John McAdam, President and Chief Executive Officer
And remember with these virtualization deals, we have the same concept: Good, Better, Best. We have modules, we iRules — all the competitive functionality we have, we have in this software side as well.
Operator
Next question Bill Choi with Janney. Your line is open.
Bill Choi, Janney
Okay, thanks. So on the large deals again I guess, I am curious because there are so many things happening between hardware moving to also support virtual editions, timed with SDN, your product becoming more softer. Again, how much of this might be more product-specific? The deal is getting more complex. It does seem like the lot of new technology to think about and Cisco did have some weakness in its billings for the October quarter. Guys like VMware also had some choppy bookings. So I am curious, as you look the complexity of products, can you really attribute any of that to the complexity?
John McAdam, President and Chief Executive Officer
Really I don’t think we can and I just don’t think we can. It’s based on the deals are there, we understand them. They’re very similar because what we have in Q4 where we had a massive crucial with large deals, and we don’t see any changes in that landscape whatsoever.
Bill Choi, Janney
And one of the factors that impacts growth rate was — you’ve refreshed all of your product line little over a year ago, so last year we enjoyed quite a bit of acceleration in growth rate with coming off of tough comp. Are you seeing any impact from just the pent up demand maybe that was created from the product cycle and to things slowing down after people went ahead and did the refreshes. Any thoughts on that as a driver?
John McAdam, President and Chief Executive Officer
You know, we thought about that and if you look at the drivers and it’s probably worth going through them again just to summarize. But obviously product refresh we’ve talked about there. It was a low hanging fruit at the beginning. It’s not quite there at the moment probably. Do we still have a very large installed base of products that we can refresh? Absolutely. So I think there’s that area. Obviously, 1200 with its SSL capability I think is clearly at one point a product but it sells its capability that’s a pretty good opportunity to refresh as well. But the big drivers of security, with a firewall that we talk about, ASM, the WAF solution and DDoS on-premise and off-premise. And then the service provider we feel very good with the drivers there, from an NFD from a security perspective, TCP optimization. We still feel good about ACE I mentioned of what we’re going to do there. And the SDN partnerships. And in general, the cloud movement I think is a growth possibility for us. So product refresh, probably to some degree but we still think has a big opportunity there.
Bill Choi, Janney
Okay last question given the growth in pipeline, partly the new creation as well as deals slipping, with your guidance, that product growth rate is continue to decelerate to somewhere near high-single digits when you look at your guidance. How do you get this back up and why isn’t the guidance for the March quarter better just given the buildup of the million dollar plus project? Thank you.
John McAdam, President and Chief Executive Officer
Historically, last quarter you need to be careful with that because it’s always beginning of the financial year for a lot of companies. We’re assuming, I hope, relatively conservative close rates — close rates in the pipe of pipeline and we’ll see what takes us.
