Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ken Xie: Yes. We continue keeping building of the infrastructure, including the cloud. Also our strategy a little bit different than 100 players we tend to build out ourselves just like we — you can see the investment in some of the real estate. Quite some of that also go to the — like a data center infrastructure that give us much better cost and also more long-term benefit just like how we — the investment made in early real estate kind of benefit our office cost, rental costs. So that’s where we’re using the cost saving we get from this rental keeping invest into some more long-term infrastructure real estate. We do see that we’re keeping benefit the company a long time. But at the same time, like I said, also partner working with car service providers that’s other strategy we have managed some of their infrastructure. So that’s also make a win-win both party or benefit or will be profit. That’s also the strategy we have.

Ben Bollin: And within that, Ken, could you speak to, is this — is it purely cost is latency part of the narrative? Is it being closer to your customers? What’s the broader strategy within it?

Ken Xie: Not just, but also will make it easy to manage easy to scale. Even some of the SASE solution I had to be the some bigger customers, they may even do themselves. So if you can integrate a more successive function to the same or into the same system. So that’s sort of the long-term strategy we have and also working with service providers is very, very important for us.

Ben Bollin: And then my last one. Ken, what are your thoughts on the traditional campus networking opportunity in the WLAN market? How do you think about wallet share opportunity and the ability to displace more of the incumbent there? That’s it for me. Thank you.

Ken Xie: That’s kind of the thinking we have like over 20, 30 years really. There’s a convergence of networking, traditional networking and network security. I think SD-WAN is a very, very good example. So the WAF solution will be more efficient, more secure, and there’s a lot of additional service we can apply to secure SD-WAN, which is whether offer free or we are not kind of there yet. But same thing for a lot of other web technology. And so we feel that’s a huge potential. And — but also doing security in the networking environment not need a huge company in power, which has come from ASIC investment we made, which also will take a long time to see the return of investment, that’s what we kind of comment from day one back 23 years ago.

So when we start with we really need to invest and planning all these kind of long-term convergence of networking or security together. So the new ASIC is one example is the fifth generation of our SoC chip, which also including some of the investments we made in the mine generation of our content process and seven-generation network processor together with a lot of multiple CPU. So we continue to develop technology and eventually will be deployed more broadly beyond the traditional network security.

Operator: Thank you. I’d like to turn the call back over to Peter Salkowski for any closing remarks.

Peter Salkowski: Thank you, Valerie. I’d like to thank everyone for joining today’s call. Fortinet will be attending investor conferences hosted by Baird and Morgan Stanley during the first quarter. A fireside webcast link will be posted on the Events & Presentations section of Fortinet’s Investor Relations website for the Morgan Stanley conference. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.

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