that had really, I think, impacted our ability to garner the pipelines.
Maybe one more point on that. I think that we also need to expand significantly what we do with marketing, but I can talk more about that, like, later on.
Yeah. If I can just to put the clock ticking so we know when to end this. Thank you. So in this, in this quarter, we, we saw, as you said, some, some very positive growth in, in, in cash flow generation, et cetera. What needs to be done in order to fix the things that you highlighted, that you wanna fix? Meaning, is it something that you need to do internally, such as systems and processes, et cetera, with the channel, go to market, finding distributors, or where, where do I put my finger on things that should be done?
Yeah, I would say 95% of it is internal. Onboarding everything we do in a much better way. I mean, I just mentioned, you know, everything from renewals to enablement, to onboarding, to training, like, all of that just needs to be better. By the way, I fully treat that as an opportunity to now really scale the company in these areas, inherently with AI, which is pretty amazing. I mean, you're, I think you're gonna see a lot of companies trying to transition what they do and infuse AI with, you know, at the foundational level, and that's amazing. I mean, getting AI into your operations is a massive super scaler. So I'm actually very encouraged about that effect, exponential.
But a lot of it is just a question of execution, and I think that we know exactly what, what needs to be done, and now it's just a question of going through it, and we'll do it extremely fast. And I think you'll see how that translates, I think, into growth next year. Inflecting, you know, into free cash flow positivity also gives us the ability to reinvest back in the business. And if there's one thing, and truly, if there's one thing that constrains our growth—it's not the competition, it's not the distribution, it's the amount of marketing that we can do, and it's basically how many eyeballs we can capture. And we've been very, very constrained to achieve a certain envelope. My competitors are not constrained by anything.
I mean, whether it's Nikesh reinvesting all the firewall profitability dollars into marketing next generation, or my, you know, my other peer just, you know, growing in a zero interest environment to the point that they have massive amounts of cash that they indefinitely put into their marketing machine. We didn't have that ability this year. I think inflection and, you know, we talk about 18 points of margin, that's, you know, $20-$30 million that I can now take and invest into a business that was largely very effective. I'm doing a fraction of the market, 40%, still winning market share in an incredibly competitive market. So now, you know, that we're, I think, a bit freer to, you know, to invest back into the business, it just make things, I think, for us.
You're expecting a recovery in the second half. You're expecting growth resumption, or not growth, growth acceleration second half. Do you think it's gonna translate that quickly to the risk that second half may the, what the, the factors that impacted your first half can also impact second half?
Most of it was internal execution, so unless we're unable to, you know, fix our processes, which I would under our control, I think that's. I mean, there's risk in everything, but I think that's fairly low risk.
Got it. I wanna talk about your offerings. Makes you grow 40%. What makes you grow, meaning what is the differentiating factor that you bring to the market that... I'm not talking about CrowdStrike, I'm talking about everyone else, you know, Cisco and Fortinet and Palo Alto, and the other versus the other players in the market.
All of it. I mean, we, you know, we got the best-of-breed offering in endpoint protection, the most autonomous product out there. We're a leader in AI, above and beyond it. We have a data solution, a data analytics back-end, security data lake, a SIEM, whatever you wanna call it, an AI SIEM, that is more performant, more effective, more flexible than any other offering in it. So we, we just have superior technology in every part of our business, which is really what allows us to lend first with these adjacent offerings. So when you look at that 40% contribution, it didn't come from our existing customers; it came from new logos. So we're lending net new with our data lake. We're lending net new with cloud.
That opens up the door, you know, later on to expand into other areas, the incumbent vendors on the other footprints from expanding into these footprints. So to me, it's a double win that we're able to end with our adjacent offerings. And with all that said, 40% coming from endpoint, so there's still a lot of growth in endpoint, and again, predominantly, that's net new growth. So all in all, I mean, we, I think, have a really good tap into both the endpoint markets, the up-and-coming markets, data, SIEM, however you wanna call it. It's a huge TAM. I mean, we're talking about, like, a $40 billion opportunity. It's not something that's gonna happen overnight, not for us, not for...
I think our scale there is already quite significant and probably in much less disparity than maybe our endpoint scale versus some of the others. So I'm, again, very encouraged by, you know, our strategic and, just again, using AI. I mean, if, if you've seen Purple AI versus any other AI offering in the space, whether it's Copilot or other chatbots or whatnot, it's just that alone, I think, creates a differentiation that is quite visible, which has been missing. It's have been missing in cybersecurity for a while. Like, everybody talks the same thing. Everybody says this, "Have AI-driven data someplace," for sure. Sure, you've seen that, like, 100 times today. But at the end of the day, if you're looking at these products, like, what can they actually do? Like, what's the big promise?
Can the stuff that you see on the video really exist in real life? Is somebody really using it? Is it really delivering that? Can it do it in production environments? You'll find that 99% of what's out there is really great marketing. And I think this is where Purple AI, which we launched a year ago at RSA, not this RSA, while still other service security vendors showing presentations and videos. We launched that a year ago. You know, it's robust. I wouldn't call anything a huge moat in any market at this point in time. But I think it's substantial, and it ties the entire platform together. You can really, I think, different parts weave together by AI, and that's a story that not many others can tell, if anybody.
Can you tell us about how you typically land with customers? Do you typically land with XDR and then first landing with other solutions?
Yeah, it really depends, and it's all of the above. The one thing I wanna highlight is that we don't try to stick to, like, it's EDR, it's this, it's that. It's what problem do you have? We have solutions pretty much to everything that you can think of. We got EDR for the cloud, plus a CNAPP platform. How do you call that? Like, I don't even care at this point. Like, XDR, is it XDR, or is it EDR, or is it really SIEM, or is it a data lake? I don't really care. It's just about do you need data ingestion, control plane for your entire enterprise? You can do that. Call it whatever you wanna call it.
So we typically either go after endpoint opportunities, so basically somebody, you know, you got an incumbent there, whether it could be a next fallen from grace, next-gen provider, it could be an incumbent, and those are very clear projects, and we win the vast majority of opportunities that we see in the cloud. I mean, we go after accounts that, you know, might not be our accounts on the endpoint, and they have a substantial cloud environment, and they need AI protection for their cloud workload. That claim to be the best in cloud security don't provide that type of functionality, so they don't have real workload protection. They basically give you good visibility. They don't give you any type of protection.
You know, call it big production, mission-critical services, the stuff that you all use on a daily basis, whether it's your cell phone or your, you know, ride-sharing, means that our stuff is working if you're getting your stuff. I think that's where people just gravitate towards the best solution they can find. They can't compromise. They can't compromise even on the performance aspect of this. If this stuff doesn't work in a highly seamless way, they're just not gonna be considered, and that's why, you know, when you see us, you see us deployed on half of the Fortune 10. You see us, the companies out there, whether it's on the cloud or on the endpoint, people just recognize that what we do is a leg above anybody else, except for our marketing.
That part is not there yet.
In your last NRR, we can actually calculate how much revenues came from existing clients versus new clients, and although you grow ARR at the same level of CrowdStrike, it's a very different picture.
Yeah.
You are 76 from new customers, and for them, it's only 33%, give or take-
Yeah
... the big numbers. Talk about your strategy of maximizing upsell to a customer versus getting new customer. You have limited resources. How do you look at tons of focus?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, we're focused on net new business. I mean, it's something that we do in a very deliberate way. There's more market share to be had. There's more account-wise, we're a young company. We got about 12,000 customers. I want more accounts, and to have more accounts, you need to have a focus in your sales force that is about winning new business, no matter how we land, again, whether it's cloud or endpoint, I want the account. And, you know, obviously, if you got a given seller with a million-dollar quota or a X quota, let's say, you want most of that quota exhausted on getting after new business versus... Which also means that relatively speaking, our estate is very underpenetrated.
We're not making a ton of concentrated effort to go after and cross-sell and upsell, and that's a growth lever that we can pull, and we will. The time is right, that we have enough investment, that we can shift some of the focus that we have on winning new business into monetizing the current customer estate. The most interesting thing about that dynamic is growing this much net new accounts and generating 40% of growth is really hard. It's much more expensive typically to do it in grabbing net new accounts. Obviously, when you already have the customer nurture in much easier sales motion than going after a net new account, especially when they're entrenched already with one of your competitor.
I mean, imagine going after one of Nikesh's customers and trying to sell them anything that we have on the, on the track, right? But we're very, very successful in it, and I think that's something that's, you know, kind of a very underlooked property of our business and does create, I think, you know, maybe kind of a harder, more stringent go-to-market that, you know, that, that's something that we are strategically doing and will continue to do. Yeah.
Maybe I want to switch gear to go to market. There's the enterprise segment, there is the SMB segment, and the market, such as MSSPs, et cetera. Can you talk about the dynamics in each of these markets? Do you see, for example, one side of the market growing better than the other side, or do you see weakness in one side versus the others? Separately, can you talk about your go-to-market strategy through partners?
Yeah. I think generally, things remain pretty much the same as it were, like I would say in the past couple of years or so. It's, you get all kinds of, jittery behavior sometimes from customers, and that transcends any specific part of the market. Like the MSSP ecosystem, I think has been, it's a great motion for us because it's low touch, low friction. We basically just license our platform for these partners, and, you know, they conduct everything, on kind of behalf of the customers that they onboard. It, I think, kind of more of the same, the VAR ecosystem for us, you know, whether it's the Optiv or GuidePoint or SHI. I mean, again, good, good traction there. I think we can do much more with them.
Just to give you some rough sense, like 5 account, channel account managers for each one of these partners, we maybe have, you know, 1 for 5. So, you know, obviously, now that we're able to invest a little bit more and we're reaching, you know, more critical scale, and also, I think the main message for me is we're just underpenetrated in so many regards. We can do so much better, and we got tremendous technology, and I think now we gave ourselves the license back to invest an amount of capital, and I think you've seen some of that by the fact that we still have all of our cash from 3 years ago still on the balance sheet, basically.
The company is, you know, becoming much more efficient, and I think after all these opportunities, accelerating, and I think, you know, all in all, we got the reach, now we need the coverage as well.
... You spoke about the fact that you're trying to move some of your-- about it and the implications on your financials?
Yeah, it's a question of scale. I mean, we're sometimes addressing so many customers on the long tail that we're just not doing a, so, you know, just moving some of those into our channel partners, routing those, allowing them to be managed by our channel partners is, should be a favorable dynamic for us, and just reduce a lot of load. Nothing super critical, but definitely, I think, a favorable dynamic for us.
So I want to ask you about competition. I know that you said competition is less of a factor, but what—how did the competitive landscape, new companies enter the space or provide an agent, and is competition a consideration in your competitive bids, meaning you lose or you win? Do you see a change from a year ago, two years ago?
No, not entirely. I think that... I wouldn't say competition is not a factor. I think it's a constant factor.
Yeah, not changing factor.
It's not—I mean, not in a material way, right? Two things to remember is that it's a very, very big market, and look, you guys, you know, you like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is a great machine, right? I can think differently about the technology, but success. Even if you don't argue with that, you kinda say they're gonna be very successful. They're gonna be a $10 billion company by 2030. The opportunity in the market is $100 billion. If anybody thinks that I'm not gonna have a significant share of this market, security providers out there, and we're gonna be some of the biggest cybersecurity providers in the years to come. We got exceptional technology that almost nobody else in this market has.
So to me, a competitor in this market, we win the fair share of the engagements that we're actually included in. I think our work needs to focus on being included in more of these conversations and going back to, in our ability, I think, to double down now that we've, you know, inflected into free cash flow positivity, it just opens up the door to, you know, create more awareness for what we do, all across the SIEM, which is all here about SentinelOne, but there's a ton of folks that don't know anything about SentinelOne. I mean, it's a very, very, very, very big market, especially if you consider, you know, data and how that's coming up online. It's a gradual...
but again, $100 billion, I mean, that's an ocean of opportunities, and we're here to stay and, you know, go, go after them. And I think, you know, stock, that point in time thing, we don't get, too stressed about that, and I think that generally, we can and we will improve our profile as a company. I think that one of the things that are a pressure on our stock is just our overall profitability and EBIT profile, and that's temporary for this year and next year. I think it's a, it's a very different story, and growth, I believe, will still be there in a very sustainable way. So I've seen this competition. I know the competition. I know who I'm competing against. A lot of them are my ex-employees.
So, you know, I think I got a good vantage point into all of this.
Has Microsoft been a growing risk or a declining risk over time?
It's a growing risk for customers, that's for sure. No, truly, I think we'll attest to that. And I think it is now a question that lingers in many practitioners' minds. How do I mitigate the Microsoft-introduced risk in your environment? And I think that you can't, you can't ignore that anymore. So I do think there's some sentiment change. I wouldn't say that it's as material as you want to see it. Like, I would, I would want people to be more aware of the, of the risk in Microsoft's offering as of now, but you are seeing a change in behavior, so you know, time, time will tell. But I don't consider that Microsoft will taper away from security anytime soon. It's gonna take an antitrust and a couple of other things.
So, is it important for us to focus on the number of modules that you sell, meaning the upsell opportunity, and what's your plan on that? You have about 10 modules. The question is, what, when you, when I... You know, when we're gonna meet, like, 3 years from now, when we talk about the, the number of modules that you have, where do you want to be? Is there a number out there?
Yeah. I would say that I would like to have four product lines and zero modules. I don't. I think that also, if I see this correctly, AI will naturally consolidate a ton of the bullshit that you're seeing in the market today. They have no place. They don't provide for better security. Everybody's getting breaches. Why, why, why are you even investing all that money in all these things that you can't even manage? You don't have enough people to control all of AI. You need general intelligence for security, which is really what we're building. I think you're gonna have one AI governing many, many aspects of. I don't think, you know, Palo building like a chatbot per product and continuing their acronym soup. I want to break that cycle.
I'm done with this, and, you know, that's kind of what we're—Eventually, if you parse through all the indoctrination by the vendors and the space and kind of the inertia of the past 20 years in cybersecurity, want that. It's all based on just bad assumptions from decades ago in a very, very different environment, and we're gonna keep on pushing the envelope there. I mean, I'm—no modules. I think we got the core capabilities that we want, whether it's to your initial point, endpoint protection, protecting the devices, super imperative. So, protecting, you know, the data, incredibly important, and that's something that we'll continue to do, and protecting the cloud.
And I think, you know, no matter then, like, how many modules you have, what you do, the investment and the vulnerability management and vulnerability patching, all of them being sold by a different SKU, and who needs that stuff? It's just, it's not the way to go. So four main product lines, AI to govern all of it. Whether you buy the capability from me or not, you know, just connect it to my AI, I'll manage it for you, or AI will manage it for you.
Great. We almost, almost ran out of time. Is there any question from the audience? Okay, in the sake of leaving 9:10, I wanna just thank you-
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Appreciate the time.