NASDAQ:PANW Palo Alto Networks Q3 2023 Earnings Report $238.22 +8.41 (+3.66%) Closing price 04/17/2025 04:00 PM EasternExtended Trading$239.18 +0.96 (+0.40%) As of 04/17/2025 06:24 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Polygon.io. Learn more. Earnings HistoryForecast AppLovin EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.19Consensus EPS $0.12Beat/MissBeat by +$0.08One Year Ago EPSN/AAppLovin Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$1.72 billionExpected Revenue$1.71 billionBeat/MissBeat by +$6.49 millionYoY Revenue GrowthN/AAppLovin Announcement DetailsQuarterQ3 2023Date5/23/2023TimeN/AConference Call DateTuesday, May 23, 2023Conference Call Time4:30PM ETUpcoming EarningsAppLovin's Q1 2025 earnings is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7, 2025, with a conference call scheduled at 5:00 PM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Q1 2025 Earnings ReportConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptSlide DeckPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfileSlide DeckFull Screen Slide DeckPowered by AppLovin Q3 2023 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMay 23, 2023 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 13 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Fiscal Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I am Walter Pritchard, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please note that this call is being recorded today, Tuesday, May 23, 2023, at 1:30 pm Pacific Time. With me on today's call are Nikesh Arora, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Deepak Galeche, our Chief Financial Officer. Following the prepared remarks, our Chief Product Officer, Lee Klarich, will join us in the Q and A session. Operator00:00:30You can find the press release and other information to supplement today's discussion on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com. While there, please click on the link for events and presentations where you will find the investor presentation and supplemental information. During the course of today's call, we will make forward looking statements and projections regarding the company's business operations and financial performance. These statements made today are subject to risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update them. Operator00:01:00Please review the press release and our recent SEC filings to see these risks and uncertainties. We will also refer to non GAAP financial measures. These measures should not be considered a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are in the press release and the appendix of the investor presentation. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all results and comparisons are on a fiscal year over year basis. Operator00:01:29We also note that management is participating at the Bank of America Global Technology Conference on June 6. I will now turn the call over to Nikesh. Speaker 100:01:40Thank you for joining us today. Operator00:01:41Good day, everyone, and welcome to Palo Alto. Speaker 200:01:44Oops. There's a bit of Speaker 100:01:46a little repeat AI action there. Thank you, Walter. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our earnings call. As you can see, once again, our teams have delivered a balanced between our top and bottom line performance in the current macroeconomic environment. In Q3, our billings grew 26% year over year And revenue grew 24%, while RPO grew ahead of these at 35%. Speaker 100:02:11Our Q3 non GAAP operating income Our trailing 12 month adjusted free cash flow both grew above 60% year over year, while we achieved our 4th consecutive quarter of profitability on a GAAP basis. Let's talk about the macro environment. The overall macro trends of cautious spending, deal scrutiny And cost and value consciousness persist. Moreover, the behavior continues to be more widespread across a larger swath of our customers. Against this backdrop, we have been staying ahead with rigorous execution. Speaker 100:02:43We have increased our own deal scrutiny, gotten ahead of the challenges and continue to sharpen our business value focus while demonstrating superior security outcomes to our customers. From a technology trend perspective, there is no significant change. The themes we have seen around cloud adoption, automation and hybrid work continue with minor variations. Network transformations, albeit with long cycles, continue to be undertaken because they offer cost savings and are part of the modernization stack for most customers as they go down their cloud and network transformation journeys. This in turn continues to drive a sustained demand for SASE and hardware and software firewalls. Speaker 100:03:23As we have shared before, the theme of consolidating around platforms continues to come up and we are well positioned to offer solutions in this regard. Needless to say, in the last 3 months, Chad GPT and generative AI have revived the interest in AI as a technology. As we have always maintained, AI is a data problem and security is a data problem and has an interesting AI has an interesting role to play in security, both for its ability to help deliver superior security outcomes in near real time and unfortunately, the potential threat associated with AI being used to generate attacks. We have and continue to work on these problems. We should talk more about this today. Speaker 100:04:02On the other hand, we continue to see limited underlying growth in hardware Whilst the supply chain crisis and its effects are all but over, there is a shift that the crisis created. We have seen a higher appetite for software based solutions and networking and higher appetite for cloud delivered form factors. This is particularly salient to the current CapEx constrained environment. On the adversary front, there seems to be no impending recession and threats. Increased cloud activity and connectivity continues to drive the threat environment. Speaker 100:04:34This is best illustrated by recent findings in the 7th installment of our Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report. It still takes the average security team approximately 6 days to resolve a security alert. In contrast, it only takes a threat actor a few hours to exploit a newly While over 7,000 malicious versions of open source software packages were circulated in 2022, Speaker 300:04:57Less than a Speaker 100:04:57quarter of those packages are sourced properly to ensure a clean software version is incorporated into a typical customer's code base. Regulatory interest continues to rise and is prevalent across multiple governments. There's sustained activity around incremental regulatory mandates and executive orders to create awareness around cybersecurity. This is true not only at the government level, but also as company's Board of Directors are bringing additional oversight And drive an alignment of accountability for cybersecurity. This requires incremental organizational focus and investment by our customers. Speaker 100:05:29On the macro front, customers anticipate that global growth may slow. Some are grappling with rising capital costs and are watching their bottom lines more closely. This means looking for efficiencies in their business. Within cybersecurity, complex architectures and long vendor rosters have come into focus And many customers see this as an opportunity to simplify and drive consolidation. 5 years ago, when I highlighted the need for platform architectures and consolidation, The idea was met with some resistance. Speaker 100:05:58Over the last few years, our industry leading solutions, 3 platform approach has continued to take hold and has allowed us to provide a much needed option for simplicity, a modern stack and better security outcomes for our customers. I mentioned earlier that our customers are engaging in more scrutiny of deals and value, resulting in robust discussions internally with us. We continue to work hard to stay ahead of deal cycles engaging the CFO and procurement departments. The cost of money continues to become a topic of conversation As customers enter to larger and longer term relationship with us, some also seek more flexible business terms. A strong balance sheet allows us to accommodate customers while we maximize our medium term cash flow. Speaker 100:06:39Let's turn to efficiency and operations. As we started this fiscal year, We pivoted our efforts and focused our effort on doing more with less. Our teams responded effectively. Coupled with the waning of the supply chain crisis, We have been able to adapt our operating model significantly. Deepak will get into specifics, but it suffices to say, we have found a new rhythm And at our scale, we believe we can continue to drive better margins from our business. Speaker 100:07:03We have achieved this through selective hiring in our customer facing teams as well as streamlining our go to market efforts in addition to hiring for key innovation areas, which we expect to continue to do. These efforts are self evident in our higher Q3 operating margins and our increased operating and free cash flow margin guidance for the year. We continue to see platformization in cybersecurity. I talked about consolidation earlier. A key part of our thesis at Palo Alto Networks has always been to drive superior cybersecurity outcomes for our customers. Speaker 100:07:34To do that, We need a robust portfolio that works both individually and cohesively to reduce the burden on our customers who have to stitch together disparate cybersecurity products. We've had to navigate this fine line with our customers. We continue to see the benefits of this approach and think we are in a multiyear trend. We have the opportunity to do to security what we have seen done in financial software, HR software or CRM, where customers have adapted to platforms due to their inherently superior benefits from data integrity, integration, seamlessness and outcome orientation. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Speaker 100:08:10You can see our success here driving larger platform transactions. Across the board, the size of the transactions we are signing is increasing. This is evidenced by bookings from transactions valued over $1,000,000 $5,000,000 $10,000,000 in the 3rd quarter, which are up by year over year by 29%, 62%, 136%, respectively. We see a similar trend in cohorts of our customers. For example, When we look at the average lifetime value for our 200 largest customers, we've seen steady growth of 30% plus over the last 3 years. Speaker 100:08:43When we look at purchases of our platforms amongst the Global 2,000, we see now that 53% of our customers have bought a product in all three platforms of StartUp, Prisma and Cortex, up from 48% a year ago and 33% 3 years ago. We see this as a continuing trend. It convinces us that the opportunity to impact outcomes for our customers is large if it can get us right. We see the path to continued success with large customers and multiproduct expansion in our installed base. I'll now update you on our 3 platforms starting with network security. Speaker 100:09:16We are the comprehensive Zero Trust network security company. This quarter, we were proud to be named a new leader in Gartner's most recent security service, Edge Magic Quadrant. This recognition is apt as our teams have been delivering significant innovation and seeing stronger customer adoption in Sassy for years. This, in addition to our leadership position in SD WAN, makes us the only SaaS vendor in the industry to be named leader in the Gartner SSE and SD WAN Magic Quadrants. Add to that, our leadership position in network firewalls and our number one market share position in virtual firewalls, we are the only vendor with clear leadership across 0 Trust Network Security. Speaker 100:09:54This leadership across the network security category is a testament to our ability to drive significant innovation in new markets, while maintaining our leadership in core markets and offering this innovation as part of our cohesive platforms. Let's talk about SASE. SASE remains one of the fastest growing markets within all of cybersecurity. Our ARR is growing over 50%. At scale, we have surpassed 4,200 customers in Q3. Speaker 100:10:18Our success has spread across all 3 major geographies as highlighted by large deals in each of these territories in Q3. Let me tell you about 3 of these notable wins. First, a global beverage company with U. S. Headquarters Signed a transaction north of $30,000,000 which includes $24,000,000 of Sassy for a complete Sassy transformation that included Prisma Access, Prisma SD WAN and our ATEM or Autonomous Digital Experience Management for tens of thousands of employees. Speaker 100:10:442nd, a Japan based technology company signed an 8 figure transaction to modernize Its network and its network security after an extensive POC. Before standardizing on our SASE, the customer replaced its legacy firewalls and other network security capabilities and standardized on our next generation firewalls, driving a full 0 trust network strategy. Finally, a European technology company signed a high 7 figure Sassy deal that was part of an overall transaction to Palo Alto Networks of once again nearly $30,000,000 in total value the customer bought From us, because of our multiple network security form factors, in the broader transaction, we added capabilities such as IoT and fully adopted our core network security subscriptions. You all might remember, at the beginning of this fiscal year, as part of our scaling efforts, we combined our Sassy sales organization into our Kohl's core sales organization. Drivers here with that, we saw Sassy demand going mainstream and we saw encouraging signs that our core sellers could sell the more complex Sassy offering. Speaker 100:11:42After 3 quarters of executing as a combined organization, we're delighted to report that over 80% of our core reps participate in the creation of Prisma SaaSci pipelines as we enter Q4. Q3 was a strong quarter of innovation highlighted by our AI powered SaaSci launch. This flagship release improves capabilities to enable organizations to automate their increasingly complex IT and network operations center functions with AI ops. It improves monitoring for networks and apps at the branch office and significantly improves integration with IoT Secure. Moving over to our firewall business. Speaker 100:12:16Broadridge and SaaSy, the future of network security is clear to us. It is centered around software. And while we have led and expect continue to lead the hardware appliance market for many years, software and cloud delivered form factors have been an increasing focus since I joined as CEO. There are multiple reasons why the shift to software is accelerating. In the changing macro environment, customers are more challenged in their CapEx budgets, which often fund appliance purchases. Speaker 100:12:41As a result, their interest in software and cloud deliver form factors remain high. This is especially true when tied to strategic initiatives around cloud adoption. Illustrating this, we saw a significant uptick in customer requests to evaluate our virtual firewall offerings at the beginning of the pandemic. Customer interest in VMs was also sparked by supply chain challenges where we saw evaluation sustained. We continue to see primarily net new demand for software and cloud However, we are seeing more appliance replacements and planning for this trend to continue and possibly accelerate. Speaker 100:13:12Beyond the strength I already covered in Sassy, We saw VM Series deals over $1,000,000 more than double in Q3, including an 8 figure deal we signed as a government agency where they moved from a primarily Appliance centric model to VM Series as a fully leveraged public cloud as their primary infrastructure. This year so far, our VM Series bookings are up more than 40% year over year and it grew over 55% in Q3. Most investors have equated our product revenue with hardware. However, given the drivers I have mentioned Here, this has been rapidly shifting. Software now contributes 30% of our product revenue. Speaker 100:13:46This is up from about 10% 3 years ago. We expect this trend to continue. And as Deepak would remind you, bookings from our VM Series and SaaS transactions are recognized as revenue more over time than an appliance booking. Given the conversation about AI, as I mentioned, there is a renaissance in artificial intelligence driven by significant Advances in large language models, the development of more powerful and efficient computing, the broad availability of large volumes of training data. As a result, we've all seen some of the fastest innovation cycles and launches of unique applications in the last several months. Speaker 100:14:20At Palo Alto Networks, we have been focused on this technology for many years and our efforts have been accelerating over the last 2 years. We first introduced machine learning capabilities as part of our wildfire offering 7 years ago. In the ensuing years, we added AI and machine learning capabilities across our network and has been a critical driver of our innovation and differentiation in the market. In 2020, we introduced the industry's first machine learning powered next generation firewall, where machine learning detection moved in line to prevent 0 day attacks. Since then, we have overhauled nearly all of our security subscriptions with advanced AI capabilities: DNS security, advanced URL filtering, advanced threat prevention, advanced wildfire, all harness machine learning for in line detection and prevention of 0 day attacks. Speaker 100:15:06This means even new attacks that have never been seen before are blocked at the very first attempted use by an attacker. Additionally, We applied AI to IoT security to discover, identify and secure IoT devices and most recently it was expanded to cover both medical IoT and OT security needs. We had a signature release in Sassy that included AI powered autonomous digital experience management in addition to leveraging AI for SD WAN as well as AI powered phishing prevention. In short, we have really been accelerating the application of AI to our network security stack is one of the most mature applications of AI in the security industry today. We are not only ahead in investments in AI and machine learning as a differentiator in our products, But these investments have driven tangible customer benefits. Speaker 100:15:51In a typical day, we analyze nearly 750,000,000 yes, 750,000,000 new unique telemetry objects worldwide. This includes files, URLs, domains, DNS connections and other signals. Our AI models analyze this data and every day we see 1,500,000 new attacks that have never been seen before. We take these new insights and add them to all the other things we have already know about and we use them to block 8,600,000,000 attacks across our customer base daily. This forms the foundation how we do better security across our network security platforms and is how we continue to get better and better at detecting 0 day attacks and being in a position actually to prevent those attacks as well. Speaker 100:16:35Moving on to Prisma Cloud. Our early deal in Prisma Cloud continues to strengthen. Most of our competitors continue to provide OnlyPoint products, while customer demands continues to shift towards the platform approach. Within this, Connecting the left side to the right side, otherwise known as code to cloud is becoming paramount. As an example of our platform success, We continue to see strong usage of our cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection offerings. Speaker 100:17:01Customers are increasingly standardizing on these foundational modules with 49% of Prisma Cloud customers using both CSPM and CWP. This quarter, Gartner noted that in 2022, Only 25% of enterprises buy these capabilities from a common vendor. They expect this will increase to 60% of enterprises by 2025. At the same time, we continue to stay ahead of the industry's need for new capabilities, which is core to our commitment as a platform. We are on track to launch our 11th module as we innovate CIDR security. Speaker 100:17:31We're also focused on driving industry certification in Prisma Cloud. In this last quarter, we were accepted by the Joint Advisory Board and reached Ready status for FedRAMP High, a first for a cloud security platform. This comes in addition to other certifications we have achieved, including Recently announced Prisma Access Achieving Impact Level 5 or IL-five provision authorization. IL-five is the highest unclassified authorization level for DoD agencies under the FedRAMP process. We continue to see steady growth in consumption of Prisma Cloud credits, which were up 44% year over year in Q3. Speaker 100:18:04Our platform is key to the steady growth. We continue to see customers increase their consumption as they deploy workloads And strategically leveraged the public cloud at the core of their IT and business strategy. This includes migrating workloads to the hyperscale clouds, Building new applications in the clouds and leveraging new cloud services. They're also deploying new Prisma Cloud modules of which we currently have 10. The number of customers using 2 or more Prisma Cloud modules grew 37% year over year, while the number using 4 or more modules almost doubled. Speaker 100:18:32We now have 1 in 5 of our Prisma Cloud customers using our Cloud Code module across Our capabilities in Infrastructure as Code, SCA or Software Composition Analysis and Secrets Management as they leverage the more efficient approach to detect and remediate Security issues as core decision for cloud applications before it reaches production. Now moving on to Cortex. This has been a net new business for Palo Alto Networks, a business which was born in the belief that we need to bring next generation innovation to the SOC and all the related activities, just like we had brought firewall business years ago. We're delighted to announce that Cortex achieved a $1,000,000,000 booking milestone in the last 12 months. Cortex was born in 2019 and since then, we have focused intensively on ensuring we have industry leading capabilities across endpoints, SOC Automation and Tax Surface Management. Speaker 100:19:20In the last 4 years, we have visited a leading player in automation, application of AI, attack surface management and continue to climb the charts of the XDR industry as one of the most technically capable solutions. We're particularly proud of the fact that XDR has consistently led in security efficacy. XDR delivered 100% prevention and 100% detection across the 19 evaluation steps conducted by MITRE and has had the highest quality detections of any product in the latest round of evaluations. On the back of our hard work driving these capabilities, we have built Cortex business to over $1,000,000,000 in bookings over the last 12 months, as I mentioned. This is up from $150,000,000 in annual bookings when we launched Cortex as a business in 2019. Speaker 100:20:00As we look forward, these three core capabilities in Cortex are precursors to leading the next generation autonomous security operations center, which pulls this all together and was launched publicly a few months ago called XIM. Our next generation SOC platform, XIM, built totally on AI, is on track to be our fastest growing new offering. XiM represents another significant opportunity within Cortex as we fulfill our vision around autonomous security operations. Like network security a decade ago, Security operations have evolved slowly. XiM is now paving the way for us to drive AI driven security transformation outcomes. Speaker 100:20:39After our GA launch in late Q1, our design partners made significant commercial commitments to Exane. We followed that up in Q2 by broadening our go to market Achieving early success with $30,000,000 in bookings. This quarter, we established momentum for XIM with quarterly bookings more than doubling sequentially As we signed our first 8 figure deal and transactions across all three of our major geographic theaters with this product, We remain optimistic about the prospects of Exane, with the product the center of customers' security operations center transformation. We're seeing Exane give us access to a broader swath of our customers' budgets. Based on what we have achieved this quarter and what we see in the pipeline, we're confident we can achieve our goal of $100,000,000 in bookings faster than we originally anticipated. Speaker 100:21:23This would make it one of the fastest growing security platforms from Palo Alto Networks. Not only does XIM bring together the core capabilities of Cortex, It also brings AI driven outcomes to customers. This heralds a new approach to security, an outcome based approach. The inspiration came to us from our own sock, where we were woefully slow in our own mean time remediate 5 years ago. Our MTTR was in days, Which in today's adversarial environment is unacceptable. Speaker 100:21:50With that insight in mind, you're able to collect billions of events and then using AI Reduces down to just over 100 alerts from a handful of incidents. From here, continuing to use AI and automation, we are able to investigate and respond while detecting incidents in a matter of seconds and responding to high priority ones in under a minute. This is one of the most compelling outcome stories in security. So far, in the early customers that are farthest along on this journey with us, we are seeing the benefits accrue in a similar way. We process over 3.5 petabytes of data a day across the customer state of XDR and XIM. Speaker 100:22:24From here, we apply approximately 1,000 AI models to detect attacks. We then leveraged smart scoring in these automation to accelerate investigation response. We are seeing early indications that customers are able to see reductions Meantime to respond from days or weeks down to hours or minutes just like we did. Swerving back, We are fortunate to be focused on the part of the technology market that is more resilient. Our customers depend on their partnership with us to address challenges that are only becoming more sophisticated. Speaker 100:22:54The market is tough and definitely more challenging than when we started the year. I'm proud that our team has executed through this environment. Our strategy focused on having industry leading capabilities, helping customers simplify their architectures and consolidating vendors is working. Given our diverse portfolio of products, some of our products are growing faster in any given quarter and others are moderating. Combined, You see this portfolio benefit in the top line results we reported today. Speaker 100:23:20We also see significant opportunity as we begin to embed generative AI into our products and workflows. There are 3 ways that our concerted investment as generative AI will benefit us. 1st, generative AI will help us improve our core under the hood detection and prevention efficacy By further advancing the state of the art AI and ML in our products that I spoke of today. 2nd, it will manifest itself in how our customers engage with our products. We will leverage our large cybersecurity data set and telemetry to provide a more intuitive and natural language driven experience within our products, which should improve NPS and drive efficiency benefits for our customers. Speaker 100:23:54And finally, as our employees leverage generative AI, we will drive significant efficiency in our own processes and operations across the enterprise. We intend to deploy proprietary Palo Alto Networks security LLM in the coming year and are actively pursuing multiple efforts to realize these three outcomes. Our portfolio approach, company's overall scale and focus on efficiency have enabled us to drive significant leverage. We are well ahead of schedule here and we're not done. As we continue to execute our plans, we see additional opportunities for efficiency. Speaker 100:24:25With our visibility into incremental leverage, we continue to see the operating profit levels and our fiscal year 2023 guidance as a baseline to build upon. With that, I will turn the call over to Deepak to discuss the details of Q3 and our guidance. Speaker 300:24:39Thank you, Nikesh, and good afternoon, everyone. For Q3, revenue was $1,720,000,000 and grew 24%. Product revenue grew 10%. Total service revenue grew 29% with subscription revenue of $838,000,000 growing 31% and support revenue of £495,000,000 growing 25%. Moving on to geographies. Speaker 300:25:02We saw revenue growth across all theatres with the Americas growing 24%, EMEA up 23% and JPAC growing 24%. The strength of our next generation security capabilities continues to drive our results with NGS ARR of $2,600,000,000 growing 60%. We saw strength across all three platforms, network security, cloud security and security operations. We delivered total billings of $2,260,000,000 up 26% and above the high end of our guidance range. Total deferred revenue in Q3 was $8,100,000,000 an increase of 38%. Speaker 300:25:41Remaining performance obligation or RPO was $9,200,000,000 increasing 35% with current RPO just under half of our RPO. Our non GAAP earnings per share was significantly ahead of our guidance, growing 83% year over year. We again delivered strong cash flow in Q3 with trailing 12 month adjusted free cash flow of $2,800,000,000 growing 68% year over year. Moving on to the rest of the financial highlights. Non GAAP gross margin of 76.1% was up 320 basis points year over year, driven mainly by a higher software mix, reduced supply chain costs and some efficiencies in customer support. Speaker 300:26:25Our non GAAP operating margin of 23.6% increased 5.40 basis points year over year. In addition to improving gross margins, slower headcount additions contributed to our operating leverage. Based on our performance in Q3, we are raising our fiscal year 'twenty three non GAAP operating margin guidance. Non GAAP net income for the Q3 grew 86 percent to $359,000,000 or $1.10 per diluted share. Our non GAAP effective tax rate was 22%. Speaker 300:26:57We again delivered GAAP profitability in Q3 with GAAP net income of $108,000,000 or $0.31 per diluted share. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended Q3 with cash, equivalents and investments of $6,700,000,000 It is worth reminding investors that our 2023 convertible note will mature on July 1, 2023, and we expect to settle the principal obligation with cash on our balance sheet of $1,700,000,000 The excess will be settled in shares. These shares have previously been accounted for in our non GAAP diluted shares outstanding. Q3 cash flow from operations was $432,000,000 with total adjusted free cash flow of $401,000,000 this quarter. Speaker 300:27:43Stock based compensation declined by 90 basis points as a percentage of revenue sequentially. On a year over year basis, Stock based compensation was down 220 basis points as a percent of revenue. As we look forward, we remain focused on profitable growth. At our Analyst Day in 2021, we outlined plans to drive 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion annually in fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024. In the months leading up to this profitability commitment, we focused in-depth on optimally balancing investments in our business and opportunities to capture efficiencies and benefit from our growing scale. Speaker 300:28:24As a result, we came out of this effort with significant conviction in meaningful operating leverage. In fiscal 'twenty two, we started implementing these plans but faced supply chain challenges that unexpectedly drove higher costs. While the supply chain was uncertain as we entered fiscal year 2023, We also saw signs of a changing macroeconomic environment. As such, it was the right time to accelerate our efficiency plans. We focused our headcount additions in sales and R and D to fuel our medium term growth prospects. Speaker 300:28:56Outside of these critical investment areas, We've leveraged our scale and employed technology to accommodate our growth in other business areas. Additionally, supply chain challenges have continued to abate at Increasing pace, helping to improve our gross margin. The result has been a significant acceleration in operating margin expansion through the 1st 3 quarters of fiscal year 2023 and also increases to our operating and free cash flow margin guidance through the year. As you see with our guidance for non GAAP operating margin in fiscal year 2023, we're nearly 300 basis points ahead of the midpoint Our fiscal year 2024 range that we implied back in 2021. We now see our fiscal year 2023 non GAAP operating margin as a baseline to build on in the future. Speaker 300:29:46Moving on to guidance. For the 4th Fiscal quarter of 2023, we expect billings to be in the range of $3,150,000,000 to $3,200,000,000 an increase of 17% to 19%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $1,937,000,000 to $1,967,000,000 an increase of 25% to 27%. We expect non GAAP EPS to be in the range of $1.26 to $1.30 an increase of 58% to 63%. For the fiscal year 2023, we expect billings to be in the range of $9,180,000,000 to $9,230,000,000 an increase of 23% to 24%. Speaker 300:30:27We expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $2,080,000,000 to $2,850,000,000 an increase of 48% to 51%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $6,880,000,000 to $6,901,000,000 an increase of 25% to 26%. We expect product revenue growth in the range of 15% to 16% of fiscal year 'twenty three as we see supply chain challenges normalize as we exit fiscal year 'twenty three. For fiscal year 'twenty three, we expect operating margins to be in the range of 23% to 23.25%. We expect non GAAP EPS to be in the range of 4.24% to 4.29%, an increase of 69% to 70%. Speaker 300:31:08We expect our adjusted free cash flow margin to be 37.5% to 38.5%, and we expect to be GAAP profitable for fiscal year 2023, including in Q4. Additionally, please consider the following modeling points. We expect our non GAAP Tax rates remain at 22% for Q4 'twenty three and fiscal year 'twenty three, subject to the outcome of future tax legislation. For Q4 'twenty three, we expect net interest and other income of $50,000,000 to $55,000,000 We expect Q4 diluted shares outstanding of $326,000,000 to $332,000,000 We expect fiscal year diluted shares outstanding of $322,000,000 to $324,000,000 And we expect Q4 capital expenditures of $35,000,000 to $40,000,000 With that, I will turn the call back over to Walter Speaker 100:32:03Thank you, Deepak. Operator00:32:09Our first question will come from Bhakti Kalia of Barclays with Hamzah Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley on deck. Saket, you're muted. Right. Why don't we go to Hamzah next question? Speaker 400:32:34Okay. Can you hear me now? Go ahead. Sorry, it didn't let me unmute. Thanks so much for taking the question here and nice job to the team executing in a very challenging environment. Speaker 400:32:46Nikesh, maybe a lot of good things to talk about, but I'd love to just double click on the operating margin improvement here that you've And really a new baseline that the team is creating going into next year. Maybe the question is, can you and Deepak maybe talk about What areas the team is finding efficiency in? And what are the opportunities for efficiency maybe going forward as well? Thanks. Speaker 100:33:13Yes, look, I'll preface that as Deepak highlighted, supply chain crisis all but over. And as you know, there were some adverse impacts to gross margins by driven by hardware. I think the product mix is in our favor. As we go from hardware to software, Our gross margins are way better on software than they generally are on hardware, given software firewalls are much, much more profitable for us. Coupled with that, I think what Deepak really has been driving for the last year as we flipped into the new macroeconomic environment Has been real focused on resource utilization, ROI, as well as making sure we are focused on hiring Only on stuff where it's important. Speaker 100:33:58We also talked about streamlining sales forces. If you remember, Saket, we had the conversation around making sure our SaaS team is integrated with our core, Which saved us hundreds of heads in terms of efficiency as well as driving more outcome and output from a SaaS perspective. So generally, Those have been some of the key drivers, but Deepak, did you want to add something? Speaker 300:34:17No, I think you've covered it all. I think, Saket, we've talked this before. Welcome. Yes. We scale well as a company, Right. Speaker 300:34:24And I think that's across all the different elements of our P and L. I think Nikesh has talked about the supply chain. We talked about the OpEx. I just also mentioned Cloud hosting, cloud consumption, as we get bigger and we consume more, we have the ability to go back to our service providers and try and negotiate better contracts. So I think across all the areas of the P and L, we scaled pretty well as a company. Speaker 100:34:48And I think to your question in terms of where this goes, as Deepak said, this is a new baseline. We think there is continued opportunity from here. And we haven't even factored in the potential impact of generative AI, As you've been hearing all the conversation in the industry, we're still working on it. We're understanding it. We're relooking at processes. Speaker 100:35:06But No, we believe there is a there there. We think there will be an opportunity in the future to get more efficiency from generative AI as we go ahead and implement some of the capabilities Through our organization, so I think there's upside both in the continued efforts of what Deepak has been driving for the last 9 months And there's the sort of the icing on the top is the potential application of generative AI as we continue to grow business over the next few years. Speaker 200:35:32Got it. Operator00:35:32Thanks, Saket. Speaker 100:35:33Thank you. Operator00:35:34Next question is from Hamzah Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley with Brian Essex from JPMorgan on deck. Hamzah, go ahead. Speaker 500:35:40Hey, guys. Good evening. I hope you can hear me okay. Maybe a question for Nikesh and re players Nikesh, on AI, you've clearly been thinking about this a lot based on what I can tell from your Twitter. But we were at RSA last month and while there's a lot of opportunity around AI, there seems to be a lot of risks Around data security, around sort of the data that these models are trained on. Speaker 500:36:11So, I'm curious as you have that AI based conversation with your customers, How are you getting them comfortable around that to really leverage the full capabilities of AI to automate their thoughts? Speaker 100:36:21Yeah, I think there's 2 different parts of it. I think one part is Us using AI already in our products where we have been using it for a while to look at patent recognition, look at what it's telling us From a real time analysis of data perspective, as I mentioned, we deploy over 1,000 AI models to go look at what happens the next time. This is all proprietary. It's happening In our instance, this is not an LLM that's going out and getting trained. This is a proprietary AI model used by Palo Alto Networks, built by Palo Alto Networks, being used for a specific use case and a task for security. Speaker 100:36:57Now to the extent that we intend and will deploy conversational AI in our models, We are working with every public model and open source model out there to understand how can we build it using our own proprietary data. I don't know, Lee, did you want can you elaborate on that, please? Speaker 200:37:13Yes, of course. It's very early in the large language model adoptions that we're seeing. And as you point out, there are a number of risks associated with them, particularly in enterprise use cases. We've already seen some examples where Data has fed into large language models without the understanding of how the data would be used and the data has been Publicly made public available even though it was confidential. So it's very clear that there is sensitivity there. Speaker 200:37:44There's also Sensitivity from a security perspective of things like prompt injection attacks, data poisoning and things like that, that have to be taken into account. The and so I think what we'll see is, the enterprise use cases of LLMs will Evolve a little bit more actually, I should say, need to evolve a little bit more methodically and carefully to take these security challenges into account. At the same time, though, it's also important to recognize that they offer tremendous promise, as Nikesh mentioned earlier, in terms of being able to Help guide product adoption, product usage, to help enhance security capabilities, and to drive greater efficiencies across the business. Speaker 100:38:30Yes, I think to cap it off, I think there is no doubt we will continue to deploy our proprietary AI models For XIM or for our network security use cases I highlighted, we believe in our preliminary analysis over the last 3 months and driving a lot of these work streams internally That there is a there there with generative AI. So we believe that we will be deploying generative AI over the course of the next few months and we'll talk more about it later when. But we think that has an opportunity both to significantly improve our customer efficiency and the efficacy of our products At the same time, also to drive efficiencies within the way we run Palo Alto Networks. I think last but not the least, which is something you didn't ask, but I'll say, Now separately, Lee and his team have been working hard to see and look at the adverse impact that generative AI could have in terms of Adversaries using generative AI to build new malware to try and attack our customers and there's a lot of work we're doing as well to make sure we are able to protect our customers against any such activity that is conducted using generative AI. Speaker 200:39:34Thank you. Speaker 300:39:35Thanks for Operator00:39:35your question Hamzah. Next question is from Brian Essex at JPMorgan followed by Brad Zelnick from Deutsche Bank. Brian, go ahead. Speaker 600:39:42Yes. Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. And to follow-up on Sakka's Nice progression in operating margin here and it's good to see cash flow margin guidance go up as well. If I could tick down if you could maybe peel back a couple of layers on that. Speaker 600:39:59Core drivers of that cash flow Margin improvement and how sustainable it is. We noticed that CapEx looks like it's a little bit lower than you previously guided to. So just wondering, As we kind of look at that as a foundational metric to lean on for valuation, how sustainable is that? And As we kind of forecast operating margins going forward, should that, I guess, gap between operating margins and cash flow margins Speaker 300:40:28Yes. So Brian, thanks for the question. Let me just start off with like the biggest driver over the long It's really just to strengthen your bookings, at least your billings and then comes down. Then the foundation really is your operating margins that then makes up the base that you can do on your cash. There are multiple other factors, but do recognize that when we came into the year, The interest rates were at a different level. Speaker 300:40:52We have had the benefit of higher interest rates. We've deployed a lot of our cash flow. We earn interest income. We're not predictors of interest rates, but fundamentally, we believe that, that will continue to be a tailwind for Cash generation. And then last but not least, we do have PanaFest. Speaker 300:41:11We have a certain amount of our business We do structure and financing. Frankly, that's been broadly in line with what we assumed at the beginning of the year. But those are really the drivers and we feel pretty comfortable on what we're able to do with those different drivers in delivering our numbers. Speaker 200:41:32Great. Thank you. Operator00:41:33Great. Thanks, Brian. Next question from Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank followed by Andrew Nowinski at Wells Fargo. Go ahead, Brad. Speaker 700:41:41Great. Thanks so much for the question and nice job both to Nikesh, Deepak and the entire team. Nikesh, my question is about M and A, which I feel like Typically comes later in the call, but I feel like it's such a great opportunity right now. What's the hurdle to doing the large deal? Can you remind us how you think about transformative M and A? Speaker 700:42:00And just related to that, your competitors naturally knock you on having grown through acquired innovation. Just to set the record straight, can you talk about how much a priority and a focus it is to have a deeply integrated product? Speaker 100:42:14Yes, Brian, I think, first of all, I'm amused that you're asking for transformational M and A. I think I feel like somehow we have our networks have been going through a transformation already for the last 5 years. Let me talk about it in 2 different parts. 1, and I'd like to bust the myth of the notion that We've grown our innovation through M and A, because pretty much the entire XIM product that we've built, which is now going to be one of the fastest platforms at Palo Alto Networks It's homegrown. It was built by our team internally. Speaker 100:42:42It was designed, built and delivered by the Cortex team. So I think it's a disservice to them to say that someone of the fastest growing Being built at Palo Alto Networks was acquired similarly our next generation firewalls or our SASE product. SaaSci product for the most part is entirely homegrown driven by the security capabilities that we build using our firewalls as well as our virtual firewall business. So I think Majority of M and A has been focused on building our cloud security portfolio, where we felt where we needed to be assertive and be out there in the front. And I would say, Auxiliary capabilities, whether it's an automation with XOR or auxiliary capabilities around tax purposes management. Speaker 100:43:18So Bottom line, we're very comfortable with the 3 platforms that we have and what we need to get done. I think we've been very clear about from an acquisition perspective, We look for product capability where we can take product capability and attach that and make sure we can solve more problems for our customers that they're looking at. So from that perspective, My view on M and A is consistent that we find something interesting in industry trend, which is added incremental tech capability, we will do it. I think from a transformational M and A, I think we can transform this company and have continued to transform it to where it is Based on our innovation and our balance of execution, I think we will continue to do that. I don't think the market is particularly cheap yet. Speaker 100:44:02If you were to try and look for a transformation in M and A, and I think it's kind of a double edged situation. 1, I think we continue to get stronger as we get execution under our belt and we continue to grow in value as Palo Alto Networks. And If some of the large players out there end up committing missteps, then we'll go take a look at it. But for now, I feel very comfortable with the position Palo Alto has in I feel very, very comfortable with the amount of cash we have on our balance sheet. And I believe it is our job to keep our heads down and keep executing because it's a tough market. Speaker 100:44:34And I think one of the things which was brought up just a minute ago, I think the opportunities from AI I have not been fully comprehended by most enterprise businesses. I think we are going to undergo a transformation both as Palo Alto Networks as well as Generally, an enterprise software industry over the next 12 to 24 months as we embrace generative AI, I think that's The real opportunity and challenge in front of us and I think half of the people now that we get it wrong and hopefully we're on the right side of history. Speaker 700:45:05You're doing a great job. Keep it up. Thank you, Migraine. Great. Operator00:45:08Thanks for the question, Brad. Next question is from Andy Nowinski from Wells Fargo followed by Matt Hedberg from RBC. Andy, go ahead. Speaker 800:45:15Okay. Thank you and congrats on a great quarter. So nearly every single vendor and nearly every reseller we talked to, he says they're seeing an elongation of sales cycles, yet you seem to defy those headwinds with massive growth In large deals and customers spending $5,000,000 $10,000,000 with you, I guess, would you view this as an important inflection point As it relates to sort of consolidation in that, if you can drive large deals in this macro constrained environment, you could potentially see an acceleration of those consolidation trends When the macro improves? Speaker 100:45:51Are you predicting a macro improvement, Andy? Speaker 800:45:53I certainly hope so. Speaker 100:45:55Well, look, I think first and foremost, I don't want to leave you with any impression that the macro is not hard. It is hard out there. I think everything you're hearing from resellers, Some other people in the industry, it's true. Customers are spending more time paying attention to deals. Customers are taking longer. Speaker 100:46:14Some are rightsizing deals. Some are focusing things that are important, some are looking for financing, some want to pay annually. So all the effects that you talked about are true in the industry. And we recognized this towards the end of our Q1. And I'll tell you what, we've been working at double time, like literally The day Deepak sort of shut the doors on us being able to book anything this quarter, we're out there hunting for next quarter. Speaker 100:46:39We have a big number to hit this quarter. We're out there in the field, we're executing, our teams are out there. So as you probably appreciate, there's no magic in the world Around the fact that our quarter ended July 31st, there's no budget year end for any part of the world on July 31st. It's a date which has been created that Palo Alto finished this year, Q4 July 31, which means we have to run as hard as we can to get business done by July 31. We know that's the end of our year. Speaker 100:47:05We know that's the end of our quarter. Our customers So what we're doing is we're getting ahead of it. We're hoping that us getting ahead of it and continuing to rigorously execute is going to allow us to be able to improve our conversion rates. And our conversion rates on our pipeline are down. Guess what? Speaker 100:47:21You've drawn up more pipeline, Therefore, your conversion rate that's down still allows you to make the number that you promised us to reach. That's what we've been trying to do. And as I've said, the macro is hard and we're going to keep trying to keep our heads down and execute. Speaker 800:47:33Thanks Nikesh. Keep up the good work. Operator00:47:35Great. Thanks, Andy. Next question from Matt Hedberg at RBC followed by Gabriel Goldman, go ahead, Matt. Speaker 900:47:41Thanks, Walter. My congrats again, team, outstanding results. I guess, in the cash order, Lee, on the success you've seen thus far with You noted, you essentially have full access to SIEM budgets right now. I'm curious with some of the large deals you're seeing, are these generally replacing legacy SIEM vendors Or are you actually generating new TAM that didn't exist previously? Speaker 100:48:04So Matt, I'll let Lee jump in and talk about some of the specifics. But I'll tell you Every one of these deals is a replacement of the legacy SIEM or a data store. In addition, We do not sell XIM without our endpoint products. You have to buy Palo Alto Cortex XDR to deploy XIM because we believe the only way to have normalized Good source single source of truth data is to deploy our endpoint products and then we use that, as I showed, in the AI funnel of how we can go cross correlate that and go drive Great security outcomes. So in every case, we are replacing an existing vendor. Speaker 100:48:39But I will tell you, the SOC industry is upside down. It was designed so far to go understand when a breach happens, how the breach happened and try and figure out how to remediate it. And those remediation times as I highlighted are 6 days. And now most modern attacks are in and out in under 12 hours. So if you've got a SOC infrastructure, where it allows you to come up With what happened to you after 6 days, the bad actors have gone in and out in 12 hours, you have a mismatch. Speaker 100:49:07That is a problem. But Lee, can you highlight some of the key use cases that we're obviously seeing in the first 30 plus customers that we have, what's driven in some of this transformation? Yes. Look, Speaker 200:49:19nearly so Exane is replacing the SIEM, it's also replacing other tools in the SOC As well. There's 3 core elements to how this is happening. The first is around data. As you saw, 3.5 petabytes a day is being ingested and analyzed. Data is the key to driving good AI and XIM is specifically designed to be able to ingest large amounts of data across different data sources into an AI data lake. Speaker 200:49:482nd This is how we drive AI based analytics on that data, be able to detect attacks in real time. This is something that the traditional SIEM industry was just not Well designed to be able to do. That is driving the meantime, the detection that you're seeing. And then 3 is the integration of automation natively into XIM that allows us to drive the meantime remediation down from what in the past used to be, in many cases, days down to hours and even minutes. And so in all of the XIM deployments we're seeing, it's amazing how quickly we're seeing the Outcomes that we saw in our own SOC when we deployed and operational at Sacsayon. Speaker 100:50:33I think the last thing I'll add Sorry, Matt. The only thing I'll add to this is that over the last 15 years, what has happened is the cost and value equation In existing SOCs has diverged tremendously. So people are spending a lot of money collecting data in a lot of data stores And they're not getting adequate value out of it and they're not getting adequate security outcomes out of it. So I think that is a big gap and that gap is something we've been We've built this product to try and fill and now it really is very early days for us. I think the fact that we'll get to $100,000,000 in the time span that you thought was Aggressive, less than that, I think tells us there's a huge potential out there, which means we have to keep our heads down again, keep building, keep executing And keep trying to solve the problems that our customers are presenting in front of us, but I have a good feeling about this. Speaker 200:51:21Certainly seems that way. Thanks. Great. Operator00:51:24Thanks, Matt. Next question is Gabriela Gorges at Goldman Sachs with Adam Tindle from Raymond James on deck. Gabriela, go ahead. Speaker 1000:51:32Good afternoon. Thank you. Either for Leon Akash, I wanted to ask about your cloud security strategy in Prisma, Specifically with respect to how you think about the right balance of incentives that you give customers upfront to catalyze adoption? And then also how you think about the balance of Top down growth versus product led growth given that DevSecOps, DevOps, some of those tools seem to be driven by product led growth as well? Thank you. Speaker 100:51:59Yes, Blede, go ahead. Answer that question. Speaker 200:52:04So One of the challenges that we set out to address with Prisma Cloud was this fundamental challenge in enterprise cybersecurity of sort of the proliferation of Point products. Every time there's a new security need, there's a new product and then customers become the system integrator of all these turn point solutions. And they spend more time Speaker 100:52:28I'm trying to be the system integrator than Speaker 200:52:28they are actually getting the value from the products. And so with Prisma Cloud, we've taken the unique approach Of building a platform where we can deliver many different capabilities pre integrated from the same location. Now at the same time we did that on the technical side, We also approached it from a sort of the adoption side and I'll call it the procurement side of Having a single Prisma Cloud credit system that makes it really easy for customers to buy a level of capacity And then simply use it to adopt as much of the platform as they need and when they need. And so we've it's allowed us to focus more of Our attention in terms of how we engage with customers and how the product works on in product adoption, Guided adoption of additional capabilities and enabling them to easily use more and more the services as they need them As opposed to having to go back and turn every module into a new transaction with a customer. And as you saw from what Nikesh showed, The new credit usage year over year going up about 44% year over year, but then also the number of customers, 2 or more, 3 or more, 4 more modules, in the case 4 more almost doubling year over year shows how well that is working. Operator00:53:48Great. Thanks Gabriela. Next up, Adam Tindle, Raymond James followed by Greg Moskowitz, Mizuho. Adam, go ahead. Speaker 900:53:56Okay, thanks. Good afternoon. I want to start by just acknowledging the Progression in operating margin is really impressive and commitment to that being a baseline is a really important point. If I'm thinking about tomorrow, some of the distracting questions that might come up would be around Product revenue, I think you grew 10% year over year in Q3 and you had previously guided the fiscal year to 10%. But if I saw on the slides correctly, I think you're now raising that to 15% to 16%. Speaker 900:54:22So what's driving that increase in product revenue and the acceleration in Q4 despite the Cautionary comments and anything we can think about in terms of puts and takes to product revenue as we think about fiscal 'twenty four, so we don't get ahead of ourselves? Speaker 100:54:36Thanks. Adam, I think there's 2 parts to it. 1 is, as you will appreciate, we highlighted that software has become 30% of our product revenue. So we whilst when you book a hardware firewall, you get a dollar for dollar for revenue. In software, you don't get a dollar for dollar for revenue. Speaker 100:54:54There's some part of an amortized value we get from our software firewalls and some part of our SD WAN, which becomes part of our product revenue. So We have to run harder on billings to be able to deliver product revenue in the context of software. But as I mentioned, our virtual firewalls grew at 55% this Quarter, they grew at 40% for the year so far. This is a tailwind we had not expected. At the same time, the hardware, as I mentioned, is not as strong as we had expected. Speaker 100:55:19They balance each other out, but in balances in favor of software for now, coming off a low base of last year. So as a result, We have been able to improve our product revenue guidance. Obviously, it comes at a cost of services revenue because some of our software Has now had to work triple time to be able to deliver product revenue. So I think that's the context in which you should think about it overall where there's been a draw from one side And a partial give on the other side, in the product revenue, however, given our RPO is growing way ahead of revenue, it just means we are Saving up a lot of revenue for a future rainy day. Does that sound right financially? Speaker 300:55:57No, that's right. Saving up Speaker 100:55:58a lot of revenue for a rainy day. There we Speaker 300:56:00The only other thing that I would maybe just add to that is simply the supply chain dynamics that Nikesh talks about In his remarks, I mean, that does have some factors, but we really have been able to, with a world class team, get ahead of the supply chain reality. And so That may explain some of the variability you're seeing. Operator00:56:23Great. Thank you, Adam. Next up, Greg Moskowitz from Mizuho followed by Shaul Eyal from Cowen. Speaker 1100:56:32Thank you. Can you hear me? Speaker 100:56:33Yes. Speaker 300:56:34All right. Speaker 1100:56:35I have a follow-up for Lee or Nikesh on Generate AI. So Your comments on ALMs were helpful, but do you think GenAI will tilt the scales in favor of Palo Alto and Perhaps some other security vendors over time or is it ultimately more likely to cause an even faster game of cat and mouse between the vendors and the attackers? Speaker 100:56:55How do you see this playing out? Well, I think, look, 1st and foremost, the benefit of generative AI so far is 2 fold, right? One is, and it's ability to summarize data and give you access to information much faster. Can I imagine a sales rep at Palo Alto having access at their fingertips What about all the information? Of course, I can. Speaker 100:57:17And I imagine my customer support people having access to amazing amounts of information That's at the tip of their fingers so they can answer questions much faster. Can I imagine showcasing that information directly to my customers As you're seeing the industry now suddenly, a plethora of co pilots start to emerge in every product? So I think that is going to become an obvious benefit of generative AI. Now, Don't forget, it relies on one principle called having a lot of data. It's very important that whether you're using it for Sharing your own information from your customers to your customers, you need all that data, you have to clean all your data processes and have that. Speaker 100:57:53Secondly, If you're in the security business, it definitely helps. If you have the largest data lake in the world, we'll have security data. So from that perspective, I think it favors the people who have a lot of data already as part of their strategy and they have built a business in the back of a data led strategy. I think not just Specific to security, in any industry, especially consumer Internet, if you've been a UI company, you have something to worry about. If you're a Travel booking operator or something that just takes other people's data and makes a better UI, you have something to worry about. Speaker 100:58:24So I think from that perspective, It favors companies which have tremendous amounts of data. I think the second thing is also important to understand. Now, if I have 14,000 people, I spend 1,000 of $1,000,000,000 in customer support or more, there's leverage. I can go spend $30,000,000 $40,000,000 $50,000,000 deploying an LLM and saving half my cost. If you're running a small company and your entire cost is $50,000,000 it probably doesn't behoove you to go out and create an Adelem based generative AI project to go out and pay And take away $21,000,000 of cost. Speaker 100:58:54So I think it also benefits people of scale who are able to drive efficiencies using generative AI across the enterprise, allowing them to Grow their business much faster with limited resources. Does that help? Speaker 1100:59:07It does. Thanks, Nikesh. Operator00:59:08Great. Thanks, Greg. And Shaul Eyal from Cowen, our last question. Speaker 1200:59:13Thanks for that. Good afternoon. Congrats team. Akesh, I want to go back Actually, I know Brad was asking about M and A. I want to ask about the competitive landscape, but specifically with the focus Maybe on the CNAP front. Speaker 1200:59:29So my question is, how do you think about it? Any change? Do you think that the product right now as it stands is comprehensive or anything you might be Thinking of maybe augmenting specifically on the SINA front? Thank you for that. Speaker 200:59:51We have by far the most comprehensive cloud native application protection platform there is. That doesn't mean that we do everything. But we do far more than any other solution out there. There's tremendous amount of focus on delivering capabilities that we've been building internally, organically among We've seen the most recent one we delivered with Secret Scanning just a few months ago. We've seen very good early adoption of that. Speaker 201:00:27At the same time, we're also delivering on the latest acquisition of CIDR Security, where we expect that to become a new module in the next couple of months, available to all of our Prisma Cloud customers. And so, Nikesh talked about How we've leveraged M and A in the past to help build some of the key technology areas of Prisma Cloud, which is absolutely true. We have also shown an ability to deliver new cloud security capabilities organically and be very successful at that. And right now, feel good about the balance of both those capabilities and how we're bringing them together and how we continue to deliver new innovations. Speaker 1101:01:10Thank you. Operator01:01:11Thank you for the question. With that, we'll conclude the Q and A portion of the call, and I'd like to pass it back to Nikesh for his closing remarks. Speaker 101:01:18Well, thank you very much again everybody for joining us. We look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming investor events. I also want to once again take an opportunity to thank all of Employees who worked very hard in a very dedicated fashion, as you all know, to help us achieve the results. Not only that, A big thank you to all of our partners and our customers around the world. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 101:01:38Thank you.Read morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallAppLovin Q3 202300:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsSlide DeckPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) AppLovin Earnings HeadlinesDXC Technology to Report Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2025 Results on Wednesday, May 14, 2025April 16 at 6:34 PM | gurufocus.comDXC Technology to Report Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2025 Results on Wednesday, May 14, ...April 16 at 5:42 PM | gurufocus.comThe Trump Dump is starting; Get out of stocks now?The first 365 days of the Trump presidency… Will be the best time to get rich in American history.April 19, 2025 | Paradigm Press (Ad)DXC Technology to Report Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2025 Results on Wednesday, May 14, 2025April 16 at 5:00 PM | businesswire.comDXC Technology establishes hub in Canada's largest cityApril 15, 2025 | bizjournals.comDXC Expands North America Operations with New Toronto OfficeApril 15, 2025 | msn.comSee More DXC Technology Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like AppLovin? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on AppLovin and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About AppLovinAppLovin (NASDAQ:APP) engages in building a software-based platform for advertisers to enhance the marketing and monetization of their content in the United States and internationally. It operates through two segments, Software Platform and Apps. The company's software solutions include AppDiscovery, a marketing software solution, which matches advertiser demand with publisher supply through auctions; MAX, an in-app bidding software that optimizes the value of a publisher's advertising inventory by running a real-time competitive auction; Adjust, a measurement and analytics marketing platform that provides marketers with the visibility, insights, and tools needed to grow their apps from early stage to maturity; and Wurl, a connected TV platform, which distributes streaming video for content companies and provides advertising and publishing solutions through its AdPool, ContentDiscovery, and Global FAST Pass products. It also offers SparkLabs, which uses app store optimization to enhance ad visibility; AppLovin Exchange, which connects buyers to mobile and CTV devices through a single and direct RTB exchange; and Array, an end-to-end app management suite for mobile operators and end users. In addition, the company operates various free-to-play mobile games. It serves individuals, small and independent businesses, enterprises, advertisers and advertising networks, mobile app publishers, indie studio developers, and internet platforms. AppLovin Corporation was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.View AppLovin ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Archer Aviation Unveils NYC Network Ahead of Key Earnings Report3 Reasons to Like the Look of Amazon Ahead of EarningsTesla Stock Eyes Breakout With Earnings on DeckJohnson & Johnson Earnings Were More Good Than Bad—Time to Buy? 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There are 13 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Fiscal Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I am Walter Pritchard, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please note that this call is being recorded today, Tuesday, May 23, 2023, at 1:30 pm Pacific Time. With me on today's call are Nikesh Arora, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Deepak Galeche, our Chief Financial Officer. Following the prepared remarks, our Chief Product Officer, Lee Klarich, will join us in the Q and A session. Operator00:00:30You can find the press release and other information to supplement today's discussion on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com. While there, please click on the link for events and presentations where you will find the investor presentation and supplemental information. During the course of today's call, we will make forward looking statements and projections regarding the company's business operations and financial performance. These statements made today are subject to risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update them. Operator00:01:00Please review the press release and our recent SEC filings to see these risks and uncertainties. We will also refer to non GAAP financial measures. These measures should not be considered a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are in the press release and the appendix of the investor presentation. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all results and comparisons are on a fiscal year over year basis. Operator00:01:29We also note that management is participating at the Bank of America Global Technology Conference on June 6. I will now turn the call over to Nikesh. Speaker 100:01:40Thank you for joining us today. Operator00:01:41Good day, everyone, and welcome to Palo Alto. Speaker 200:01:44Oops. There's a bit of Speaker 100:01:46a little repeat AI action there. Thank you, Walter. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our earnings call. As you can see, once again, our teams have delivered a balanced between our top and bottom line performance in the current macroeconomic environment. In Q3, our billings grew 26% year over year And revenue grew 24%, while RPO grew ahead of these at 35%. Speaker 100:02:11Our Q3 non GAAP operating income Our trailing 12 month adjusted free cash flow both grew above 60% year over year, while we achieved our 4th consecutive quarter of profitability on a GAAP basis. Let's talk about the macro environment. The overall macro trends of cautious spending, deal scrutiny And cost and value consciousness persist. Moreover, the behavior continues to be more widespread across a larger swath of our customers. Against this backdrop, we have been staying ahead with rigorous execution. Speaker 100:02:43We have increased our own deal scrutiny, gotten ahead of the challenges and continue to sharpen our business value focus while demonstrating superior security outcomes to our customers. From a technology trend perspective, there is no significant change. The themes we have seen around cloud adoption, automation and hybrid work continue with minor variations. Network transformations, albeit with long cycles, continue to be undertaken because they offer cost savings and are part of the modernization stack for most customers as they go down their cloud and network transformation journeys. This in turn continues to drive a sustained demand for SASE and hardware and software firewalls. Speaker 100:03:23As we have shared before, the theme of consolidating around platforms continues to come up and we are well positioned to offer solutions in this regard. Needless to say, in the last 3 months, Chad GPT and generative AI have revived the interest in AI as a technology. As we have always maintained, AI is a data problem and security is a data problem and has an interesting AI has an interesting role to play in security, both for its ability to help deliver superior security outcomes in near real time and unfortunately, the potential threat associated with AI being used to generate attacks. We have and continue to work on these problems. We should talk more about this today. Speaker 100:04:02On the other hand, we continue to see limited underlying growth in hardware Whilst the supply chain crisis and its effects are all but over, there is a shift that the crisis created. We have seen a higher appetite for software based solutions and networking and higher appetite for cloud delivered form factors. This is particularly salient to the current CapEx constrained environment. On the adversary front, there seems to be no impending recession and threats. Increased cloud activity and connectivity continues to drive the threat environment. Speaker 100:04:34This is best illustrated by recent findings in the 7th installment of our Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report. It still takes the average security team approximately 6 days to resolve a security alert. In contrast, it only takes a threat actor a few hours to exploit a newly While over 7,000 malicious versions of open source software packages were circulated in 2022, Speaker 300:04:57Less than a Speaker 100:04:57quarter of those packages are sourced properly to ensure a clean software version is incorporated into a typical customer's code base. Regulatory interest continues to rise and is prevalent across multiple governments. There's sustained activity around incremental regulatory mandates and executive orders to create awareness around cybersecurity. This is true not only at the government level, but also as company's Board of Directors are bringing additional oversight And drive an alignment of accountability for cybersecurity. This requires incremental organizational focus and investment by our customers. Speaker 100:05:29On the macro front, customers anticipate that global growth may slow. Some are grappling with rising capital costs and are watching their bottom lines more closely. This means looking for efficiencies in their business. Within cybersecurity, complex architectures and long vendor rosters have come into focus And many customers see this as an opportunity to simplify and drive consolidation. 5 years ago, when I highlighted the need for platform architectures and consolidation, The idea was met with some resistance. Speaker 100:05:58Over the last few years, our industry leading solutions, 3 platform approach has continued to take hold and has allowed us to provide a much needed option for simplicity, a modern stack and better security outcomes for our customers. I mentioned earlier that our customers are engaging in more scrutiny of deals and value, resulting in robust discussions internally with us. We continue to work hard to stay ahead of deal cycles engaging the CFO and procurement departments. The cost of money continues to become a topic of conversation As customers enter to larger and longer term relationship with us, some also seek more flexible business terms. A strong balance sheet allows us to accommodate customers while we maximize our medium term cash flow. Speaker 100:06:39Let's turn to efficiency and operations. As we started this fiscal year, We pivoted our efforts and focused our effort on doing more with less. Our teams responded effectively. Coupled with the waning of the supply chain crisis, We have been able to adapt our operating model significantly. Deepak will get into specifics, but it suffices to say, we have found a new rhythm And at our scale, we believe we can continue to drive better margins from our business. Speaker 100:07:03We have achieved this through selective hiring in our customer facing teams as well as streamlining our go to market efforts in addition to hiring for key innovation areas, which we expect to continue to do. These efforts are self evident in our higher Q3 operating margins and our increased operating and free cash flow margin guidance for the year. We continue to see platformization in cybersecurity. I talked about consolidation earlier. A key part of our thesis at Palo Alto Networks has always been to drive superior cybersecurity outcomes for our customers. Speaker 100:07:34To do that, We need a robust portfolio that works both individually and cohesively to reduce the burden on our customers who have to stitch together disparate cybersecurity products. We've had to navigate this fine line with our customers. We continue to see the benefits of this approach and think we are in a multiyear trend. We have the opportunity to do to security what we have seen done in financial software, HR software or CRM, where customers have adapted to platforms due to their inherently superior benefits from data integrity, integration, seamlessness and outcome orientation. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Speaker 100:08:10You can see our success here driving larger platform transactions. Across the board, the size of the transactions we are signing is increasing. This is evidenced by bookings from transactions valued over $1,000,000 $5,000,000 $10,000,000 in the 3rd quarter, which are up by year over year by 29%, 62%, 136%, respectively. We see a similar trend in cohorts of our customers. For example, When we look at the average lifetime value for our 200 largest customers, we've seen steady growth of 30% plus over the last 3 years. Speaker 100:08:43When we look at purchases of our platforms amongst the Global 2,000, we see now that 53% of our customers have bought a product in all three platforms of StartUp, Prisma and Cortex, up from 48% a year ago and 33% 3 years ago. We see this as a continuing trend. It convinces us that the opportunity to impact outcomes for our customers is large if it can get us right. We see the path to continued success with large customers and multiproduct expansion in our installed base. I'll now update you on our 3 platforms starting with network security. Speaker 100:09:16We are the comprehensive Zero Trust network security company. This quarter, we were proud to be named a new leader in Gartner's most recent security service, Edge Magic Quadrant. This recognition is apt as our teams have been delivering significant innovation and seeing stronger customer adoption in Sassy for years. This, in addition to our leadership position in SD WAN, makes us the only SaaS vendor in the industry to be named leader in the Gartner SSE and SD WAN Magic Quadrants. Add to that, our leadership position in network firewalls and our number one market share position in virtual firewalls, we are the only vendor with clear leadership across 0 Trust Network Security. Speaker 100:09:54This leadership across the network security category is a testament to our ability to drive significant innovation in new markets, while maintaining our leadership in core markets and offering this innovation as part of our cohesive platforms. Let's talk about SASE. SASE remains one of the fastest growing markets within all of cybersecurity. Our ARR is growing over 50%. At scale, we have surpassed 4,200 customers in Q3. Speaker 100:10:18Our success has spread across all 3 major geographies as highlighted by large deals in each of these territories in Q3. Let me tell you about 3 of these notable wins. First, a global beverage company with U. S. Headquarters Signed a transaction north of $30,000,000 which includes $24,000,000 of Sassy for a complete Sassy transformation that included Prisma Access, Prisma SD WAN and our ATEM or Autonomous Digital Experience Management for tens of thousands of employees. Speaker 100:10:442nd, a Japan based technology company signed an 8 figure transaction to modernize Its network and its network security after an extensive POC. Before standardizing on our SASE, the customer replaced its legacy firewalls and other network security capabilities and standardized on our next generation firewalls, driving a full 0 trust network strategy. Finally, a European technology company signed a high 7 figure Sassy deal that was part of an overall transaction to Palo Alto Networks of once again nearly $30,000,000 in total value the customer bought From us, because of our multiple network security form factors, in the broader transaction, we added capabilities such as IoT and fully adopted our core network security subscriptions. You all might remember, at the beginning of this fiscal year, as part of our scaling efforts, we combined our Sassy sales organization into our Kohl's core sales organization. Drivers here with that, we saw Sassy demand going mainstream and we saw encouraging signs that our core sellers could sell the more complex Sassy offering. Speaker 100:11:42After 3 quarters of executing as a combined organization, we're delighted to report that over 80% of our core reps participate in the creation of Prisma SaaSci pipelines as we enter Q4. Q3 was a strong quarter of innovation highlighted by our AI powered SaaSci launch. This flagship release improves capabilities to enable organizations to automate their increasingly complex IT and network operations center functions with AI ops. It improves monitoring for networks and apps at the branch office and significantly improves integration with IoT Secure. Moving over to our firewall business. Speaker 100:12:16Broadridge and SaaSy, the future of network security is clear to us. It is centered around software. And while we have led and expect continue to lead the hardware appliance market for many years, software and cloud delivered form factors have been an increasing focus since I joined as CEO. There are multiple reasons why the shift to software is accelerating. In the changing macro environment, customers are more challenged in their CapEx budgets, which often fund appliance purchases. Speaker 100:12:41As a result, their interest in software and cloud deliver form factors remain high. This is especially true when tied to strategic initiatives around cloud adoption. Illustrating this, we saw a significant uptick in customer requests to evaluate our virtual firewall offerings at the beginning of the pandemic. Customer interest in VMs was also sparked by supply chain challenges where we saw evaluation sustained. We continue to see primarily net new demand for software and cloud However, we are seeing more appliance replacements and planning for this trend to continue and possibly accelerate. Speaker 100:13:12Beyond the strength I already covered in Sassy, We saw VM Series deals over $1,000,000 more than double in Q3, including an 8 figure deal we signed as a government agency where they moved from a primarily Appliance centric model to VM Series as a fully leveraged public cloud as their primary infrastructure. This year so far, our VM Series bookings are up more than 40% year over year and it grew over 55% in Q3. Most investors have equated our product revenue with hardware. However, given the drivers I have mentioned Here, this has been rapidly shifting. Software now contributes 30% of our product revenue. Speaker 100:13:46This is up from about 10% 3 years ago. We expect this trend to continue. And as Deepak would remind you, bookings from our VM Series and SaaS transactions are recognized as revenue more over time than an appliance booking. Given the conversation about AI, as I mentioned, there is a renaissance in artificial intelligence driven by significant Advances in large language models, the development of more powerful and efficient computing, the broad availability of large volumes of training data. As a result, we've all seen some of the fastest innovation cycles and launches of unique applications in the last several months. Speaker 100:14:20At Palo Alto Networks, we have been focused on this technology for many years and our efforts have been accelerating over the last 2 years. We first introduced machine learning capabilities as part of our wildfire offering 7 years ago. In the ensuing years, we added AI and machine learning capabilities across our network and has been a critical driver of our innovation and differentiation in the market. In 2020, we introduced the industry's first machine learning powered next generation firewall, where machine learning detection moved in line to prevent 0 day attacks. Since then, we have overhauled nearly all of our security subscriptions with advanced AI capabilities: DNS security, advanced URL filtering, advanced threat prevention, advanced wildfire, all harness machine learning for in line detection and prevention of 0 day attacks. Speaker 100:15:06This means even new attacks that have never been seen before are blocked at the very first attempted use by an attacker. Additionally, We applied AI to IoT security to discover, identify and secure IoT devices and most recently it was expanded to cover both medical IoT and OT security needs. We had a signature release in Sassy that included AI powered autonomous digital experience management in addition to leveraging AI for SD WAN as well as AI powered phishing prevention. In short, we have really been accelerating the application of AI to our network security stack is one of the most mature applications of AI in the security industry today. We are not only ahead in investments in AI and machine learning as a differentiator in our products, But these investments have driven tangible customer benefits. Speaker 100:15:51In a typical day, we analyze nearly 750,000,000 yes, 750,000,000 new unique telemetry objects worldwide. This includes files, URLs, domains, DNS connections and other signals. Our AI models analyze this data and every day we see 1,500,000 new attacks that have never been seen before. We take these new insights and add them to all the other things we have already know about and we use them to block 8,600,000,000 attacks across our customer base daily. This forms the foundation how we do better security across our network security platforms and is how we continue to get better and better at detecting 0 day attacks and being in a position actually to prevent those attacks as well. Speaker 100:16:35Moving on to Prisma Cloud. Our early deal in Prisma Cloud continues to strengthen. Most of our competitors continue to provide OnlyPoint products, while customer demands continues to shift towards the platform approach. Within this, Connecting the left side to the right side, otherwise known as code to cloud is becoming paramount. As an example of our platform success, We continue to see strong usage of our cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection offerings. Speaker 100:17:01Customers are increasingly standardizing on these foundational modules with 49% of Prisma Cloud customers using both CSPM and CWP. This quarter, Gartner noted that in 2022, Only 25% of enterprises buy these capabilities from a common vendor. They expect this will increase to 60% of enterprises by 2025. At the same time, we continue to stay ahead of the industry's need for new capabilities, which is core to our commitment as a platform. We are on track to launch our 11th module as we innovate CIDR security. Speaker 100:17:31We're also focused on driving industry certification in Prisma Cloud. In this last quarter, we were accepted by the Joint Advisory Board and reached Ready status for FedRAMP High, a first for a cloud security platform. This comes in addition to other certifications we have achieved, including Recently announced Prisma Access Achieving Impact Level 5 or IL-five provision authorization. IL-five is the highest unclassified authorization level for DoD agencies under the FedRAMP process. We continue to see steady growth in consumption of Prisma Cloud credits, which were up 44% year over year in Q3. Speaker 100:18:04Our platform is key to the steady growth. We continue to see customers increase their consumption as they deploy workloads And strategically leveraged the public cloud at the core of their IT and business strategy. This includes migrating workloads to the hyperscale clouds, Building new applications in the clouds and leveraging new cloud services. They're also deploying new Prisma Cloud modules of which we currently have 10. The number of customers using 2 or more Prisma Cloud modules grew 37% year over year, while the number using 4 or more modules almost doubled. Speaker 100:18:32We now have 1 in 5 of our Prisma Cloud customers using our Cloud Code module across Our capabilities in Infrastructure as Code, SCA or Software Composition Analysis and Secrets Management as they leverage the more efficient approach to detect and remediate Security issues as core decision for cloud applications before it reaches production. Now moving on to Cortex. This has been a net new business for Palo Alto Networks, a business which was born in the belief that we need to bring next generation innovation to the SOC and all the related activities, just like we had brought firewall business years ago. We're delighted to announce that Cortex achieved a $1,000,000,000 booking milestone in the last 12 months. Cortex was born in 2019 and since then, we have focused intensively on ensuring we have industry leading capabilities across endpoints, SOC Automation and Tax Surface Management. Speaker 100:19:20In the last 4 years, we have visited a leading player in automation, application of AI, attack surface management and continue to climb the charts of the XDR industry as one of the most technically capable solutions. We're particularly proud of the fact that XDR has consistently led in security efficacy. XDR delivered 100% prevention and 100% detection across the 19 evaluation steps conducted by MITRE and has had the highest quality detections of any product in the latest round of evaluations. On the back of our hard work driving these capabilities, we have built Cortex business to over $1,000,000,000 in bookings over the last 12 months, as I mentioned. This is up from $150,000,000 in annual bookings when we launched Cortex as a business in 2019. Speaker 100:20:00As we look forward, these three core capabilities in Cortex are precursors to leading the next generation autonomous security operations center, which pulls this all together and was launched publicly a few months ago called XIM. Our next generation SOC platform, XIM, built totally on AI, is on track to be our fastest growing new offering. XiM represents another significant opportunity within Cortex as we fulfill our vision around autonomous security operations. Like network security a decade ago, Security operations have evolved slowly. XiM is now paving the way for us to drive AI driven security transformation outcomes. Speaker 100:20:39After our GA launch in late Q1, our design partners made significant commercial commitments to Exane. We followed that up in Q2 by broadening our go to market Achieving early success with $30,000,000 in bookings. This quarter, we established momentum for XIM with quarterly bookings more than doubling sequentially As we signed our first 8 figure deal and transactions across all three of our major geographic theaters with this product, We remain optimistic about the prospects of Exane, with the product the center of customers' security operations center transformation. We're seeing Exane give us access to a broader swath of our customers' budgets. Based on what we have achieved this quarter and what we see in the pipeline, we're confident we can achieve our goal of $100,000,000 in bookings faster than we originally anticipated. Speaker 100:21:23This would make it one of the fastest growing security platforms from Palo Alto Networks. Not only does XIM bring together the core capabilities of Cortex, It also brings AI driven outcomes to customers. This heralds a new approach to security, an outcome based approach. The inspiration came to us from our own sock, where we were woefully slow in our own mean time remediate 5 years ago. Our MTTR was in days, Which in today's adversarial environment is unacceptable. Speaker 100:21:50With that insight in mind, you're able to collect billions of events and then using AI Reduces down to just over 100 alerts from a handful of incidents. From here, continuing to use AI and automation, we are able to investigate and respond while detecting incidents in a matter of seconds and responding to high priority ones in under a minute. This is one of the most compelling outcome stories in security. So far, in the early customers that are farthest along on this journey with us, we are seeing the benefits accrue in a similar way. We process over 3.5 petabytes of data a day across the customer state of XDR and XIM. Speaker 100:22:24From here, we apply approximately 1,000 AI models to detect attacks. We then leveraged smart scoring in these automation to accelerate investigation response. We are seeing early indications that customers are able to see reductions Meantime to respond from days or weeks down to hours or minutes just like we did. Swerving back, We are fortunate to be focused on the part of the technology market that is more resilient. Our customers depend on their partnership with us to address challenges that are only becoming more sophisticated. Speaker 100:22:54The market is tough and definitely more challenging than when we started the year. I'm proud that our team has executed through this environment. Our strategy focused on having industry leading capabilities, helping customers simplify their architectures and consolidating vendors is working. Given our diverse portfolio of products, some of our products are growing faster in any given quarter and others are moderating. Combined, You see this portfolio benefit in the top line results we reported today. Speaker 100:23:20We also see significant opportunity as we begin to embed generative AI into our products and workflows. There are 3 ways that our concerted investment as generative AI will benefit us. 1st, generative AI will help us improve our core under the hood detection and prevention efficacy By further advancing the state of the art AI and ML in our products that I spoke of today. 2nd, it will manifest itself in how our customers engage with our products. We will leverage our large cybersecurity data set and telemetry to provide a more intuitive and natural language driven experience within our products, which should improve NPS and drive efficiency benefits for our customers. Speaker 100:23:54And finally, as our employees leverage generative AI, we will drive significant efficiency in our own processes and operations across the enterprise. We intend to deploy proprietary Palo Alto Networks security LLM in the coming year and are actively pursuing multiple efforts to realize these three outcomes. Our portfolio approach, company's overall scale and focus on efficiency have enabled us to drive significant leverage. We are well ahead of schedule here and we're not done. As we continue to execute our plans, we see additional opportunities for efficiency. Speaker 100:24:25With our visibility into incremental leverage, we continue to see the operating profit levels and our fiscal year 2023 guidance as a baseline to build upon. With that, I will turn the call over to Deepak to discuss the details of Q3 and our guidance. Speaker 300:24:39Thank you, Nikesh, and good afternoon, everyone. For Q3, revenue was $1,720,000,000 and grew 24%. Product revenue grew 10%. Total service revenue grew 29% with subscription revenue of $838,000,000 growing 31% and support revenue of £495,000,000 growing 25%. Moving on to geographies. Speaker 300:25:02We saw revenue growth across all theatres with the Americas growing 24%, EMEA up 23% and JPAC growing 24%. The strength of our next generation security capabilities continues to drive our results with NGS ARR of $2,600,000,000 growing 60%. We saw strength across all three platforms, network security, cloud security and security operations. We delivered total billings of $2,260,000,000 up 26% and above the high end of our guidance range. Total deferred revenue in Q3 was $8,100,000,000 an increase of 38%. Speaker 300:25:41Remaining performance obligation or RPO was $9,200,000,000 increasing 35% with current RPO just under half of our RPO. Our non GAAP earnings per share was significantly ahead of our guidance, growing 83% year over year. We again delivered strong cash flow in Q3 with trailing 12 month adjusted free cash flow of $2,800,000,000 growing 68% year over year. Moving on to the rest of the financial highlights. Non GAAP gross margin of 76.1% was up 320 basis points year over year, driven mainly by a higher software mix, reduced supply chain costs and some efficiencies in customer support. Speaker 300:26:25Our non GAAP operating margin of 23.6% increased 5.40 basis points year over year. In addition to improving gross margins, slower headcount additions contributed to our operating leverage. Based on our performance in Q3, we are raising our fiscal year 'twenty three non GAAP operating margin guidance. Non GAAP net income for the Q3 grew 86 percent to $359,000,000 or $1.10 per diluted share. Our non GAAP effective tax rate was 22%. Speaker 300:26:57We again delivered GAAP profitability in Q3 with GAAP net income of $108,000,000 or $0.31 per diluted share. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended Q3 with cash, equivalents and investments of $6,700,000,000 It is worth reminding investors that our 2023 convertible note will mature on July 1, 2023, and we expect to settle the principal obligation with cash on our balance sheet of $1,700,000,000 The excess will be settled in shares. These shares have previously been accounted for in our non GAAP diluted shares outstanding. Q3 cash flow from operations was $432,000,000 with total adjusted free cash flow of $401,000,000 this quarter. Speaker 300:27:43Stock based compensation declined by 90 basis points as a percentage of revenue sequentially. On a year over year basis, Stock based compensation was down 220 basis points as a percent of revenue. As we look forward, we remain focused on profitable growth. At our Analyst Day in 2021, we outlined plans to drive 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion annually in fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024. In the months leading up to this profitability commitment, we focused in-depth on optimally balancing investments in our business and opportunities to capture efficiencies and benefit from our growing scale. Speaker 300:28:24As a result, we came out of this effort with significant conviction in meaningful operating leverage. In fiscal 'twenty two, we started implementing these plans but faced supply chain challenges that unexpectedly drove higher costs. While the supply chain was uncertain as we entered fiscal year 2023, We also saw signs of a changing macroeconomic environment. As such, it was the right time to accelerate our efficiency plans. We focused our headcount additions in sales and R and D to fuel our medium term growth prospects. Speaker 300:28:56Outside of these critical investment areas, We've leveraged our scale and employed technology to accommodate our growth in other business areas. Additionally, supply chain challenges have continued to abate at Increasing pace, helping to improve our gross margin. The result has been a significant acceleration in operating margin expansion through the 1st 3 quarters of fiscal year 2023 and also increases to our operating and free cash flow margin guidance through the year. As you see with our guidance for non GAAP operating margin in fiscal year 2023, we're nearly 300 basis points ahead of the midpoint Our fiscal year 2024 range that we implied back in 2021. We now see our fiscal year 2023 non GAAP operating margin as a baseline to build on in the future. Speaker 300:29:46Moving on to guidance. For the 4th Fiscal quarter of 2023, we expect billings to be in the range of $3,150,000,000 to $3,200,000,000 an increase of 17% to 19%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $1,937,000,000 to $1,967,000,000 an increase of 25% to 27%. We expect non GAAP EPS to be in the range of $1.26 to $1.30 an increase of 58% to 63%. For the fiscal year 2023, we expect billings to be in the range of $9,180,000,000 to $9,230,000,000 an increase of 23% to 24%. Speaker 300:30:27We expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $2,080,000,000 to $2,850,000,000 an increase of 48% to 51%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $6,880,000,000 to $6,901,000,000 an increase of 25% to 26%. We expect product revenue growth in the range of 15% to 16% of fiscal year 'twenty three as we see supply chain challenges normalize as we exit fiscal year 'twenty three. For fiscal year 'twenty three, we expect operating margins to be in the range of 23% to 23.25%. We expect non GAAP EPS to be in the range of 4.24% to 4.29%, an increase of 69% to 70%. Speaker 300:31:08We expect our adjusted free cash flow margin to be 37.5% to 38.5%, and we expect to be GAAP profitable for fiscal year 2023, including in Q4. Additionally, please consider the following modeling points. We expect our non GAAP Tax rates remain at 22% for Q4 'twenty three and fiscal year 'twenty three, subject to the outcome of future tax legislation. For Q4 'twenty three, we expect net interest and other income of $50,000,000 to $55,000,000 We expect Q4 diluted shares outstanding of $326,000,000 to $332,000,000 We expect fiscal year diluted shares outstanding of $322,000,000 to $324,000,000 And we expect Q4 capital expenditures of $35,000,000 to $40,000,000 With that, I will turn the call back over to Walter Speaker 100:32:03Thank you, Deepak. Operator00:32:09Our first question will come from Bhakti Kalia of Barclays with Hamzah Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley on deck. Saket, you're muted. Right. Why don't we go to Hamzah next question? Speaker 400:32:34Okay. Can you hear me now? Go ahead. Sorry, it didn't let me unmute. Thanks so much for taking the question here and nice job to the team executing in a very challenging environment. Speaker 400:32:46Nikesh, maybe a lot of good things to talk about, but I'd love to just double click on the operating margin improvement here that you've And really a new baseline that the team is creating going into next year. Maybe the question is, can you and Deepak maybe talk about What areas the team is finding efficiency in? And what are the opportunities for efficiency maybe going forward as well? Thanks. Speaker 100:33:13Yes, look, I'll preface that as Deepak highlighted, supply chain crisis all but over. And as you know, there were some adverse impacts to gross margins by driven by hardware. I think the product mix is in our favor. As we go from hardware to software, Our gross margins are way better on software than they generally are on hardware, given software firewalls are much, much more profitable for us. Coupled with that, I think what Deepak really has been driving for the last year as we flipped into the new macroeconomic environment Has been real focused on resource utilization, ROI, as well as making sure we are focused on hiring Only on stuff where it's important. Speaker 100:33:58We also talked about streamlining sales forces. If you remember, Saket, we had the conversation around making sure our SaaS team is integrated with our core, Which saved us hundreds of heads in terms of efficiency as well as driving more outcome and output from a SaaS perspective. So generally, Those have been some of the key drivers, but Deepak, did you want to add something? Speaker 300:34:17No, I think you've covered it all. I think, Saket, we've talked this before. Welcome. Yes. We scale well as a company, Right. Speaker 300:34:24And I think that's across all the different elements of our P and L. I think Nikesh has talked about the supply chain. We talked about the OpEx. I just also mentioned Cloud hosting, cloud consumption, as we get bigger and we consume more, we have the ability to go back to our service providers and try and negotiate better contracts. So I think across all the areas of the P and L, we scaled pretty well as a company. Speaker 100:34:48And I think to your question in terms of where this goes, as Deepak said, this is a new baseline. We think there is continued opportunity from here. And we haven't even factored in the potential impact of generative AI, As you've been hearing all the conversation in the industry, we're still working on it. We're understanding it. We're relooking at processes. Speaker 100:35:06But No, we believe there is a there there. We think there will be an opportunity in the future to get more efficiency from generative AI as we go ahead and implement some of the capabilities Through our organization, so I think there's upside both in the continued efforts of what Deepak has been driving for the last 9 months And there's the sort of the icing on the top is the potential application of generative AI as we continue to grow business over the next few years. Speaker 200:35:32Got it. Operator00:35:32Thanks, Saket. Speaker 100:35:33Thank you. Operator00:35:34Next question is from Hamzah Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley with Brian Essex from JPMorgan on deck. Hamzah, go ahead. Speaker 500:35:40Hey, guys. Good evening. I hope you can hear me okay. Maybe a question for Nikesh and re players Nikesh, on AI, you've clearly been thinking about this a lot based on what I can tell from your Twitter. But we were at RSA last month and while there's a lot of opportunity around AI, there seems to be a lot of risks Around data security, around sort of the data that these models are trained on. Speaker 500:36:11So, I'm curious as you have that AI based conversation with your customers, How are you getting them comfortable around that to really leverage the full capabilities of AI to automate their thoughts? Speaker 100:36:21Yeah, I think there's 2 different parts of it. I think one part is Us using AI already in our products where we have been using it for a while to look at patent recognition, look at what it's telling us From a real time analysis of data perspective, as I mentioned, we deploy over 1,000 AI models to go look at what happens the next time. This is all proprietary. It's happening In our instance, this is not an LLM that's going out and getting trained. This is a proprietary AI model used by Palo Alto Networks, built by Palo Alto Networks, being used for a specific use case and a task for security. Speaker 100:36:57Now to the extent that we intend and will deploy conversational AI in our models, We are working with every public model and open source model out there to understand how can we build it using our own proprietary data. I don't know, Lee, did you want can you elaborate on that, please? Speaker 200:37:13Yes, of course. It's very early in the large language model adoptions that we're seeing. And as you point out, there are a number of risks associated with them, particularly in enterprise use cases. We've already seen some examples where Data has fed into large language models without the understanding of how the data would be used and the data has been Publicly made public available even though it was confidential. So it's very clear that there is sensitivity there. Speaker 200:37:44There's also Sensitivity from a security perspective of things like prompt injection attacks, data poisoning and things like that, that have to be taken into account. The and so I think what we'll see is, the enterprise use cases of LLMs will Evolve a little bit more actually, I should say, need to evolve a little bit more methodically and carefully to take these security challenges into account. At the same time, though, it's also important to recognize that they offer tremendous promise, as Nikesh mentioned earlier, in terms of being able to Help guide product adoption, product usage, to help enhance security capabilities, and to drive greater efficiencies across the business. Speaker 100:38:30Yes, I think to cap it off, I think there is no doubt we will continue to deploy our proprietary AI models For XIM or for our network security use cases I highlighted, we believe in our preliminary analysis over the last 3 months and driving a lot of these work streams internally That there is a there there with generative AI. So we believe that we will be deploying generative AI over the course of the next few months and we'll talk more about it later when. But we think that has an opportunity both to significantly improve our customer efficiency and the efficacy of our products At the same time, also to drive efficiencies within the way we run Palo Alto Networks. I think last but not the least, which is something you didn't ask, but I'll say, Now separately, Lee and his team have been working hard to see and look at the adverse impact that generative AI could have in terms of Adversaries using generative AI to build new malware to try and attack our customers and there's a lot of work we're doing as well to make sure we are able to protect our customers against any such activity that is conducted using generative AI. Speaker 200:39:34Thank you. Speaker 300:39:35Thanks for Operator00:39:35your question Hamzah. Next question is from Brian Essex at JPMorgan followed by Brad Zelnick from Deutsche Bank. Brian, go ahead. Speaker 600:39:42Yes. Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. And to follow-up on Sakka's Nice progression in operating margin here and it's good to see cash flow margin guidance go up as well. If I could tick down if you could maybe peel back a couple of layers on that. Speaker 600:39:59Core drivers of that cash flow Margin improvement and how sustainable it is. We noticed that CapEx looks like it's a little bit lower than you previously guided to. So just wondering, As we kind of look at that as a foundational metric to lean on for valuation, how sustainable is that? And As we kind of forecast operating margins going forward, should that, I guess, gap between operating margins and cash flow margins Speaker 300:40:28Yes. So Brian, thanks for the question. Let me just start off with like the biggest driver over the long It's really just to strengthen your bookings, at least your billings and then comes down. Then the foundation really is your operating margins that then makes up the base that you can do on your cash. There are multiple other factors, but do recognize that when we came into the year, The interest rates were at a different level. Speaker 300:40:52We have had the benefit of higher interest rates. We've deployed a lot of our cash flow. We earn interest income. We're not predictors of interest rates, but fundamentally, we believe that, that will continue to be a tailwind for Cash generation. And then last but not least, we do have PanaFest. Speaker 300:41:11We have a certain amount of our business We do structure and financing. Frankly, that's been broadly in line with what we assumed at the beginning of the year. But those are really the drivers and we feel pretty comfortable on what we're able to do with those different drivers in delivering our numbers. Speaker 200:41:32Great. Thank you. Operator00:41:33Great. Thanks, Brian. Next question from Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank followed by Andrew Nowinski at Wells Fargo. Go ahead, Brad. Speaker 700:41:41Great. Thanks so much for the question and nice job both to Nikesh, Deepak and the entire team. Nikesh, my question is about M and A, which I feel like Typically comes later in the call, but I feel like it's such a great opportunity right now. What's the hurdle to doing the large deal? Can you remind us how you think about transformative M and A? Speaker 700:42:00And just related to that, your competitors naturally knock you on having grown through acquired innovation. Just to set the record straight, can you talk about how much a priority and a focus it is to have a deeply integrated product? Speaker 100:42:14Yes, Brian, I think, first of all, I'm amused that you're asking for transformational M and A. I think I feel like somehow we have our networks have been going through a transformation already for the last 5 years. Let me talk about it in 2 different parts. 1, and I'd like to bust the myth of the notion that We've grown our innovation through M and A, because pretty much the entire XIM product that we've built, which is now going to be one of the fastest platforms at Palo Alto Networks It's homegrown. It was built by our team internally. Speaker 100:42:42It was designed, built and delivered by the Cortex team. So I think it's a disservice to them to say that someone of the fastest growing Being built at Palo Alto Networks was acquired similarly our next generation firewalls or our SASE product. SaaSci product for the most part is entirely homegrown driven by the security capabilities that we build using our firewalls as well as our virtual firewall business. So I think Majority of M and A has been focused on building our cloud security portfolio, where we felt where we needed to be assertive and be out there in the front. And I would say, Auxiliary capabilities, whether it's an automation with XOR or auxiliary capabilities around tax purposes management. Speaker 100:43:18So Bottom line, we're very comfortable with the 3 platforms that we have and what we need to get done. I think we've been very clear about from an acquisition perspective, We look for product capability where we can take product capability and attach that and make sure we can solve more problems for our customers that they're looking at. So from that perspective, My view on M and A is consistent that we find something interesting in industry trend, which is added incremental tech capability, we will do it. I think from a transformational M and A, I think we can transform this company and have continued to transform it to where it is Based on our innovation and our balance of execution, I think we will continue to do that. I don't think the market is particularly cheap yet. Speaker 100:44:02If you were to try and look for a transformation in M and A, and I think it's kind of a double edged situation. 1, I think we continue to get stronger as we get execution under our belt and we continue to grow in value as Palo Alto Networks. And If some of the large players out there end up committing missteps, then we'll go take a look at it. But for now, I feel very comfortable with the position Palo Alto has in I feel very, very comfortable with the amount of cash we have on our balance sheet. And I believe it is our job to keep our heads down and keep executing because it's a tough market. Speaker 100:44:34And I think one of the things which was brought up just a minute ago, I think the opportunities from AI I have not been fully comprehended by most enterprise businesses. I think we are going to undergo a transformation both as Palo Alto Networks as well as Generally, an enterprise software industry over the next 12 to 24 months as we embrace generative AI, I think that's The real opportunity and challenge in front of us and I think half of the people now that we get it wrong and hopefully we're on the right side of history. Speaker 700:45:05You're doing a great job. Keep it up. Thank you, Migraine. Great. Operator00:45:08Thanks for the question, Brad. Next question is from Andy Nowinski from Wells Fargo followed by Matt Hedberg from RBC. Andy, go ahead. Speaker 800:45:15Okay. Thank you and congrats on a great quarter. So nearly every single vendor and nearly every reseller we talked to, he says they're seeing an elongation of sales cycles, yet you seem to defy those headwinds with massive growth In large deals and customers spending $5,000,000 $10,000,000 with you, I guess, would you view this as an important inflection point As it relates to sort of consolidation in that, if you can drive large deals in this macro constrained environment, you could potentially see an acceleration of those consolidation trends When the macro improves? Speaker 100:45:51Are you predicting a macro improvement, Andy? Speaker 800:45:53I certainly hope so. Speaker 100:45:55Well, look, I think first and foremost, I don't want to leave you with any impression that the macro is not hard. It is hard out there. I think everything you're hearing from resellers, Some other people in the industry, it's true. Customers are spending more time paying attention to deals. Customers are taking longer. Speaker 100:46:14Some are rightsizing deals. Some are focusing things that are important, some are looking for financing, some want to pay annually. So all the effects that you talked about are true in the industry. And we recognized this towards the end of our Q1. And I'll tell you what, we've been working at double time, like literally The day Deepak sort of shut the doors on us being able to book anything this quarter, we're out there hunting for next quarter. Speaker 100:46:39We have a big number to hit this quarter. We're out there in the field, we're executing, our teams are out there. So as you probably appreciate, there's no magic in the world Around the fact that our quarter ended July 31st, there's no budget year end for any part of the world on July 31st. It's a date which has been created that Palo Alto finished this year, Q4 July 31, which means we have to run as hard as we can to get business done by July 31. We know that's the end of our year. Speaker 100:47:05We know that's the end of our quarter. Our customers So what we're doing is we're getting ahead of it. We're hoping that us getting ahead of it and continuing to rigorously execute is going to allow us to be able to improve our conversion rates. And our conversion rates on our pipeline are down. Guess what? Speaker 100:47:21You've drawn up more pipeline, Therefore, your conversion rate that's down still allows you to make the number that you promised us to reach. That's what we've been trying to do. And as I've said, the macro is hard and we're going to keep trying to keep our heads down and execute. Speaker 800:47:33Thanks Nikesh. Keep up the good work. Operator00:47:35Great. Thanks, Andy. Next question from Matt Hedberg at RBC followed by Gabriel Goldman, go ahead, Matt. Speaker 900:47:41Thanks, Walter. My congrats again, team, outstanding results. I guess, in the cash order, Lee, on the success you've seen thus far with You noted, you essentially have full access to SIEM budgets right now. I'm curious with some of the large deals you're seeing, are these generally replacing legacy SIEM vendors Or are you actually generating new TAM that didn't exist previously? Speaker 100:48:04So Matt, I'll let Lee jump in and talk about some of the specifics. But I'll tell you Every one of these deals is a replacement of the legacy SIEM or a data store. In addition, We do not sell XIM without our endpoint products. You have to buy Palo Alto Cortex XDR to deploy XIM because we believe the only way to have normalized Good source single source of truth data is to deploy our endpoint products and then we use that, as I showed, in the AI funnel of how we can go cross correlate that and go drive Great security outcomes. So in every case, we are replacing an existing vendor. Speaker 100:48:39But I will tell you, the SOC industry is upside down. It was designed so far to go understand when a breach happens, how the breach happened and try and figure out how to remediate it. And those remediation times as I highlighted are 6 days. And now most modern attacks are in and out in under 12 hours. So if you've got a SOC infrastructure, where it allows you to come up With what happened to you after 6 days, the bad actors have gone in and out in 12 hours, you have a mismatch. Speaker 100:49:07That is a problem. But Lee, can you highlight some of the key use cases that we're obviously seeing in the first 30 plus customers that we have, what's driven in some of this transformation? Yes. Look, Speaker 200:49:19nearly so Exane is replacing the SIEM, it's also replacing other tools in the SOC As well. There's 3 core elements to how this is happening. The first is around data. As you saw, 3.5 petabytes a day is being ingested and analyzed. Data is the key to driving good AI and XIM is specifically designed to be able to ingest large amounts of data across different data sources into an AI data lake. Speaker 200:49:482nd This is how we drive AI based analytics on that data, be able to detect attacks in real time. This is something that the traditional SIEM industry was just not Well designed to be able to do. That is driving the meantime, the detection that you're seeing. And then 3 is the integration of automation natively into XIM that allows us to drive the meantime remediation down from what in the past used to be, in many cases, days down to hours and even minutes. And so in all of the XIM deployments we're seeing, it's amazing how quickly we're seeing the Outcomes that we saw in our own SOC when we deployed and operational at Sacsayon. Speaker 100:50:33I think the last thing I'll add Sorry, Matt. The only thing I'll add to this is that over the last 15 years, what has happened is the cost and value equation In existing SOCs has diverged tremendously. So people are spending a lot of money collecting data in a lot of data stores And they're not getting adequate value out of it and they're not getting adequate security outcomes out of it. So I think that is a big gap and that gap is something we've been We've built this product to try and fill and now it really is very early days for us. I think the fact that we'll get to $100,000,000 in the time span that you thought was Aggressive, less than that, I think tells us there's a huge potential out there, which means we have to keep our heads down again, keep building, keep executing And keep trying to solve the problems that our customers are presenting in front of us, but I have a good feeling about this. Speaker 200:51:21Certainly seems that way. Thanks. Great. Operator00:51:24Thanks, Matt. Next question is Gabriela Gorges at Goldman Sachs with Adam Tindle from Raymond James on deck. Gabriela, go ahead. Speaker 1000:51:32Good afternoon. Thank you. Either for Leon Akash, I wanted to ask about your cloud security strategy in Prisma, Specifically with respect to how you think about the right balance of incentives that you give customers upfront to catalyze adoption? And then also how you think about the balance of Top down growth versus product led growth given that DevSecOps, DevOps, some of those tools seem to be driven by product led growth as well? Thank you. Speaker 100:51:59Yes, Blede, go ahead. Answer that question. Speaker 200:52:04So One of the challenges that we set out to address with Prisma Cloud was this fundamental challenge in enterprise cybersecurity of sort of the proliferation of Point products. Every time there's a new security need, there's a new product and then customers become the system integrator of all these turn point solutions. And they spend more time Speaker 100:52:28I'm trying to be the system integrator than Speaker 200:52:28they are actually getting the value from the products. And so with Prisma Cloud, we've taken the unique approach Of building a platform where we can deliver many different capabilities pre integrated from the same location. Now at the same time we did that on the technical side, We also approached it from a sort of the adoption side and I'll call it the procurement side of Having a single Prisma Cloud credit system that makes it really easy for customers to buy a level of capacity And then simply use it to adopt as much of the platform as they need and when they need. And so we've it's allowed us to focus more of Our attention in terms of how we engage with customers and how the product works on in product adoption, Guided adoption of additional capabilities and enabling them to easily use more and more the services as they need them As opposed to having to go back and turn every module into a new transaction with a customer. And as you saw from what Nikesh showed, The new credit usage year over year going up about 44% year over year, but then also the number of customers, 2 or more, 3 or more, 4 more modules, in the case 4 more almost doubling year over year shows how well that is working. Operator00:53:48Great. Thanks Gabriela. Next up, Adam Tindle, Raymond James followed by Greg Moskowitz, Mizuho. Adam, go ahead. Speaker 900:53:56Okay, thanks. Good afternoon. I want to start by just acknowledging the Progression in operating margin is really impressive and commitment to that being a baseline is a really important point. If I'm thinking about tomorrow, some of the distracting questions that might come up would be around Product revenue, I think you grew 10% year over year in Q3 and you had previously guided the fiscal year to 10%. But if I saw on the slides correctly, I think you're now raising that to 15% to 16%. Speaker 900:54:22So what's driving that increase in product revenue and the acceleration in Q4 despite the Cautionary comments and anything we can think about in terms of puts and takes to product revenue as we think about fiscal 'twenty four, so we don't get ahead of ourselves? Speaker 100:54:36Thanks. Adam, I think there's 2 parts to it. 1 is, as you will appreciate, we highlighted that software has become 30% of our product revenue. So we whilst when you book a hardware firewall, you get a dollar for dollar for revenue. In software, you don't get a dollar for dollar for revenue. Speaker 100:54:54There's some part of an amortized value we get from our software firewalls and some part of our SD WAN, which becomes part of our product revenue. So We have to run harder on billings to be able to deliver product revenue in the context of software. But as I mentioned, our virtual firewalls grew at 55% this Quarter, they grew at 40% for the year so far. This is a tailwind we had not expected. At the same time, the hardware, as I mentioned, is not as strong as we had expected. Speaker 100:55:19They balance each other out, but in balances in favor of software for now, coming off a low base of last year. So as a result, We have been able to improve our product revenue guidance. Obviously, it comes at a cost of services revenue because some of our software Has now had to work triple time to be able to deliver product revenue. So I think that's the context in which you should think about it overall where there's been a draw from one side And a partial give on the other side, in the product revenue, however, given our RPO is growing way ahead of revenue, it just means we are Saving up a lot of revenue for a future rainy day. Does that sound right financially? Speaker 300:55:57No, that's right. Saving up Speaker 100:55:58a lot of revenue for a rainy day. There we Speaker 300:56:00The only other thing that I would maybe just add to that is simply the supply chain dynamics that Nikesh talks about In his remarks, I mean, that does have some factors, but we really have been able to, with a world class team, get ahead of the supply chain reality. And so That may explain some of the variability you're seeing. Operator00:56:23Great. Thank you, Adam. Next up, Greg Moskowitz from Mizuho followed by Shaul Eyal from Cowen. Speaker 1100:56:32Thank you. Can you hear me? Speaker 100:56:33Yes. Speaker 300:56:34All right. Speaker 1100:56:35I have a follow-up for Lee or Nikesh on Generate AI. So Your comments on ALMs were helpful, but do you think GenAI will tilt the scales in favor of Palo Alto and Perhaps some other security vendors over time or is it ultimately more likely to cause an even faster game of cat and mouse between the vendors and the attackers? Speaker 100:56:55How do you see this playing out? Well, I think, look, 1st and foremost, the benefit of generative AI so far is 2 fold, right? One is, and it's ability to summarize data and give you access to information much faster. Can I imagine a sales rep at Palo Alto having access at their fingertips What about all the information? Of course, I can. Speaker 100:57:17And I imagine my customer support people having access to amazing amounts of information That's at the tip of their fingers so they can answer questions much faster. Can I imagine showcasing that information directly to my customers As you're seeing the industry now suddenly, a plethora of co pilots start to emerge in every product? So I think that is going to become an obvious benefit of generative AI. Now, Don't forget, it relies on one principle called having a lot of data. It's very important that whether you're using it for Sharing your own information from your customers to your customers, you need all that data, you have to clean all your data processes and have that. Speaker 100:57:53Secondly, If you're in the security business, it definitely helps. If you have the largest data lake in the world, we'll have security data. So from that perspective, I think it favors the people who have a lot of data already as part of their strategy and they have built a business in the back of a data led strategy. I think not just Specific to security, in any industry, especially consumer Internet, if you've been a UI company, you have something to worry about. If you're a Travel booking operator or something that just takes other people's data and makes a better UI, you have something to worry about. Speaker 100:58:24So I think from that perspective, It favors companies which have tremendous amounts of data. I think the second thing is also important to understand. Now, if I have 14,000 people, I spend 1,000 of $1,000,000,000 in customer support or more, there's leverage. I can go spend $30,000,000 $40,000,000 $50,000,000 deploying an LLM and saving half my cost. If you're running a small company and your entire cost is $50,000,000 it probably doesn't behoove you to go out and create an Adelem based generative AI project to go out and pay And take away $21,000,000 of cost. Speaker 100:58:54So I think it also benefits people of scale who are able to drive efficiencies using generative AI across the enterprise, allowing them to Grow their business much faster with limited resources. Does that help? Speaker 1100:59:07It does. Thanks, Nikesh. Operator00:59:08Great. Thanks, Greg. And Shaul Eyal from Cowen, our last question. Speaker 1200:59:13Thanks for that. Good afternoon. Congrats team. Akesh, I want to go back Actually, I know Brad was asking about M and A. I want to ask about the competitive landscape, but specifically with the focus Maybe on the CNAP front. Speaker 1200:59:29So my question is, how do you think about it? Any change? Do you think that the product right now as it stands is comprehensive or anything you might be Thinking of maybe augmenting specifically on the SINA front? Thank you for that. Speaker 200:59:51We have by far the most comprehensive cloud native application protection platform there is. That doesn't mean that we do everything. But we do far more than any other solution out there. There's tremendous amount of focus on delivering capabilities that we've been building internally, organically among We've seen the most recent one we delivered with Secret Scanning just a few months ago. We've seen very good early adoption of that. Speaker 201:00:27At the same time, we're also delivering on the latest acquisition of CIDR Security, where we expect that to become a new module in the next couple of months, available to all of our Prisma Cloud customers. And so, Nikesh talked about How we've leveraged M and A in the past to help build some of the key technology areas of Prisma Cloud, which is absolutely true. We have also shown an ability to deliver new cloud security capabilities organically and be very successful at that. And right now, feel good about the balance of both those capabilities and how we're bringing them together and how we continue to deliver new innovations. Speaker 1101:01:10Thank you. Operator01:01:11Thank you for the question. With that, we'll conclude the Q and A portion of the call, and I'd like to pass it back to Nikesh for his closing remarks. Speaker 101:01:18Well, thank you very much again everybody for joining us. We look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming investor events. I also want to once again take an opportunity to thank all of Employees who worked very hard in a very dedicated fashion, as you all know, to help us achieve the results. Not only that, A big thank you to all of our partners and our customers around the world. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 101:01:38Thank you.Read morePowered by