Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:CHKP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And the last one is what we call the MDR/MPR, which is the management of kind of managed security for customers. And that’s a tiny start-up, but that’s overwhelming response from the market. We have hundreds of customers. We have a nice demand for it and that’s with very limited investment even to promote it. We’re just a — nice response from the market to these services. By the way, these services or this technology, it’s the same technology that we will have in our XPR product. So, we’re actually leveraging one another. So, you can get it as a product in the XPR product for it to manage service with the MPR service that we provide today. Next to that at the beginning of the year, we created a new go-to-market organization, appointed new leadership through Rupal Hollenbeck based in Silicon Valley.

And again, she is building a very robust infrastructure for everything, doing many changes. Again, I think we do less revolution, more evolution the Check Point way, and we are doing them nicely without creating too much earthquakes. Actually, I think you see that going well, but she’s doing a very, very good job building an organization that can scale too much what we think we have the potential to a much bigger scale. In the product organization, we also have a lot of investment in many areas from SD-WAN to SSC and SaaS, which is cloud-based delivery of security, the whole — I mentioned the XPR technologies are also quite interesting in terms of new technologies. We talked, I think it was last quarter about the Titan package, which again, some of it is great new security technology.

Some of it is really new markets like IoT security. So, there’s a lot going on in our organization. We are building now a new model for partnership with our partners. We’ve invested in the brand last year. So, I think there’s a lot going on in the organization right now.

Kip Meintzer : All right. Thank you. And next up is Raym from Guggenheim.

Raymond McDonough: Kip, I’ve only known you for, I think, half a decade. It’s Ray. Ray McDonough from Guggenheim, but I appreciate it.

Kip Meintzer : I’m sorry. I blew it.

Raymond McDonough : It’s all good. I wanted to double-click on cash flow if I could. And Gil, the comment that you made for shifting towards more of a subscription-based model and more flexible buying programs, so to speak and what again, the impact of cash flow would be on — or the impact of lower invoicing duration, if you’re seeing that this quarter, what the impact of cash flow was this quarter from lower invoicing duration, again, if you’re seeing it? And then how we should think about that going into ’23? Should we think about that as being a headwind to ’23 cash flow as we look forward?

Roei Golan : So, I think, again, I think it’s tough to quantify, I mean, the effect on the cash flow, I mean, in terms of moving to — in terms of the duration, but I would say that, yes, we’ve seen less multi-year deals, more kind of one year deals that customers intend because of the macro environment, the higher interest rates. And so, we’ve seen less multi-year deals. Also effect on our cash flow, something that we should again, our cash flow was — this quarter was much more back-end loaded. I mean, usually, Q4 isn’t back-end loaded, but this specifically quarter was much more back-end loaded. We’ve seen much higher billings in December. You can see it also in our receivables in the balance sheet. So again — so that’s also affected our cash flow this quarter.