All right. Well, hey, good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of the Barclays Tech Conference. My name is Saket Kalia. I cover software here at Barclays. Honored to have with us the team from SentinelOne. We've got co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten. We've also got the IR, the dream team IR team here. We've got Doug Clark as well as Saad Nazir in the audience. So we've got about 30 minutes together. Let's spend maybe 20 or 25 minutes doing some fireside chat here with Tomer, which I know is gonna be really fun. And then anyone has any questions, just pop your hand up and we've got a mic runner on the back. So maybe with all of that said, Tomer, thanks so much for being with us here today.
Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Yeah, absolutely. So, Tomer, I mean, a lot of us were on your Q3 earnings call last week, but, maybe just to make sure we're all sort of on the same page, could you just maybe recap some of the highlights from the quarter that you were most proud of?
Yeah. First of all, just the, you know, net new ARR reacceleration and the break away from seasonality, is just exactly the dynamic that we wanted to see. This is something that we've, I think, designed and planned probably, about three, four quarters ago, in a really conscious attempt to drive just a different trajectory to the business and to see that, really kind of, come to fruition exactly as we imagined. Just gave us a lot of confidence that we can keep on doing that, that if we, if we stitch together the same ingredients, the same motions, we can, you know, continue and drive acceleration in net new ARR.
More than anything, I think that, seeing that, seeing the pipelines that we have, putting these two together, you know, is just like a very different picture than the one that we've had last year.
Yeah.
That to me is the most exciting part, seeing acceleration in the endpoint business and not a super exciting, you know, element of this. Seeing that also continue and appear in forward pipelines is also really, really nice to see. I mean, we've been very focused on driving emerging business. This was, you know, becoming like 40% of our business almost in any given quarter.
Yeah.
But now seeing endpoint also uptake coming, that's a good boost to the business as well. Yeah, big deals, big customers, average deal sizes, just, you know, creeping up significantly. That's exactly the dynamics that we wanna see. I mean, we've been trying to drive the business, to go there. We've been telling you all about that. And I think Q3 was probably the most pronounced, I would say testament of these initiatives.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It showed, you know, so it's funny. We were talking about the earnings call last week, but ever since the earnings call, a little bit of news out here from MITRE. You know, I think it was yesterday MITRE put out their enterprise sort of results, if you will, in the endpoint space. And it was good to see that SentinelOne achieved strong results here, which I think has been, you know, the case in prior years as well. Could you just maybe highlight some of the key takeaways from that MITRE report?
Yeah. Look, I am just super proud of our teams, you know, delivering consistent results, 100% detection, for five years in a row. I mean, there's no other vendor in our space, outside of space, in outer space. Nobody's able to do that, and that is just tremendous. You know, this year, you know, this has been such an important test because it tests some of the most advanced capabilities that we see adversaries employ. And again, to see the performance, to see how others performed, I think that that's another. Some people just didn't show up. Our closest competitor is not even there. I think that is also pretty significant. At the end of the day, people wanna know that what they're buying is tried and tested and stable and able to deliver what you advertise.
And I think that MITRE was kind of this unbiased body, was always, you know, one of the best in the business to really net out what these EDR platforms can do. There's a lot of marketing in cybersecurity, as we all know. So the need for something, you know, neutral and unbiased to just tell you what's going on, I think is, is so important. And, and again, you know, just leading it for five years in a row is, is pretty tremendous. I think it's fairly unprecedented in any type of these tests, you know, over the years.
Definitely speaks to the strength of the product over the years. You know, Tomer, I wanna start a little high level because I know you spend a lot of time with customers, and I just wanna put July 19th aside for a second, right? The question is, what do you hear from customers about their interest in endpoint right now? You know, it's been interesting to see we do a couple CIO surveys every year. We ask about prioritization of different security areas, and endpoint consistently comes out, you know, up at the top. What do you think is driving that based on your conversations with the customers?
Yeah. Look, we just talked about the reacceleration in our endpoint business.
Yeah.
I think this is probably the kind of a reawakening of that space. It's the most consideration and attention that we've seen in the past three years or so in the endpoint space. To your point, I mean, it's always a good space. There's always a lot of action. I think, you know, this past year, definitely, you know, some more of that came through that outage. There's definitely just a better, I think, understanding of what the role of the endpoint is in this world of 5,000 cybersecurity vendors.
Right.
At the end of the day, you can slice and dice it any way you want and talk to a lot of these folks here in this conference, but endpoint is the stuff. Endpoint is what stops the attackers. Endpoint is the most critical part of your entire cybersecurity ecosystem. When people look at what the adjacencies that endpoint can deliver and stop as well, 'cause it's not really just endpoint protection. It's also workload protection.
Right.
Let me go back to MITRE for one second. MITRE this year, it was the first year where they actually tested coverage, not just for Windows endpoints, but also for Mac and also for Linux. So in essence, it's also testing the protection for server-based and workloads. That entire thing, you know, is really the most important factor in cybersecurity. So I think, you know, the traction in endpoint is most likely gonna pick up. There's still 50% of this market that is in the hands of incumbents, even, you know, even McAfee or Trellix or, you know, whatever you wanna call them. I mean, that's still, you know, kind of probably like a billion-dollar business, right? I mean, so there's a lot more there. And then you got Trend Micro and you got Sophos and you got Webroot and Bitdefender.
So there's a lot more that we expect to do in that space. And I also wanna maybe kind of tie it and put some frame around this. There's been a lot of talk about the benefit from the outage and all that stuff. And I think what's really important to understand is that that company, you know, that suffered the outage, they're still a pretty good execution company. And to displace the customer of theirs is something that takes typically more energy, more time. I can do 10 incumbent displacements at the time that I do one, you know. Company displacement. So at the end of the day, I mean, you also wanna kinda pick and choose if you're going after these opportunities. The ACV, given their discounting, is sometimes not as lucrative.
So it's really much more what do you wanna take out of that versus am I gonna just, you know, spend all of my sellers' time in all these, you know, customers looking to leave and looking for a great price point, but at the same time, you know, they're fighting, you know, tooth and nail to try and keep them. So, you know, we kinda prioritize what we wanna get from that long list of people that contact us. But we have to balance it with the inertia that we have in the business elsewhere 'cause the end of time is time.
Yeah.
So, to me, you know, I just wanna focus on what I can the most I can do with my time.
Yeah.
And that's not always that, you know, that displacement opportunity.
Yeah. No, listen, I think that's thoughtful. And I think that punctuates one of the things that you said on the last call, which is, you know, the outage is certainly one factor in helping SentinelOne gain share, but it's not the only factor. But maybe looking at that event, 'cause I know we'll get the question. Maybe looking at that event, I mean, you just sounded great about sort of the pipeline. What have you seen about just around the size and quality of the pipeline? I think you've also talked about the quality of the pipeline.
Yeah.
You know, what have you seen around the size and quality of the pipeline compared to before the outage? How has that changed, whether it's from CrowdStrike displacements or just opportunities from other non-CrowdStrike vendors.
Yeah. I would say, you know, even before the outage, again, that concentrated effort that we had to drive up market and to start selling endpoint with the platform has already started driving up the size of every opportunity in the pipeline. So, you know, I can share, I think last I looked at it, the average deal size in our pipeline is up 40% year- over- year. That's significant.
Wow.
And that, you know, partial outage, some of it is outage. I wouldn't say the dominant stuff we have in our pipeline is outage displacements. I think there's quite a bit there. But at the same time, again, we got multiple capabilities, multiple avenues to market, some parts of the market where, you know, that competitor is almost not present, despite their attempts. So again, the diversification of our kind of, you know, revenue funnel, I would say, makes it that not one thing is gonna control the entire pipeline.
Right.
But as a whole, you know, it's the biggest pipeline we've had, you know, it's record pipelines as we go into next year. We just experienced, you know, net new ARR acceleration. All the fundamentals are intact. We're getting more efficient. We just crossed, you know, last 12 months free cash flow positivity. So I'm fairly confident that we can keep on accelerating net new ARR. I'm fairly confident that next year for us is gonna look better in terms of net new ARR. But I don't want people running like and doing all kinds of speculation. I just think that the strength you've seen in Q3 should carry on. And I think every indication that we have sitting here points to that direction.
Maybe just to put a bow on this outage point, right? Because again, I just wanna make sure all those, these questions are asked. But, you know, how do we feel about the momentum going into Q4, given everything that you've just said? Because Q4 for, you know, for that competitor as well as a lot of other competitors, that ends up being a very heavy renewal quarter for them.
Right.
I know that, you know, displacement is one part of the pipeline, but, you know, those renewal opportunities are also great opportunities for you to take share. How is that playing into your view on Q4?
Yeah. Look, Q4 has traditionally been a strong quarter for us, and I think it's gonna continue to be a strong quarter for us. There's really good momentum in the business. Like any way I slice and dice it, I see, you know, just better dynamics than the ones I've seen a year ago. A lot of it is really the function of our go-to-market organization changes, I think, more than anything else, honestly. I mean, outage or not, we just invested a lot of work in up-leveling, improving, getting new talent in, getting new leadership in, across the board almost.
To your point, that was three or four quarters ago, well before the outage, right, when that foundation was laid.
Totally. To me, I mean, when I look at that outage, I'm saying, okay, this is good timing for me because if that had happened a year prior, we probably not would be in the same position to capture, you know, the same amount of benefits.
That's interesting.
So, I'm you know kind of at least happy that we've been able to kind of shift our go-to-market gears, and now our overall competitive position is better, and you know with MITRE even.
Yep.
I think we're just in a better position to capture the demand. And demand, you know, is definitely rising, you know, outage-related or not. So again, I'm more encouraged now than I've been in a while. I think for us, there's been like almost a year of stabilization and rebuilding of our go-to-market team. The vast majority of that is in the revenue org. From here, it's net positive evolution, I would say, versus fixing things that we felt were really broken.
Absolutely. You know, I wanna, that's a great segue into go-to-market, right? And I think one of the areas that really enhances that go-to-market is this Lenovo partnership, right?
Yes.
That you expanded, right? Can we maybe just walk through what the current partnership sort of looks like and how that announcement in October enhanced it?
Yeah. So first of all, I mean, incredibly strategic. I mean, if you have anybody that's willing to take your software, and embed it and ship it on, call it, you know, 30 million PCs in the next few years, you know, that's, that's big. That's substantial. It will come up online, you know, probably towards the latter end of next year. I wanna also maybe kind of frame it for people. I mean, this is not something that you're gonna see kind of popping into ARR and suddenly, you know, ARR boosts up by.
Yeah.
By a ton. We took a very conservative portion of that commitment for those 30 million PCs. By the way, Lenovo ships 70 million PCs a year. So there's a level of conservatism in the amount that we have contracted. There's a level of conservatism in what we took into ARR, when we signed that contract. So don't expect like any ARR-based dynamic, until we start seeing the pace, until we start seeing, you know, how Lenovo ships, you know, how long does it take, what are the dynamics that we're seeing. And from there, you know, we might revise the contract and then take more into ARR. But right now, our focus is get this up and running. Every PC that ships is a boost to our revenue, not to ARR yet. And that's where I want people to kind of, get the right frame around that partnership.
We, at the end of the day, don't know exactly all these dynamics. Every OEM deal is a bit different. I'm definitely not gonna base this OEM dynamic on anybody else's OEM dynamic, but I think all of it is gonna be positive. It's just the magnitude, the pace, the velocity of it. We wanna see how it looks like, and then I think we're gonna be smarter on how much of this we can really kind of take as a future commitment. We definitely don't wanna inject like a big slug to ARR now, where we don't know exactly, you know, what's the pace, how fast it's gonna get into revenue, and then you create this big bifurcation.
Sure.
So right now, that's kind of how we look at it, you know. I think it's gonna be probably a lot more pronounced in FY 2027 than even in FY 2026. But to us, it could be and should be something that also helps us sustain our growth rate in the out years, which, you know, when we sit here, we think three, three, three years forward, you know. We wanna see our growth rate, you know, as high as can be throughout these years, not just next year, and, you know, how do we boost that.
Of course. Yeah.
So that, that's really how we're looking at it.
So super helpful framework there, Tomer, right? and I just wanna make sure, and sorry, it's probably a dumb question, but why what, and we asked this question to Barbara on the last call as well. Why is it why would a Lenovo shipment just be a benefit to revenue and not just ARR? There's, is it is there something around the deployment or anything? Maybe touch on that a little bit.
No, it's really simple. I'll try and, you know, kind of give you whatever I can share.
Please, yeah.
But if you think about any ARR deal, let's say, you know, this deal with Lenovo is a four-year deal, and kinda say, okay, conservatively, I'm gonna benefit $X million from that deal over the term.
Right.
Obviously, you divide it by four. And then we take that specific portion, we put it into ARR, and that is it. And that is all that there is.
Right.
Moreover, we already had an existing partnership with Lenovo prior to the OEM deal. So in essence, we already had some ARR and revenue coming from Lenovo.
Right.
So in our first year of recognizing that ARR, we basically took just the offset of it into ARR. And that just accounting. We're not doing.
Totally.
You know, anything, you know, out of the ordinary, and that is it. You don't get to take it again to ARR until you revise up, true up, or true down, but in this case, hopefully true up.
Mm-hmm.
When you start seeing shipment, when you start seeing usage. So this is very much like any other consumption deal if you think about it. Where the moment people start consuming the services, that's when you get to start and talk about, okay, what does this look like in the out years? Do I need to revise my contract? Do, are my ARR assumptions that I signed in the beginning of the contract right right now or not? And, and that's all there is to it. I mean, it's a pretty.
Yeah.
Think about it as a commitment deal.
Yeah. Very clear. Very, and very helpful. You know, one of the areas that I wanna touch on just that I think one of the most important topics that came out of OneCon is sort of the momentum around non-endpoint solutions. We've talked so much about endpoint, and it's obviously an accelerating business. But, you know, the non-endpoint solutions like Data Lake, like Purple AI, like Cloud and Identity, can you just remind us of the rough sizing of kind of that in aggregate? And, you know, maybe stack rank those in terms of opportunities for growth.
Yeah. I think all in all, you're looking at about a $200 million kind of roughly, you know, emerging set. Dominant part there, you know, obviously is Cloud right now. Data is growing incredibly fast. Identity is a really good attach for us. Purple AI, obviously, you know, is definitely boosting growth rates, across the board for a lot of our adjacent capabilities. So it's not only about Purple. It's about also what Purple drives in terms of more attach from different modules. And then, you know, there's an overlooked part of our business. We don't talk about it a lot, but like our services business, our MDR business is also quite sizable. It's probably, you know, in the top three in the world.
And it's also something that we are now extending to manage not only SentinelOne endpoints, but really anything you put into our SIEM. So it's becoming this complete managed enterprise solution. And we're seeing really good traction with that already and, and honestly also, you know, a much better price point, to be honest. So all of that, you know, are things that we are looking to continue and accelerate. I think the most challenging thing that we, that we have going in SentinelOne is just pushing all of these things in parallel at the same time. For better or for worse, it's not like we have just one capability and we're, you know, kinda putting our entire might, you know, behind it. We are moving in a pretty compounded fashion where we're driving a lot of different growth vectors at the same time.
To me, one of the biggest unlocks that we have yet to really fully fulfill is really the upsell and cross-sell opportunity. So going back, I think, in a more methodical way to our customer state, which is still very underpenetrated, predominantly on kind of the endpoint, endpoint model, maybe another module or two, definitely not on a lot of the emerging capabilities. And that could be another lever for growth for us. So to me, the right way to think about that opportunity is SentinelOne needs to lead with the platform, and that opens up the gate for the gates for all these different emerging capabilities. And SentinelOne needs to start selling more to its existing customer base. And I think these two things in tandem could just show better dynamics in, you know, in the years to come.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, maybe I want to use that to pivot to some financial questions here, right? So, and I fully appreciate you've just got so much more product. You know, there's a net revenue retention opportunity there at the base as well, right? So let's put all of this stuff together. I mean, you still have tailwinds from the outage. You've got all these seeds that you've planted in terms of go-to-market. And, you know, let's see how Lenovo sort of goes. But, and we've kinda crossed the billion-dollar, you know, you've crossed the billion-dollar market in ARR. Not looking for guidance here, but how should we think about sort of the moving parts for ARR next year, if you will?
Let me try and, you know, give some direction, I would say. I think, and actually, I mean, I just said it as well. I mean, I think the only thing that we kind of are focused on is just driving more net new ARR acceleration. So if anything, I think, you know, we'll add more net new ARR than we've added this year, you know. The magnitude, I don't know even to tell you right now. We want it to be as big as possible, but I don't want, you know, nobody to run away, including our own teams.
Sure.
So I think it's safe to assume there's gonna be acceleration, a continued acceleration. The magnitude, I think, you know, let's get through this quarter, very focused on closing, you know, a strong Q4. From there, I think obviously we'll be smarter. But I think, given all these dynamics, it's clear that we're gonna have a better year next year than the one we had this year.
Yeah. It definitely, definitely feels that way. You know, I mean, we've spent so much of the time just on growth, and, you know, SentinelOne is a growth company, and that's why I wanted to focus there. But, you know, I also don't wanna lose sight of the fact that, you know, we're on track to achieve positive free cash flow, I think, for the year. What are some of the drivers of that stronger free cash flow this year, and how do you kinda think about that growth trajectory going forward?
Yeah.
I know that's, you know, that's a great question for Barbara too when we have her here next year at some point, but curious how you think about that.
Yeah. No, luckily, we're very aligned, so I don't think you're gonna hear anything different.
Got it.
Probably she'll be a bit more, you know, articulate about it than I can be.
Absolutely.
But look, at the end of the day, we care a lot about profitability. I think, you know, next year for us is one where, you know, I think back in the previous quarter, sometimes you all have asked me like, you know, are you gonna keep it at break-even and reinvest everything? The answer is no. We're not gonna keep it at break-even. You know, we want to show a degree of profitability. We wanna show meaningful profitability. We wanna become sustainably profitable. And that's what we're gonna drive into next year. Is it gonna be the exact same magnitude of improvement that you've seen in years past? You know, we've improved about 25 percentage points on our operating margins every single year. I don't know that we can and want to do that into next year.
That will definitely take a lot of our ability to reinvest. But I think we can reinvest. I think we can become more efficient in our operation, and thus show meaningful improvement in profitability, and definitely still maintain kind of a good level of growth. Where does it come from? I think some of it comes from scale. A lot of it comes from just us optimizing the processes in the company. We feel like there is still a lot of leverage that we can drive. I mean, you can kind of look at our sales and marketing expenses as an example. I mean, we wanna drive it down to the long-term growth profile that, you know, that we've outlined, and that's doable. We've had a year of change in go-to-market. There's a bit of an overlap. There's a bit of a bloat. We're gonna start pruning that away.
We got a new CMO. We're starting to drive more and more a focus on ROI, you know, in marketing and how much we're yielding. We're starting to prune away things that don't yield as much. I mean, we can't do everything, and we don't wanna do everything.
Right.
So really sharpening the pen, I think, on many areas in the company where we can drive down cost, I mean, be it G&A, be it S&M. One place we're not gonna taper away is R&D. You know, to me, in cybersecurity.
You've spoken like a technologist now.
I mean, you know, that comes baked in. I can't remove that. You know, some things are very innate, and I just think that in cybersecurity, the moment you stop innovating, the moment you stop developing and pushing forward, you become irrelevant. And I think we're kind of seeing some of that already happening, and you know, to lead MITRE five years in a row, I mean, it doesn't just happen. You really have to have a really good product. And.
Right.
You know, given that our AI capabilities right now are second to none in the market, we never wanna lose that advantage, right? We just wanna keep on pushing it forward. And, and thus, you know, we're not gonna see savings in R&D. But oddly enough, R&D is actually the one part of our business which is pretty much in the long-term target profile. So we also don't feel bad about not pruning anything, out of R&D.
Yeah. Absolutely. I wanna ask a couple last questions here, but any questions here from the audience before we move on? Govinder here. Can we get a mic here for just one second?
Just a follow-up on what's coming from the go-to-market aspect. And you said that the R&D impact is, like, what is the ability to invest in larger deals that is more enterprise-wide? Like, is there a change in the go-to-market you might need to now make for that? Because, is it harder to predict when those land 'cause the sales cycle's maybe longer, or how are you handling that?
Yeah. Look, we've been doing a lot of big deals, even before that. Now, that means we need to do more of those. So the one thing that does change is, I think, the amount of sellers that we put in that part of the market. So there's definitely been a concentrated effort to put more strategic sellers, to put more high-enterprise sellers into the business. We're factoring some of these sales cycles. We're very familiar, you know, with what these sales cycles look like. It's not like we've never done very large deals. So to me, it's just that continuation of going up market, and it's all positive dynamic. Like, I have a hard time seeing it differ.
And then just one follow-up on managing growth and profitability. Maybe I misremembered it, so I apologize. But I've always kinda thought in the past, in the Rule of 40, you wanna be a Rule of 40 company.
Right.
But you wanna be growth for maybe a zero margin. I know you were okay with that. Would you say that the mindset is changing?
Company now, or maybe versus a year or two ago?
Yeah. I think just at our scale right now, I think that 40% growth is untenable at this point in time, so you know, how do you get to Rule of 40, with 40 being untenable? I'm not saying that even 30% is tenable at this point. I mean, who knows? Let us get through a quarter. Let's figure out what's happening. I mean, we're not gonna be guiding anything, and I think don't assume that we can get to Rule of 40 within FY26. That's another thing. I mean, we'll get, you know, as close as we can. I mean, that's part of this trajectory, and I think we can get relatively close. But with that, you know, being 40 on zero, I wish. But we have other considerations as well.
I think that we kind of, at the state of the public market, a lot of investors, you know, favor profitable companies or stay away from non-profitable companies, so if I take that as a consideration and not just my growth rate as a consideration, then we need to balance it as well, right? Even if we could drive something like 40% growth, it is probably not the way to unlock the most value in the stock, I would say.
Any other questions here? I've got one last one. So, just going back to, I mean, just the technology focus here, and I mean, we've spoken so much about the organic growth here at SentinelOne. How do you think about sort of inorganic growth down the road, I mean, in terms of just, you know, opportunities to bolster the portfolio?
Yeah. Look, we're always looking for interesting opportunities. I think there is definitely, you know, assets out there that kind of provide ingredients that we, you know, might wanna consider owning. But with that said, I think at this point in time, we're just really focused on our standalone path. I mean, with all the great things that are happening in our business, the biggest yields are gonna come from us investing our time in growing our own business, nurturing all these different seeds that you talked about. You know, these are $200 million worth of seeds.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So, you know, it's pretty good. They come with high growth, so you wanna keep on nurturing that. If we see an interesting opportunity, I think that's always an option. But right now, there's, you know, nothing imminent or nothing that we feel we kind of have to do.
Yeah. Feels like just heads down, execution and focus.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that makes a ton of sense. Well, couldn't think of a better way to end on that. Tomer Weingarten, thank you so much for the time. Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Absolutely.