Saket Kalia : Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Ken Xie : Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Shaul Eyal with TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Shaul Eyal : Thank you for taking the question. Good afternoon. Keith or Ken, can you maybe talk about the performance that you’ve seen with your go-to-market as it relates to your top sellers? Was there anything non-balance this quarter?
Keith Jensen : I’m not quite sure — are you looking for the distribution of salespeople hitting quota? Or — I’m not sure I follow the question you’re try to get at, Shaul.
Shaul Eyal : So actually, I’m looking for your value-added resellers, your notable ones, the biggest one, and whether performance was even or balanced or not, during the quarter?
Keith Jensen : I don’t have that data handy, to be honest with you.
Ken Xie : Yeah, we do see some release from exclusive network, which probably one of biggest picture also. We also want their biggest distributor, probably 30% business top on, but they’re a little bit more —
Keith Jensen : Sorry, resellers I’m sorry. I don’t know. You’re answering the right question. [Indiscernible] distributors, yeah.
Ken Xie : Yeah, I think it’s a similar common, as we are seeing.
Keith Jensen : Yeah. I don’t think that — of our business, if you will, shifted at all significantly. We look at our top three and our top six distributors, we’re fairly concentrated in that regard. That mix doesn’t really change all that much, maybe point or 2 in the quarter. That wasn’t something that we saw that’s just out there at us.
Ken Xie : Yeah. Also, even go back to the history also going forward, also pretty similar kind of a forecast, I believe.
Keith Jensen : Yes.
Shaul Eyal : Thank you.
Operator: Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from Joseph Gallo with Jefferies. Your line is open.
Joseph Gallo : Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Given the breadth of your platform, you have a better vantage point than most. When you talk to CISOs, where is the relative health in the cyber budgets? And where are you seeing the most resistance? And then given your optimistic comments on ’24, what lends confidence that this is only a one to two quarter digestion period? Is there any historical context to support that?
Keith Jensen : In terms of CISO spending, obviously, there’s — the things that were getting media attention out there now, I suspect that we sit down with a CISO that we talking about it. Whether that’s SASE or something with some of the AI technologies, what have you. But I don’t think that CISOs and CIOs get away from having to take care of — tending their knitting, if you will, with their infrastructure. There are obviously to be new use cases for firewalls. Opportunities, if you will. There’s use cases still exists on-prem that need to be secured. There’s new cases in the cloud, the Edge, et cetera. I think it’s a very difficult career position to be at CISO right now with the budgets and threats that are after them. As it relates to 2024, I think whenever — pardon me, 2024, we’ll go through our planning cycle more religiously as we do the second half of the year.
I think the point that Ken and I were making is really, as we move back to a more normal buying pattern after we move through the supply chain in the pandemic and so forth, that’s what the industry has been historically and we would have every expectation that we’d be able to get back in that sweet spot, if you will. And I would also note that as the — it’s not a static comparison. And by that, I mean the compares get easier in every quarter as you go through 2024.
Ken Xie : The CISO, we talk to this to have a certain shortage of people they can leverage to supporting the work for home or hybrid work environment, and so that’s why they tend to a little bit more try to use in certain service kind of approach. On the other side, we do see the need to make sure that the new infrastructure, whether supporting back to office or supporting like we call it universal SASE versus the T&A [ph] environment, because there’s like so many tech service starting kind of this impact and process new area like OT security. That’s kind of — but also certain security budget, they also because some companies, they commit certain cloud spending. Sometimes that is not commit spending for certain security, we also see some of that case.
So that’s what’s happening. So that’s where we also kind of keeping ahead and helping the situation which is also — most of the CISO fuel help supporting the operation is a pretty big to help — help them to solve the issue there. And also leverage some kind of AI, some new technology and also kind of more broadly deployed network security inside the infrastructure. It’s also supporting hybrid work environment. It’s also quite a high priority for them.
Joseph Gallo : Thanks. That’s very helpful. And then, I guess, as we work through this digestion period, how should we think about investments in hiring? You’ve outperformed in the first half on profit, but your guide doesn’t necessarily reflect a continuation of that. Where should we think of the incremental investments from here and the classic growth versus profit debate as billings moderate? Thanks.
