Check Point Software Technologies - Q2 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

On the video conference call will be Gil Shwed, our CEO and founder, as well as Roei Golan, our CFO. Before we begin, obviously, the good old forward-looking statement. During this presentation, Check Point's representatives may make certain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, include, but are not limited to, statements related to our expectations regarding our product solutions, expectations related to cybersecurity and other threats. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results or events in the future are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those projected.

These risks include our ability to continue to develop platform capabilities and solutions, customer acceptance, purchase of our existing products and solutions, new products and solutions, the market for IT security, et cetera, political, economic, business, everything under the sun, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties, including those more fully described in our filings with the Securities Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 20-F, filed with the SEC on April 27th, 2023. The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to Check Point as of the date hereof. Check Point disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

In this presentation, our press release, which has been posted on our website, we present GAAP and non-GAAP results, along with a reconciliation of such results, as well as the reasons for our presentation of non-GAAP information. Guess what? This year is our 30th year in business. I hope you'll all join us in celebrating, toast a glass or what have you, of your favorite, beverage. We've had an accumulation of $30 billion in revenue over these 30 years, I hope you'll cheers us to the next 30. With that-

Roei Golan (CFO)

Actually, a week ago, we just, Yeah, 30 years.

Operator (participant)

A week ago. There you go.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Yeah.

Operator (participant)

With that, I will toss this over to Roei Golan, our CFO. A reminder again, please do not raise your hands. Thanks.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Thank you, Kip. Just let me to share my presentation. Can you see my screen?

Operator (participant)

You need to go into presentation mode.

Roei Golan (CFO)

I know. Can you see? Okay, great.

Operator (participant)

Yes, we've got it.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Great. Okay. Thank you, Kip, greetings to everyone joining the call today. Excited to be here with you and begin the review of the 2Q of 2023. We had a very strong, profitable quarter, reaching the highest rate of growth for more than a decade. Our net income may grow by 14% to $228 million, while our non-GAAP EPS was up by 22%, highest since 2009 to $2 per share. Our revenues reached $589 million, which is $1 million above the midpoint of our projections. As I mentioned, our non-GAAP earning per share reached $2, which is $0.05 above the top end of our projections. Very strong results. Now let's deep dive into the numbers.

As I mentioned, revenues were up to $589 million, 3% growth year-over-year. Our deferred revenues went up to $1,774 million, 7% growth year-over-year, while our current deferred revenues short term reached $1,307 million, 8% growth year-over-year. Our calculated billings reached $566 million, which is 1% decline year-over-year, and 17% growth compared to Q1 2023. Our current calculated billings reached $581 million, up 4% year-over-year. As in previous quarter, we see that due to the high interest rates environment, we see fewer customers willing to pay upfront for multi-year deals, which resulted in shorter billing duration.

In addition, as a result of Infinity becoming more and more significant, and you'll see it in the upcoming slides, the flexibility in billing terms affecting, of course, the billing timing. The revenues growth driven by strong subscription revenues, with 14% growth year-over-year to $239 million. That was driven mainly by our Harmony email security, which continued to deliver great results with triple-digit growth year-over-year. With that, we saw a decline in our product revenues of 12% year-over-year, which was resulted by longer sales cycles and delayed refresh projects, but also to the fact that we saw this quarter, much more customer buying our product for Infinity agreements, and most of it is not translated into revenues immediately, as they have the flexibility to utilize the allowance usually within 12 months.

It is important to note that we did see a strong renewal business as our customers continue to benefit from our security services and support. As I mentioned, we keep seeing strong adoption of our Infinity strategy. We saw Infinity revenues exceeded 10% of our total revenue for the first time since we launched Infinity. We see more and more customers adapting our platform, answering the needs under one umbrella of products and services. Let's look at our revenues by geos. We had growth across all geos. 45% of our revenues came from EMEA, 43% came from the Americas, while the remaining 12% came from Asia Pacific. Let's review our P&L, where the significant improvement in our gross margin, which went up from 88% last year to 90% this year.

We saw a significant improvement in our supply chain, which resulted lower costs, I remind you that we had a very challenging supply chain last year that drove our margin below 90%. We hope to see this positive trend continue in the remaining of 2023. Our operating expenses were increased by 5% and 7% on constant currency. The increase was mainly as a result of our continuing investment in our workforce, cloud infrastructure, marketing, and increase in our travel costs. Our non-GAAP operating income continues to be strong at $263 million or 45% margin, compares to 44% margin in the previous year.

Our financial income, this quarter reached $21 million as we invest more in higher interest rates over time. We expect this trend to continue as our securities mature, our security mature and we invest in higher interest rates. Our non-GAAP tax rate for this quarter was around 16%, mainly due to indexation and updates in tax provision because of several tax assessments we have worldwide. Our non-GAAP net income reached $238 million or $2 per share, which is $0.05 above our guidance, above the top end of our projections. Our GAAP net income was $202 million or $1.70, 25% growth year-over-year. Now let's move to our cash flow and cash position.

Our cash balances as of the end of the quarter was $3.5 billion. Our operating cash flow was $191 million this quarter. What affected our cash flow was very back-ended loaded quarter. We can see that our account receivables went up by 20% year-over-year. The balance that we have in this, compared to the same period last year, is up by 20%. We saw much more booking and billing, coming in the last month than usual, and it's something that we continue to see. We continue to see this trend since the beginning of the year, or actually since Q4. During the quarter, we continued our buyback program and purchased 2.6 million shares for $325 million, at an average price of $125 per share.

In total, we purchased $1.3 billion in the past twelve months. Let's summarize our results. We had this very strong subscription revenue with 40% growth year-over-year, which was driven by Harmony Email and continuous strong adoption of our Infinity platform. While we saw the refresh project that experienced delay, we saw a very strong and healthy renewal business. We saw improvement in improving and strong operating margin that resulted in over 22% EPS growth, highest since 2009. I'll turn the call over to Gil.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Thank you very much, Roei, and great to have all of you here with us, especially now as we celebrate 30 years for Check Point. I think we've achieved a lot, but this is just the beginning, and there's plenty more which we need to achieve in the coming 30 years. Let me jump right in and give some of my flavor. I think we all have seen some of the kind of recapture what Roei says in the summary for the quarter. Very healthy quarter with 22% EPS growth. Revenues above our midpoint of the projection. Pleased with that. Positive trends in the Americas, very important.

That sets the tone for the rest of the world, and I hope it may be setting the stage for, which shows that we should expect better economy in the next six months all over the world. Strong operating margin. I think we're seeing that our customers are actually very happy with our products and technology, so much that they defer some of the renewal, some of the refresh projects, and the renewal is very strong, and customers are happy with the products.

I think in the future, we want to translate it to additional growth, and I think we're seeing something very, very important, Infinity, and I'll speak about that, which is the pinnacle of our strategy, exceeding 10% of our total revenues for the first time, and the Harmony Email continues its very high growth rates, capturing another segment of this busy cybersecurity market. Let me start by speaking about some of the wins we have with Infinity. I think our commitment and our vision is to give the best security. Infinity, I think, expresses that vision in the best possible way, where we give the customer the full platform, where everything works together to deliver the best security, and it can serve everyone. You see here a few examples of recent wins in the Infinity landscape.

One is a important bank, which expanded the network security, their Maestro super high speed, but also added to that Infinity architecture, the Harmony Email, because of its highest catch rate, combined all of that with our new Horizon family that correlates all these events and create a more collaborative security to all these systems. In the middle, you see another sector that in many, some cases is underserved in security, but here it's a pretty large network of educational facilities, replaced a competitive vendor product and chose the whole platform, network, email, endpoint, to secure their entire estate. To the right, another sector, which is very important. This is an existing customers, large existing customers, was very satisfied with our Quantum solution and translated it into a bigger win with full Infinity implementation, consolidated across the network, the cloud, and the endpoint.

A sizable deal. What we are seeing here is how Infinity can serve customers in all sectors and deliver on that vision of the best security for everyone. Adding to that, what I already alluded, is the success that we have in the email security market. You can also see here a few examples of customer wins, different customers, and one is large bank, was not very happy with the fact that their existing email security was missing suspicious email and let them through. They tested our Harmony Email and what took them before weeks and months to install, to optimize the system, to get reasonable results, they got so much better security in less than five minutes for a large organization.

Similar to that is on top, a large pharmaceutical chose Harmony Email due to the fact that it has a much higher catch rate versus the competition, again, easy implementation. We see all of that is starting to echo in the analyst report. We see GigaOm, Forrester Wave, when we're coming relatively quickly from nowhere to the leadership areas of these charts. One is to the top upper right, one is in the middle, I think we're making a breakthrough in this industry, especially when we're speaking about cloud-based email, that I think our solution is very, very unique in the way it works, compared to everything, has the best security and the highest catch rate.

I think what I've spoken in the beginning of the year is that our vision for the year includes these three Cs: to create security, which is the best and prevents the attacks, instead of just reporting about them and let the bad guys in. The three Cs is comprehensive, consolidated, and collaborative. I'm putting a huge focus on the collaborative aspect of the system. The others are also relatively Check Point is leading in them, but the collaborative is, I think, what makes that security stand out.

The fact that we are able to identify threats in one location in the network and translate that into full prevention all over the network, I think it's completely unique in our industry, the way we do it, the scope that we do it, and the fact that we are able to connect so many technologies, not only from Check Point, but we are working more and more to connect also third-party technologies to that architecture. If we see an example how it works, here is a typical event, and unfortunately, these events happen every day. A single endpoint on the network notices that the user received an email with attachment. The attachment is infected. This is a zero-day threat, which means that it's not identified by most technologies. Some don't even detect it, some detect it few hours after the computer has been infected.

Check Point is the only one that does it in real time, before the malicious file on a zero-day has the chance to infect the user computer. That's not the end of the story, because once this threat is being analyzed by our ThreatCloud AI, we immediately isolate that endpoint, quarantine it, and make sure that the entire network protects against these files, and they won't reach any other computer. Whether these computers have our advanced endpoint or whether their security is not sufficient, we will block the download of that file on any means of communication, immediately and automatically. Again, I think this is something very typical.

We are seeing examples of that happening on a constant basis, I think we're the only vendor that can actually make the security infrastructure work together, so it does deliver that level of prevention. To summarize, I think I've talked a little bit about our strategy, about how we demonstrate the technology and how it works. I think we gave you some really good cases of some of the technologies that drive our growth, Harmony Email, to name one, Infinity, to name the other, which I'm very, very proud of what we see, the Infinity. We're working on several years now, starting to be a significant part of the business. Our financial results for the quarter were pretty good, 22% EPS growth, something we haven't seen for more than a decade. A 14% growth in the security subscription.

All our advanced technologies, the ThreatCloud AI, the CloudGuard, the Harmony Email, are all driving that security subscription growth. I think we see the collaborative security in action every day, and I think we'll see more of that in the second half of the year as we launch more products and more technologies with more innovation around the collaboration in security. That summarizes our results for the 2Q. Before I open it to your question, I want to maybe touch a little bit about our projections for the remainder of the year and the third quarter. Let me speak for two minutes about the projections. For the entire year, this slide, you've seen it before. You've seen it at the beginning of the year. There is no change in that slide.

We are well within the range that we provided for the year. Revenues in the range of $2.34 billion-$2.51 billion for the year. Non-GAAP EPS, $7.70-$8.30, and GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately $1.22 less. I always say that the projecting the future is always challenging. We are seeing the world changing around us all the time. I'm actually more optimistic about the second half of the year, but we never know what will happen. That's, again, no changes in the annual guidance, just repeating what we've seen before. For the third quarter, we haven't shared the projections that we have, let me share what we have now based on all the analysis that we've done so far.

Revenues are expected to be in the range of $570 million to $605 million. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be between $1.97 to $2.07. GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately $0.35 less than that. That's where we stand in terms of projections. I think well within our projection for, well, the guidance for the year. With that, thank you for joining us today, and I'll be very happy to open the call for your questions. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right, folks, first up today is gonna be Joseph Gallo, followed by Tal Liani. As a reminder, please limit yourselves to one question so we can get through as many of the participants as possible. With that, Joe, please take.

Joseph Gallo (Software Research Analyst)

Awesome. Thanks for the question, Kip, and congrats on the 30 years, guys. Appreciate the cycle time commentary and delayed refresh commentary. Can you just talk through the new logo side of the business, maybe just talk about the macro dynamics in Q2? Did it worsen hold course or ease a little bit versus 1Q? Maybe just how would you characterize your billings performance in 2Q? Was it all impacted by macro, or are there some areas for improvement? Thanks.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

The billing, I'll leave it to Roei. I think we had pretty good billings, Roei will comment about that. In terms of the macro environment, I think it remained tough, but it was better than Q1. I think on all the metrics, we've seen better results than the first quarter. Slightly better, I mean, much better product sales, the metrics are slightly better than Q1. Renewal, much stronger, and I think what we've seen in things like Harmony Email and a few other areas were better. Again, I'm also a little bit optimistic because the US segment of our business has shown some good signs of recovery and some good optimistic signs of growth.

I'm, I hope that this will be the, like, our bellwether for the future and for the rest of the world. Roei, do you want to?

Roei Golan (CFO)

Yeah. I think, I mean, we see a significant improvement in the billing compared to Q1. I would say that even though we saw that Q2 had a lot of very nice Infinity deals that are not translated into billings or revenues, especially in America, we had a very strong Infinity business, new customers, new logos, and existing customers that moved to Infinity. This, and some of it you don't see it still in the billing. It's not something in the billing. Some of it, yes, in the billing, in the end, I mentioned also in the call, I mean, our billing was up 17% compared to Q1, 2023. I know that there's also seasonality here, still, 17% is impressive. I think that our billing was okay.

It was good, I mean, this quarter. Of course, that we want to be better and we want to be high, we want to grow, but I think also you can see the short-term billing, the current billing, that went up by 4%. That's, I think that's much better than what.

Joseph Gallo (Software Research Analyst)

Awesome.

Operator (participant)

All right. Our next caller is Tal Liani, followed by Shaul Eyal.

Tal Liani (Managing Director)

Hi, guys. Gil, I wanna take a step back and kind of look at things from higher level, and it's related to the question before. At the end of the day, your revenue growth is 3% and your billing growth is -1%. What are your long-term targets in the sense that you invested heavily in new products in the last few years, and still the growth is well below what other cybersecurity companies are achieving? How do you see the growth accelerating over the next few years? What are the areas that could drive it up, and what are the targets?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Hi, Tal. Apologize, we got somehow disconnected. I think I heard your question, but can you see, hear me now?

Tal Liani (Managing Director)

Yes, I can hear you.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Okay. I think I might have lost the last few words of the question. I think you asked about our growth rate and about our investment and what we are shooting for. First, we are absolutely shooting for much, much higher growth rates. I think we have the technology, we have the products. I think we have a lot of differentiation and the best in the best security, and I think we have many, many loyal customers. I think we need to translate it to a much more aggressive winning of both existing and new customers to expand that. We are shooting for double-digit growth in all the metrics, let's put it that way.

I think we've started doing many good investment in our field and marketing organization in the past year and a half, starting from growing the organization and investing in its sheer size and growth. This year, the focus is actually on making sure the organization is performing, calling, reaching out, engaging with customers. I must say that for the last three months, we've seen a big change there. I think the field people have done a good job. We're seeing much higher level of engagement with customers, and I think the cycle is that the engagement with customers leads to funnel creation, to opportunities, and these opportunities eventually should result in increased sales.

For the second half of the year, and especially for the fourth quarter, we already see the increase in the pipeline, even though it's just the beginning, because I think most of performance improvement happened in the last, I would say, three months, roughly, starting kind of March, and the big improvement was kind of May and June. I hope it will be translated to the results that I'm expecting. I think we have plenty of potential, and I'm seeing progress. I don't want yet to say that we are seeing the wins because the numbers are not there yet, but I'm seeing the progress on our internal metrics.

Tal Liani (Managing Director)

Thank you.

Shaul Eyal (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

All right, next up is Shaul Eyal, followed by Joel Fishbein.

Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Question for Roei. So on the maintenance line front, given that product has been declining in recent quarters, what could be the impact on the maintenance line longer term? Maybe I know you mentioned in your prepared commentary, some linearity trend, but maybe can you talk to us how this quarter has been progressing, April, May, June? Thanks.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Yes, sure. As for the first question, I would say like that. We mentioned we had a very strong renewal business. Our customer didn't buy the product, I mean, they didn't buy enough product. We saw less refresh project. We did see them renewal, renew the support, renew the maintenance. Therefore, on the short term, I mean, again, it's tough for me to say what's gonna be long term, but short term, I don't expect any effect on this line item, as long as the renewal business will keep, will be strong, and as we've seen in the last this quarter and also in the last few quarters. That's in terms of that. In terms of linearity, yes.

We've seen it's something that we've seen, by the way, also in Q4, since Q4, 2022, and also, of course, in Q1 and also this quarter, we see much more back and loaded. I mean, we've seen that significant part of the deals are coming in the last 2 or 3 weeks of the quarter, and that's affected, I mentioned it, that affected our cash flow. Therefore, we expect a very strong cash, I mean, a stronger cash flow in Q2, in Q3, because you can see our accounts receivables that went up significantly because most of the billing, booking and billing came in the last few weeks of the quarter.

That's something that I'm assuming will continue with us also in the next quarters, as long as this existing macro environment will stay with us.

Shaul Eyal (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Next up is Joel Fishbein, followed by Ray McDonough.

Joel Fishbein (Managing Director, Senior Software Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for the question, and great job on the, on the margin front. Gil, I wanted to follow up by on Tal's question. Maybe you could share some specifics about investments that you're making in the go-to-market. Obviously, having a lot of new products, Infinity is getting some good traction, but how are you balancing this profitability and growth? Give us some specifics around these go-to-market initiatives that, you know, could potentially lead to this revenue acceleration that you're speaking about.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

First, I think, again, last year we had a big focus on increasing the field size, making sure we have people, making sure we show our field that we're willing to invest. This year, we moved into understanding, what's our productivity? Are we engaging with enough customers? Are we engaging with enough prospects? I think the big focus is making sure that all the Check Point people are in connection with their customers, are creating this, I mean, customer engagement, which at the end leads to the sales. At the end, I mean, a customer won't buy our vision if they don't know about our vision, if we don't communicate to them that, I think that's where most of the investment is.

We're doing more seminar, we're doing more conferences, we are working on new programs for partners and for others. I think we should expect much more on that front as well. The number one investment that we are seeing is, again, engaging with customers, making sure that customers know our story. I can tell you firsthand, every meeting that I have with a CISO, with a chief information security officer, ends with, "Wow, I didn't know that you had this amazing strategy. Your architecture is something I should definitely continue." That's the good part. Another good part is that they all say that they have a very warm place in their heart for Check Point. Check Point enjoys a very good reputation with them for being a great partner, for being a great for providing best security. These are the good parts.

The bad parts is usually, and it's 95% of the cases, "How come I didn't hear from you for such a long time?" This is something we can change, we can fix by engaging with them, by delivering our vision, by meeting with them, by showing them what we can do. By the way, explains some of the growth in Infinity. It's still, potentially still huge there, but when we show customers the potential of Infinity, they buy into that vision, they realize the value, they get far more security technologies and far more security to their environment than they used to do before.

Joel Fishbein (Managing Director, Senior Software Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

All right, next up is Ray, followed by Brad Zelnick.

Ray McDonough (Analyst)

Great. Thanks, Gil. You mentioned you're more optimistic about the back half of the year, and one of the things we've started to pick up in our conversations with partners is that refresh activity is actually starting to pick up. When you talk to customers, do you sense we're at the point where sweating assets is becoming less feasible? Meaning, should we start to see more refresh activity in the back half of the year and into 2024? You know, how should we think about, you know, when refresh activity really comes back here?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

First, I would like to think that we will see some this quarter and more in Q4. I know, and I think that I have all the reasons to believe that we'll see far more than that next year in 2024. Also I'm, by the way, pretty positive about the fact that such a big portion of our business became annuity business. When we look at these Infinity contracts, and I think as Ray mentioned, even some of the products has moved from the product line to the Infinity, kind of backlog, deferred revenues, financially on the balance sheet, it may be on the balance sheet, it may even be off the balance sheet, it depending on how the deal is recorded. This is not a bad thing.

This is creating the more stability, more long-term relationship with the customers, and I would like to see bigger part of the business moves to annuity. Of course, not at the cost of slower growth rate. I think over long term, we want to increase our growth rate, so no doubt about that. By the way, I really want customers to refresh some of the older appliances to get new technologies. This will give them better performance, in some cases, better security, in some cases, the same security, just a newer box. It will definitely give us more revenues. The fact that customers are not, you know, so anxious to do that is actually a very good testimony to the quality of our products.

These products, some of them are 3 years old, some of them are 10 years old, are working really, really well. I just had a conversation with a large customer that have a relatively products that are end of life, and they want to upgrade. They don't do it on time, they are very happy with the, with the products that they have, which is a very, very good testimony to a company that can produce products that 10 years later are still delivering. I'm talking, by the way, about environments that are mission-critical, high performance, high security, not about, you know, a small business that may or may not care about it.

Operator (participant)

All right. Our next up is Brad Zelnick, followed by Adam Borg.

Brad Zelnick (Managing Director, Senior US Software Analyst)

Great. Thanks very much, Kip, for taking the question, and happy anniversary to you all. Gil, there are a lot of religious debates in the market around architecture. Some are adamant that native cloud proxy is the right architecture, others insist firewall is here to stay, and it just needs to be embedded natively in the cloud. What's your view on how this plays out over the next five years? Specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts on the future of proxies, as it was actually an old friend of yours reminded me last week that the earliest firewalls were proxy firewalls that actually lost out to Check Point's network firewall almost 30 years ago.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

First, you're absolutely right, and that is true. 30 years ago, there were some proxies. They weren't flexible, they didn't support all the protocols, they required every client to change, I think we've really revolutionized the market by having kind of this transparent firewall that can support any protocol, any communication, high speed, high performance, without the application is kind of even aware of that. That's still what we do, I think we've shaped up the entire market. In the future, we will continue to see a lot of firewalls. The firewalls remain, by the way, the most important element today in securing the networks. Unfortunately or fortunately for us, they are not really replaceable. It doesn't mean that they cannot be augmented with many, many other technologies.

Yes, in the cloud, we also need to use cloud-native technologies. In the cloud, we also need the posture management to understand that the cloud is configured well, and cloud environment are far more susceptible to attacks simply because they are public, simply because they are exposed. There's a lot of good things that exist on the cloud, but when your environment is more exposed, it means that it can suffer from more attacks, and again, unfortunately, in our business, we see it almost every day. The fact that the cloud is shared is also adds a level of risk, because that means that the same thing can be replicated, the same threats can be replicated, the data can leak from one environment to another.

It's things that are less likely to happen when it's every customer is an isolated environment. Now, I think that in the future, we're seeing multiple technology. I don't think that there's one that will win. The market is far more sophisticated than that these days. I think we're active in both. We have very good posture management for the cloud. We have very good firewalls or network, virtual network firewalls in the cloud, and I think we should make them simpler and easier to use even in a cloud environment. By the way, what we also have is a huge benefit that we can connect the hybrid cloud environment, the private data center to the public cloud, which in almost every large enterprise is crucial.

'Cause all of you, all of us, we have data centers, we have private application, and we have cloud application, and we need to connect them together.

Brad Zelnick (Managing Director, Senior US Software Analyst)

Thanks for your perspective.

Operator (participant)

All right, our next up is Adam Borg, followed by Saket Kalia.

Adam Borg (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Awesome. Thanks so much for the question, Kip. Gil, great to hear about the positive trends you're seeing in Americas, and maybe love to hear a step deeper, just, you know, what exactly are you seeing there? What's giving you the optimism, especially as you think that could help translate to the rest of the world later this year? Thanks so much.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

I think the bottom line is that in my internal metrics of sales and so on, I'm seeing that the America is showing growth, and that's on all parameters, the America commercial region for us is showing growth, and that's great. That's what we wanted to have. I also see it in other indicators, like the level of engagement with customers and so on, Americas have picked that slightly better than others. We also have changes in other places in the world, but that's what caused me to be optimistic. How much of it is the macroeconomy outside? How much of it is our own execution? It's hard to say. I'd like to think that both I mean, in terms of engagement, I know that it's our execution.

In terms of results, I don't know if it's us or if it's the macroeconomy out there that's slightly improving.

Adam Borg (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Super clear. Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

All right, next up is Saket, followed by Andrew Nowinski.

Saket Kalia (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question here. Cheers to 30 years as well. Gil, maybe for you, great to see Infinity make up roughly 10% of total revenue. Maybe the question is, what products as part of Infinity, are customers really using more broadly, beyond network security? As part of that, can you share anything on what impact Infinity is maybe having on metrics like, I don't know, revenue run rates or deal size or net retention? Does that make sense?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Absolutely. First, for us, in order to be Infinity deals, I'll say what's kind of the some of the criteria for that. First, with the customer encompasses not, it's not just one product or few products purchased, it has to be an architectural win, it has to be a large kind of enterprise-wide deployment of Infinity. It has to include, so these tend to be larger deals. It has to include more than one product family, more in our portfolio, so it can't be just network security, it has to be network security plus Harmony or network security plus cloud. The best ones are that they include the full, the full architecture, and I think in all the examples that I've shown, I've shown that they include the different elements.

Right now, the wild card that many people buy is the Harmony Email. That's growing fast, but cloud is there on almost every deal. The Harmony Endpoint is quite frequent to be in that, and more and more we're seeing the new family. The new family is really small, the Horizon family that we launched less than a year ago, and Horizon is all about, kind of security, event analysis, security orchestration, analytics. Brains be connecting all the elements of the security. Horizon is becoming now a part of many of the new Infinity deals.

Saket Kalia (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Let's try that without mute. Next up is Andrew Nowinski, followed by Shebly Seyrafi.

Andrew Nowinski (Senior Research Analyst)

Great, thank you, and good afternoon. I wanted to ask about your guidance for the year. It, it does seem a little bit more back-end loaded now in Q4, given the modest guide below in Q3. Maybe why not take down the annual guidance a bit in case some of those deals in the pipeline push out or customers decide to delay their firewall refreshes even further and rely more on the cloud?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

I would start, and maybe Roei would like to add. First, there is no reason for us to take anything because we think we're well within our range. Whether we'll be in the upper part or on the middle part or on the lower part of the range, we will be well within the range, so I don't see any reason to change the range. What will happen in Q4, whether we'll be, you know, pleasantly surprised with an uptick, which we have some good signs, that's why we are there in that pipeline, or whether we'll be slightly more in the mid to low part of the range, I still don't know, but that's why it's, that's why we provide the range to start with. Roei, I don't know if you want to add anything on that.

Roei Golan (CFO)

I'll add, we don't see any risk here that we won't be in the range. We didn't change the guidance. We also, again, I was paused for a few seconds, so I'm not sure if Gil already mentioned it, but we do see a very positive pipeline for the last quarter of the year. Again, we need to be cautious here because we see the macro environment, we see that projects are being delayed, but still, we do see that there might be a back-end loaded year in terms of refresh projects. That's something that it's worth to add.

Again, no, we don't see anyhow any risk to our guidance, I mean, it's not, it won't be outside the range.

Andrew Nowinski (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right. Next up is Shebly Seyrafi, followed by Shrenik Kothari.

Roei Golan (CFO)

We can't hear you. Go on. Shebly.

Shebly Seyrafi (Senior Managing Director, Technology and Software Research)

Yeah, sorry about that. You talked about targeting double-digit growth in all metrics. I'm trying to figure out what needs to happen to make that happen. For example, do you need a better economy? Do you need SASE momentum, Infinity growing to 25% of revenue? Just what are some reasonable scenarios to get you to double digit top-line growth?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

There are many, many factors that can contribute to that, but it's mainly better traction by adding more customers and winning more projects with existing customers. Now, again, where it can, that come from? That can come from Quantum, from our network security. We have plenty of potential there, and the refresh cycle can address that. It can come from converting even more customers to Infinity and winning new Infinity customers, plenty of potential. It can come from increased risk success in the cloud, with, which also has the potential. I didn't mention Harmony Email because that's already growing quite fast, but that's, that can be from there. I think in almost every aspect of the business can have contribution to that.

Most of the aspects of the business have the ability to even, you know, network security by itself, if we see better, win rates, better refresh cycle, can get to that on its own. It's not that, there is no potential there, it's actually the opposite. There is plenty of potential there. When you look at our competitors, some are showing challenges for network security, and they're growing elsewhere, and some are actually going very, very well in network security, which means that the potential is there. Yes, the economy is kind of has put an surprising pressure on us in the last two and a half quarters or the last three quarters, I think we can overcome that and resume where we want to be.

Operator (participant)

All right. Next up is Shrenik followed by Joshua Tilton.

Shrenik Kothari (Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, yeah, thanks for taking my question. Congrats on the 30 years. Gil, you mentioned, of course, about the Harmony traction, and you gave some examples. You mentioned Check Point is the only one that detected in real time the zero-day threat. You mentioned examples of some customer wins with a large bank, as well as a large pharma. I mean, given the recent kind of challenges experienced by Microsoft, especially in the email security space, I mean, just curious, has there been a factor in Harmony gaining traction? Are you guys trying to capitalize on that with your offering?

Really going forward, like, how do you expect or what do you expect in terms of the impact of Microsoft challenges on market share and how you guys are planning to capitalize? Yeah.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

First, Microsoft is actually investing and getting more and more into security. In the case of Harmony, most of what we're doing is not in the core of our market and is complementary to what we do. By the way, Microsoft has been a good partner with us, and we do things together. We do a lot of go-to-market together, and we also compete on some areas, in particular on the email part. In the email part, most of our email security sales today are into Office 365 environment. On every Office 365 environment, Microsoft offers basic security for free, and they offer advanced security for a fee, and they try to get it to every account. Every account that buys our Harmony Email, it's actually augmenting what Microsoft does.

You can call it competition, which may be the right assumption, but also I think more generically about Microsoft, we start our job on security where the platform vendor ends. I mean, we are trying to augment the capabilities that an operating system would have, that the network would have, that any platform would have, and start with there and provide the advanced security. For the last 30 years, that strategy worked very, very well. There's been a big market that wants better security, more than just what the basic platforms, whether it's the routing and switching, network security, or the operating systems can do, and that's pretty much all the security industry, not just us. We are augmenting what they do, and I see no reason why we would change.

I mean, when we look at the macro factors of cybersecurity, better cybersecurity is needed now more than ever. The platforms need to be augmented. By the way, that's also why we put so much focus on creating an architecture, creating the three Cs, Comprehensive, Consolidated, and Collaborative. The collaborative aspect is something that most platform vendors cannot do. I think for the most part, it works.

Shrenik Kothari (Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right, next up is Joshua Tilton, followed by Gregg Moskowitz.

Joshua Tilton (Software Research Analyst)

Thank you. Guys, can you hear me?

Operator (participant)

Yep.

Joshua Tilton (Software Research Analyst)

Great. I kind of wanted to follow up on Andy's question. Well, it seems that things did get better from 1Q to 2Q for you guys. My question is, do things need to keep getting better in order to meet the back half guidance? If the environment kind of stays as it is, are you still gonna fall within the range that you're reiterating today?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Right now, we are within the range, and we are not happy that we are not growing faster. I want to grow faster, and I think we deserve to grow faster. We are executing on that. Wherever we want things to improve, we are doing everything that we can. Again, we don't change the economy, but on our execution, I think that there is so much we can do to improve our results. As much as I think I'm kind of a lot of what's happened, for us, depends on the economy, there's so much more we can do, and I think, and then we should do to deliver better security to more customers, and that will be translated to the financial results.

Joshua Tilton (Software Research Analyst)

All right. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

All right, next up is Gregg Moskowitz, followed by Gabriela Borges.

Gregg Moskowitz (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

All right, thank you, and congrats as well on the 30 years. Gil, on the network refresh delays, do you have confidence that these are, in fact, purely delays and that these deals will get it done as intended? I understand the point that renewals have remained strong, but does that mean that this is only a timing issue from your perspective as it relates to appliance purchases? Thanks.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

... I think some of it is purely timing, but we see it. When the customer says, "I have this project, I'm delaying it from Q1 to Q2," and sometimes it says, "Well, now it's from Q2 to Q3," and sometimes the delays keep being delayed, but the project is well-identified. Some of the delays are not things that are identified. We just see the trend. In, you know, in a typical quarter, X number of customers would refresh. In this quarter, it's less customers that are refreshed. We're watching very, very carefully to see whether it's a kind of a loss or a refresh, and that's why we see the trend between the renewal and the refresh. We are seeing that the retention rate of customers that we have is strong.

The renewal rate is actually stronger because in our model, we calculate that X% of customers won't renew and instead refresh. What we see is the phenomena when less refresh, more renew. We see that phenomena. Again, some of it is identified opportunity. I can take this, you know, X deals. The customer can say, "See, this is the customer, they decided to postpone the project." Some of it is just the pace of the market. Say, "Well, the product works, I'm happy with it. I'll tighten up spending." By the way, tighten up spending, we see with every customer. Almost all the customers are now... I mean, like, we've seen couple of years when, couple of years where customers were spending, again, it's not universal, but with almost no limits. They're just spending more and more.

In 2023, we see that customers started having more financial discipline, more tight control over the budgets. There are areas that customers choose to invest more. Many areas, especially in the more general infrastructure, computing, servers, and so on, we're seeing very tight spending and even decline in spending in many, many aspects of the market.

Gregg Moskowitz (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That's helpful. Thanks, Gil.

Operator (participant)

All right, next up is Gabriela Borges, followed by Irvin Liu.

Gregg Moskowitz (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great, thank you. I wanted to follow up on the comments on net retention to better understand how deal sizes are changing. When you look in the pipeline and when you think about your renewal activity year to date, would love to have some color on how is the firewall footprint changing, and how is the cross-sell footprint changing? If you put that together, how are deal sizes changing? Thank you.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Roei, do you have any data on that, any insights?

Roei Golan (CFO)

No, I think, again, I would say like that. If I understood correctly your question, we don't see, I mean, we see that some of the customers that renew, they didn't do any refresh, they renew, and actually they even upgrading their services. Sometimes they're taking more services from us. I would say it's not only the new, it's a renew. They don't go and buy any appliances, but they expand their services. They're taking more services, more security services, if it's Harmony Email, or if it's more even under the network security business. Not sure if you are okay. That's if I understood correctly your question, that's something we're seeing.

As for the pipeline, we do see that some of the projects that are being postponed from this quarter, we do see them pushed to the back, to the second half of the year, most of them to Q4. As I mentioned, that we see a, I would say, a positive pipeline for Q4 because it includes many of these deals that were postponed from this quarter or even from Q1. Hopefully, they will be closed, and won't be any deferral, additional deferral in to next year. That's my view here.

Gabriela Borges (Managing Director and Senior Software Equity Research Analyst)

The deals in the pipeline, if you take the average deal size, are the deal sizes getting bigger compared to what you might have expected three years ago or last year?

Roei Golan (CFO)

We have both. I mean, we have also large deal size. I mean, I'm talking now only. We see also large deal size. We see from all over. I mean, it's not we don't, many are around Infinity, by the way. We see very large deal sizes in the opportunities with larger enterprises all over. I mean, it's not something that we don't see. We see that. We just don't see. We see less customers in, wants to pay upfront for more than a year, but that's more kind of on the billing side.

On the booking side, on the pipeline, because Infinity has the flexibility and the flexibility around the business, we do see very large deal sizes in the pipeline, but it doesn't mean that you'll see the in the billing or in the revenues immediately.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

I actually see a nice win, especially in the 2Q. We saw an increase in the number of large deals. Again, it's not, I don't want people to go out with the wrong feeling of that, but if I saw some weakness somewhere, it was more of mid-sized deals and mid-market and less than the high-end, high-touch customers.

Gabriela Borges (Managing Director and Senior Software Equity Research Analyst)

That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right, our last call of the session is gonna or our last question of the session is gonna come from Irvin Liu.

Irvin Liu (Equity Research Analst)

Hi, thank you for the question. It's great to see Harmony Email continue to do well. Are you able to parse out how many of your email customers are standalone email customers versus historical Check Point customers? Do you see a compelling opportunity to upsell the Infinity platform to some of these single solution kind of Harmony customers that came by way of the Avanan acquisition?

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Not sure I got all the question, generally speaking, in the Harmony Email, we have a combination of 3 parts. We have small, mid-sized customers, we have MSSPs, customers that are served by managed security providers, and we have enterprise customers that are more similar to the Check Point install base. In the last year, by the way, we've doubled the Harmony Email install base, which is huge. We've added a huge number of customers. I mean, if you look at net additional customers to Check Point, it's a very, very big number that came from that. Again, big numbers are from the small and the MSSP, but the number of large enterprise customers that were added is also decent. The good news about that is that all these elements are kind of working.

There is more and more business that's coming not from the Harmony Email standalone sales, but coming from the Check Point field and the Check Point channels that are saying: "Whoa, that's a great solution. We love to include it for our customers." Yes, it does add to us a lot of customers that weren't Check Point customers before, but equally important, customers that are Check Point customers are happy to buy that as well.

Irvin Liu (Equity Research Analst)

Got it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right, folks, thank you for joining us today. We'll look forward to seeing you throughout the quarter, and here's to wishing for another 30 more years of success. Thank you, guys. Have a great day.

Gil Shwed (CEO and Founder)

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Roei Golan (CFO)

Thank you.