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

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Hamza Fodderwala: Got it. And just maybe a follow-up for Ken. I think SD-WAN is now nearly a $1 billion business for Fortinet which is quite remarkable because you just started selling it, I think, maybe four years ago. I’m curious as more of that base starts to come up for refresh. What are other monetization drivers do you see for SD-WAN, whether it be attaching more services or perhaps increasing the price points. I’m curious how you’re thinking about that?

Ken Xie: Definitely more service, whether under the overlay service for SD-WAN because our SD-WAN has all the security function and also a lot of — deployed case whether supporting work from core from anywhere or kind of helping enterprise reduce their total cost of networking all these things. We do see a lot of additional service they need. At the same time, we also see the service provider starting more working together with us, offer some quite additional service beyond — that’s the traditional SD-WAN. So that’s also helping drive much more service going forward.

Hamza Fodderwala: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Brad Zelnick: Great, thank you very much and congratulations on just blow out results and guidance, a nice job. My first question is just around the new ASIC FortiSP5. Can you remind us what if any impact we might expect in terms of customer purchasing patterns and what you’ve seen in the past and the extent perhaps it can drive accelerated demand and/or maybe the risk of trade-down effect? And I’ve got a follow-up. Thanks.

Ken Xie: Probably want to take some time, I’d say, maybe one to two years to refresh the product. And that’s where every quarter, we tend to release one or two products, whether leverage new ASIC or the new CPU of Smarter network chip in the industry. I don’t feel it will be a significant impact up and down of the result and will be more smooth transition. Because security deployment is a kind of a — take long time to design, evaluate, deploy and also very, very long sales cycle. At the same time, the life cycle of the product also tend to be quite long, like seven to 10 years. So that’s where the ASIC each generation definitely will help in and at the same time has a huge advantage compared to using general-purpose CPU. So that’s where we’re keeping gaining market share.

But consider the switching costs, consider the long cycle, sales cycle and deployment cycle. And also, we also need time to put ASIC into a new product, which also taken in a few months, three to six months, thus I do see it will be like a more long-term positive impact instead of short-term.

Keith Jensen: Yes, Brad, I would only offer again for context. I think that — this is what Fortinet has been 20 generation. It’s a chip probably now we think content processors and network processors and systems-on-a-chip. And I think that Fortinet, Ken and Michael have actually shown the ability to transition through those generations of chips. And if you look back at the financials, I think it’s a little bit difficult to find a year that for a period of time, really saw spike because of the new chip. These are much more long-term plays. And I think the approach here is to execute in a smooth fashion over a number of years.

Brad Zelnick: Thanks for the reminder and Keith, can you just expand on your comments around DSOs being up sequentially year-on-year and the impact of services revenue? And related to that, I recall you had a change in policy around subscription activations. Is that also impacting services revenue. Any help there would be great. Thanks.

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