Palo Alto Networks Inc

NASDAQ:PANW

Earnings Call Analysis

Palo Alto Posts Strong Q1 with Revenue and Margin Growth

In an uncertain environment, Palo Alto Networks kicked off a three-year plan with a robust fiscal Q1. Revenue increased by 20%, billings by 16%, and a remarkable Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) growth of 26% which surpassed both revenue and billings. A non-GAAP operating margin expansion of 760 basis points led to $1.38 non-GAAP EPS, and record free cash flow of $1.5 billion was achieved. The company embarked on innovations across all platforms, focusing on Zero Trust, SASE, and AI, aligning with diverse customer needs. However, challenges such as a volatile global situation, higher sustained interest rates, and pressure on billings due to the duration and payment terms of contracts persist. The cybersecurity threat landscape remains aggressive with ransomware rise, prompting the company to introduce a free incident response service for strategic customers.

Palo Alto Networks Starts Fiscal Year 2024 on Solid Footing

Palo Alto Networks reported their fiscal first-quarter 2024 earnings, marking the beginning of a three-year plan laid out last August. Amidst a volatile environment, including geopolitical tensions and normalization in the hardware sector, the cybersecurity company showed strong execution. CEO Nikesh Arora highlighted significant product innovations and strategic acquisitions as key drivers for the company's growth. With a 20% increase in revenue and a 16% rise in billings, supported by a 26% surge in Remaining Performance Obligation (RPO), Palo Alto Networks is capitalizing on robust demand for cybersecurity solutions amidst a relentless wave of cyber attacks.

Elevating Cybersecurity with New Products and Acquisitions

The company's commitment to innovation and consolidation within the cybersecurity arena was evident through its introduction of new AI-enabled security products and the strategic acquisition intentions of Talon Cyber Security and Dig Security Solutions. These moves aim to strengthen their SASE and Prisma Cloud platforms and address crucial security challenges like unmanaged device access. Having realized over 50% year-over-year growth in Next-Generation Security Annual Recurring Revenue (NGS ARR), Palo Alto Networks is setting a new industry standard with their comprehensive, platform-centric approach.

Financial Maneuvering and Shareholder Value Focus

In response to macroeconomic shifts, particularly the escalating cost of financing, Palo Alto Networks is flexibly navigating billing negotiations and payment terms with clients, while still aiming to grow RPO levels. The strategic repurchase of shares and the management of stock-based compensation underscore their balanced approach to growth and shareholder value creation. Moreover, the company's strong liquidity position, with $7 billion in cash and investments, affords significant leverage in adapting to market dynamics.

Forward Guidance Reflects Confidence and Adjusted Expectations

For the fiscal year 2024, Palo Alto Networks offers optimistic guidance, projecting an increase in billings between 16% to 17%, and revenue growth estimated at 18% to 19%. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to rise by 22% to 25%, and NGS ARR forecasts anticipate a robust 34% to 35% growth. The company also projects operating margins to improve by up to 240 basis points. Notably, management expects an adjusted free cash flow margin of 37% to 38%, signaling strong profitability on the horizon.

Maintaining Course Amidst Negotiation Challenges

CEO Arora stressed that the revision in the billings guidance is not an indicator of weakened demand but a strategic decision to offer greater flexibility in customer payment negotiations. By accommodating annual payment options and financing arrangements, the company aims to avoid discount pressures and secure annualized revenue streams. Despite the shift, Palo Alto Networks maintains a consistent revenue forecast and a robust pipeline, indicating a steady demand for their cybersecurity solutions.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Palo Alto Networks Fiscal First quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I am Walter Pritchard, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please note that this call is being recorded today, Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

With me on today's call to discuss first quarter results are Nikesh Arora, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Dipak Golechha, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, Lee Klarich, our Chief Product Officer, will join us for the question-and-answer portion.

You can find the press release and other information to supplement today's discussion on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com. While there, please click on the link for events and presentations to find the Q1 2024 earnings presentation and supplemental information. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements and projections regarding the company's business operations and financial performance.

These statements made today are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements. Please review our press release and recent SEC filings for a description of these risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in the presentations today. We will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should not be considered as a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are in the press release and the appendix of the investor presentation, unless specifically noted otherwise, all results and comparisons are on a fiscal year-over-year basis. We also note that management is participating in the UBS Conference November 29.

I will now turn the call over to Nikesh.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Thank you, Walter. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our earnings call. Q1 was the first quarter of our 3-year plan we presented in August. If I were to summarize the quarter, I would say the following.

We continue to execute amazingly well in what is a volatile environment. On the geopolitical front, we've been contending with what's happening in Israel and Ukraine. On the hardware or product front, as you see, there has been normalization in the industry. It's something we've been indicating for a while. Backlog is being shipped, supply chain issues are behind us and product growth is normalizing in the industry. We continue to see normal strength as we indicated in prior quarters in that category.

On the macroeconomic front, business practices continue to adapt and adjust to new normal with higher interest rates for longer. Internally, on the product side, we've had 1 of the strongest starts to our fiscal year. In addition to various recognitions, we have delivered strong innovation across all 3 platforms. We launched an AI-enabled cloud manager in network security to continue our consolidation and platformization efforts towards Zero trust.

In SASE, we announced our intent to deliver enterprise browsers, the Talent acquisition, which will solve 1 of the critical issues that more access which is not addressed today by any SASE vendor. We released the industry's first integrated UI for code to cloud and Prisma Cloud and announced the acquisition of DIC Security double down on data security for generative AI in Prisma Cloud.

Last but not the least, in Cortex we launched XSIAM 2.0 to bring your own AI. On the go-to-market side, Q1 is seasonally a slower start as we kick off the new year, but the team delivered superior revenue and profitability and we had our highest cash collection quarter in our history. We continue to see steady execution in our firewall, cloud and endpoint businesses in SASE, we continue to position ourselves in larger and more strategic deals and XSIAM while in its early days, continues to garner tremendous interest, giving us more comfort around our long-term intentions.

So in summary, a strong start in Q1 towards our 3-year journey, Early days, but confidence is [indiscernible]. Let's take in the details. Our Q1 revenue grew 20%, and our billings grew 16%, while our RPO growth of 26% exceeded both of these and was driven by our next-generation security capabilities. I would like you to pay particular attention to RPO versus billings, Deepak will talk about the difference at plan and explain why the Street might be confused with our future billings guidance.

Our Q1 non-GAAP operating margins expanded by 760 basis points, driving 1.38 in non-GAAP earnings per share, and we generated record $1.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow in Q1. If you look at what's going on from an overall cybersecurity perspective, we have never seen as much adversarial and consistent activity at scale as we have seen in the first quarter. Unfortunately, we don't expect this to abate anytime soon. As a consequence of this increased activity and in recognition of our customers' commitment to us, this week, we announced Unit 42 rapid incident response retainer at no cost to all of our strategic customers, aimed at providing additional support during this escalating threat landscape.

Ransomware attacks are increasing in frequency and severity, the ransom amounts being paid are also increasing. That acts doing damage in a much shorter amount of time. As an example, and a recent engagement of our Unit 42 team, we saw an instance where bad actors extracted 2.4 terabytes of data in just 14 hours. There's also some evidence that the adversaries are beginning to leverage Generative AIs as a tool to make attacks more sophisticated. Not just that. Based on what we are seeing in Unit 42 most attacks are now happening on the back of vulnerabilities in widely used software and APIs, such as a widely exploited move it power transfer software.

Unfortunately, these bad actors remain elusive with no apparent significant increase in convictions and high-profile attacks, and therefore, not surprisingly, this malicious activity continues. At the same time, U.S. publicly listed companies and the Board are confronted with new SEC disclosure requirements around prompt public reporting and material cybersecurity incidents, the enhanced oversight responsibility that comes with them. This result is a continued focus across organizations on understanding security posture, cybersecurity risk and how to mitigate this risk effectively.

This increasingly involves not only the CISO but the entire IT organization legal, finance and the CEO and the full Board of Directors. This pace of malicious activity and the Board lever focused on cybersecurity risk is fueling a strong demand environment. Customers have often have multiple strategic priorities in cybersecurity and our broad portfolio enables us to align with these priorities.

In Q1, the cost of money remained a constant discussion and customers' significant focus on topic is becoming the new normal. The way it manifests itself in our business is that there's always a payment and duration discussion in final negotiations. Given our strong balance sheet, we can use a mix of strategies to navigate the environment. This includes annual billing plans, financing through PFS and partner financing. Whilst this does not impact our business demand or the impact to annual revenue or annual metrics, it does create variability on total billings more than before, depending on financing use or the duration of contracts.

I am not concerned about the demand for cybersecurity for this quarter and upcoming quarters nor I'm concern about our ability to execute. The billings variability is a pure consequence of the payment conversations that we're having with our customers, and this is validated by the fact that we continue to see strong RPO and low churn suggesting this is a cosmetic impact to our business. We continue to see strong interest across our next-generation security portfolio, and we're making progress on our platformization journey.

I want to highlight a few deals to talk about the diversity of opportunity cross-platform buys as well as the geographical distribution of our deals. For example, federal government agencies signed a $25 million expansion transaction, including adding Cortex XDR and Prisma Access in highly competitive situations expanding their network security footprint. This customer has now spent over $100 million over its lifetime across our platform. A large global SaaS provider signed an $18 million Prisma Cloud transaction to consume modules across the portfolio. The customer is already a customer for our network security and cortex platforms. A large educational organization, expanded its relationship with us in the first quarter and a $15 million transaction, adding XSIAM, Prisma Cloud and an expansion of its network security footprint.

And lastly, a nation state signed a $28 million deal. That is a first of its kind, standardizing on both SaaS and XSIAM, this is a long sales cycle and represents our systematic approach to platformization. The story in these deals has been playing out across our large customers. As of Q1, 56% of the Global 2000s has transacted with us across [indiscernible] and Cortex. This continued focus on customer cyber transformation has fueled a 53% growth in NGSARR we report this quarter as we broke through the $3 billion milestone. Another exciting news as of Q1, recurring revenue across Palo Alto is 82% of our total revenue from 77% a year ago.

Let's turn on to updates from our 3 platforms that are the engine driving our success. First, in network security. We continue to drive innovation across our portfolio and see momentum as customers drive towards Zero Trust architecture. This month, we unveiled PAN-OS 11.1 or [indiscernible] and start a cloud manager, unifying the management of all of our 3 form factors and all security services in a single pane of glass and also leveraging AI to analyze security policies, reduce risk configurations and predict and prevent disruptions.

Customers who invest in our platform by deploying all 3 form factors continue to grow rapidly, up 34%. Of our top 100 network security customers, 60% have purchased all 3 form factors, up from 63% a year ago. On average, these platform customers spend more than 15x of the rest of our network security customer spend. The story is similar in SASE having just seen our innovations gain multiple industry recognitions in SASE in the second half of our fiscal year, we've continued to invest to build on our leadership position. We're seeing strong momentum in SASE, with ARR growth of approximately 60% in Q1, we also saw 35% of our $5 million or greater network security transaction include SASE, up from less than 10% a year ago.

Today was the first day of our event called SASE converge, where we unveiled several enhancements. We have enabled SASE to access applications with performance faster than the Internet. We added visibility and control over interconnected SaaS applications and enable safe access to Gen AI tools to ensure data isn't inerorgently lead. Lastly, we added remote browser isolation technology for an extra layer of security.

M&A has always been an important part of our strategy. Last week, we announced our intent to acquire talent cybersecurity. We see an opportunity to expand the addressable market for SASE and solve an important customer problem. As many as 36% of workers classified themselves as independent workers, who often use unmanaged devices for work. In addition, employees increasingly use personal devices for accessing business applications to enable access of these devices, security teams have an impossible trade-off, they're forced to either ignore security entirely in favor of flexibility and user experience or to adopt cumbersome technologies like VDI. Talent is a pioneer in the emerging enterprise browser category and when combined with [indiscernible] SASE after closing, we will enable users to securely access business applications from any device, including mobile devices and noncorporate devices with a seamless user experience. We intend to include this capability with Prisma Access after closing and customers will be able to extend the same best-in-class security to unmanaged devices.

Moving on to Prisma Cloud. We continue to see a strong endorsement of our integrated platform strategy. This traction is evident in the strong growth of our multi-module customers. We have seen particular success here with modules released over the last 2.5 years. There has been a consistent pattern of seeing 100-plus customers for new modules in the first full quarter of launch and rapid growth after that as the benefits of these new modules are broadly understood.

This enthusiastic adoption has driven our strong conviction and adding key new modules, including some through acquisitions. Our IAC scanning capability, which came through the Bridge crew acquisitions and CICD security, which came through Cider are 2 such examples. This new module traction is helping to accelerate Prisma Cloud new business ACV in the last quarters.

In Q1, we also unveiled a major new Prisma Cloud release Darwin. Darwin further differentiates our unique position across code, cloud infrastructure and cloud runtime. Darwin enables a view across all elements of cloud applications, including cloud services, infrastructure assets, compute workloads, API endpoints, data and code. Darwin can also help customers understand risks with deep contract and overlay active attack attempts in near real time.

Our full coverage from [indiscernible] cloud enables fixes to be applied immediately versus the months most vulnerability stake to be passed. About 2 weeks ago, we announced our intention to acquire DIG Security, which will bring an award-winning data security posture management capability Prisma Cloud. With almost 70% of organizations having data stored in the public cloud, this sprawl of new cloud data services and the adoption of Generative AI, we see an increased need to identify sensitive data, effectively manage user access and implement robust security measures to prevent unauthorized internal and external access to this data stored in the cloud.

After the close of proposed acquisition, Dick's capabilities will be integrated in the Prisma Cloud platform to provide near real-time data protection from code to cloud. Moving on to Cortex. We continue to invest across our product portfolio, expand our customer count as we see continued adoption of XDR, XSOAR, Expanse and XSIAM. In Q1, we have several industry recognitions of our innovation. Cortex XDR was the only product in the industry to achieve 100% production and detection in the Round 5 Mitra evaluation. Additionally, XSOAR, Expanse and XSIAM, were all named leaders by third parties this quarter.

We grew our Cortex active customer count by 25% to over 5,300 customers. Our traction overall in Cortex is essential as it allows us to sell our transformational offering, XSIAM. XSIAM has had a very fast start since we released the product just over a year ago. After a strong FY '23 XSIAM first year release, which included over $200 million in bookings, we followed up with a strong Q1. We saw our first expansion purchase of XSIAM an 8-figure deal and in Q1 our largest XSIAM customer to date was deployed with over 300,000 endpoints. We're seeing XSIAM transform customer security operations and significantly improve their security outcomes. This includes significant reductions in the meantime to direct and resolve secured incidents.

On the back of potential customers hearing about early XSIAM success, our pipeline for XSIAM is over $1 billion of which $500 million was created just in this past quarter. As I began my remarks, Q1 was the first quarter of us delivering on the 3-year plan we presented in August. We're driving profitable growth investing in innovation, next-generation security and the industry's largest dedicated security go-to-market organization.

At the same time, leveraging the scale of Palo Alto Networks. Demand for cybersecurity is strong, given the backdrop of attacks, the ever increasing focus on scrutiny around cyber risk. Execution continues to be paramount given the macro conditions and we will continue to be adapt and responded to changes in the environment. We will manage for long-term growth operating margin and free cash flow and ensure we continue to transform the business and build revenue predictably. You will still see this through RPO and most importantly our current RPO.

Our long-term forecast thesis remains intact, whilst we expect short-term variability in billings, we don't expect this to have a meaningful impact on our ability to deliver our 3-year targets.

With that, I will turn it over to Dipak.

[Dipak Golechha, executive]

Thank you, Nikesh, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll cover the specifics of our Q1 results, additional details on drivers behind the results and our Q2 and fiscal year 2024 guidance. For Q1, revenue was $1.88 billion and grew 20%, Product revenue grew 3%. Total service revenue grew 25% with subscription revenue of $988 million, growing 29% and support revenue of $549 million growing 17%.

We saw consistent revenue contribution across all theaters. Americas grew 20%, EMEA was up 19% and APAC grew 23%. The strength of our next-generation capabilities continues to drive our results with NGS ARR, exceeding $3 billion for the first time and growing 5%. We saw strong contributions across this portfolio in Q1. We delivered total billings of $2.02 billion, up 16%, Total deferred revenue in Q1 was $9.4 billion, an increase of 32%. Remaining performance obligation, or RPO, was $10.4 billion, increasing 2% with current RPO just under half of our RPO.

As Nikesh mentioned, we saw the rising cost of money have an important and incremental impact on customer behavior in Q1. We are responding to this in the ways we have discussed previously, including using annual billing plans, financing through [indiscernible] and partner financing. In Q1, this had a negative impact on our billings. Although as you can see, we saw strength in NGS ARR and revenue. Our non-GAAP earnings per share was significantly ahead of our guidance growing 66%. This was driven primarily by the significant increase in our non-GAAP operating margins, which expanded 760 basis points year-over-year.

We continue to benefit from the scale inherent in our business especially as some of our next-generation security offerings at scale. We again delivered strong cash flow in Q1 with trailing 12-month adjusted free cash flow of $3 billion achieving trailing 12-month free cash flow margins of 41%. Moving beyond the top line. Gross margin for Q1 at 78% increased 370 basis points year-over-year. We again saw year-over-year improvements in product margins with the normalization of the supply chain environment.

Service gross margin improved to 78% as our newer offerings continued to gain scale. Our operating margin expanded by 760 basis points in Q1 as we saw higher gross margins and efficiencies across our 3 operating expense lines. We are pleased with our operating efficiency progress against our medium-term targets. We continue to make significant investments to support our top line growth expectations, including investments in product and engineering, building sales capability and supporting our ecosystems and our go-to-market organization.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended Q1 with cash equivalents and investments of $6.9 billion. Q1 cash flow from operations was $1.526 billion with total adjusted free cash flow of $1.489 billion this quarter. As is typical for our Q1, this cash flow performance was primarily driven by strong collections in the prior quarter based on the strength of our Q4 bookings. Sorry, collections in the quarter, but based on the strength of our Q4 bookings.

Over the last several weeks, we announced that we have entered into definitive agreements to acquire 2 companies. On October 31, we announced our intent to acquire Dig Security Solutions for approximately $232 million in cash, excluding the value of replacement equity awards. On November 6, we announced our intent to acquire Talon Cybersecurity for approximately $435 million, excluding the value of replacement equity awards and inclusive of cash on Talend's balance sheet at closing. We expect both transactions will close in our second quarter of fiscal year '24.

During Q1, we repurchased approximately 300,000 shares on the open market at an average price of approximately $227 per share for a total consideration of $67 million. As a reminder, our share repurchase program is opportunistic, and we're committed to returning cash to shareholders over the medium term. Stock-based compensation expense declined by 250 basis points as a percent of revenue year-over-year. As expected, stock-based compensation ticked up slightly as a percent of revenue quarter-over-quarter with the issuance of a portion of our fiscal year '24 grounds.

On a year-over-year basis, we continue to manage our SBC down as a percent of revenue, in line with our long-term plans. Before turning to guidance, I want to frame some of the impacts that we're seeing on our billings. As Nikesh noted, we see strong demand in the market and continue to see customers make a technical selection of offerings across our portfolio. From here, we see more customers asking for deferred payment terms either with annual billings, financing through PANFS, or pursuing external financing. Some customers are looking for additional discounts for upfront payments as they grapple with the cost of money. Our strong financial position, which includes $7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments, combined with our many options in dealing with this dynamic gives us significant flexibility.

This can impact our billings trends quarter-to-quarter, and we're reducing our billings guidance to account for this through the fiscal year 2024. RPO and CRPO have more of a direct impact on future revenue this quarter, with duration towards the low end of the range we've seen over the last several quarters, we saw strong trends in CRPO. As we see low customer churn, we're confident that independent of specific billing terms and contract length, we can continue to grow RPO at levels that support our forward revenue growth ambitions.

Now moving on to our guidance for Q2 and the year. For the second quarter of 2024, we expect billings to be in the range of $2.335 billion to $2.385 billion, an increase of 15% to 18%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $1.955 billion to $1.985 billion, an increase of 18% to 20%. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $1.29 to $1.31, a share, an increase of 23% to 25%. For the fiscal year 2024 we expect billings to be in the range of $10.7 billion to $10.8 billion, an increase of 16% to 17%. We expect NGS ARR to be in the range of $3.95 billion to $4 billion, an increase of 34% to 35%. We expect revenue to be in the range of $8.15 billion to $8.2 billion, an increase of 18% to 19%. We expect our fiscal year '24 operating margins to be in the range 26.5%, up 190 to 240 basis points versus fiscal year '23. We expect our non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $540 to $553, an increase of 22% to 25%. And we expect adjusted free cash flow margin to be 37% to 38%.

Additionally, please consider the following modeling points, we expect our non-GAAP tax rate to remain at 22% for the second quarter and fiscal year 2024, subject to the outcome of future tax legislation. We also expect cash taxes in the range of $230 million to $280 million. For the second quarter, we expect net interest and other income of $55 million to $60 million, we expect second quarter diluted shares outstanding of 339 million to 342 million shares. We expect fiscal year 2024 diluted shares outstanding of 338 million to 343 million shares. We expect fiscal year 2024 capital expenditures of $175 million to $185 million and $40 million to $45 million in Q2.

With that, I'll pass it back to Walter for the Q&A portion of the call.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thank you, Deepak. To provide as broad a participation as possible, please limit yourself to 1 question. Our first question will be from Saket Kalia with Barclays followed up by Hamza Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley. Go ahead, Saket.

[Saket Kalia, analyst]

Deepak, maybe the question is for you. I appreciate the revised billings guide in this macro backdrop and to your point, the higher cost of money. I'm curious how you've maybe thought about factors like pipeline, like close rates and very importantly, billings duration for the rest of the year, as we just try to get comfortable with how much that billings guide has maybe been derisked?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Saket, thanks for your question. I'm going to take this 1 because it's more about demand function. I think repetition doesn't spoil the prayer, so I will repeat. The billings difference is not a change in demand for us or not a function of our pipeline. The billings change is a consequence of negotiations with the customers and the customer says, you want me to pay you for 3 years upfront? you got to give me a bigger discount. Do you want to pay me on me to do a 3-year deal -- you got to go finance it at that [indiscernible]. Now I could do that. But I could say, just pay me on an animal basis. I'm okay. I'll collect my money every year. If I go in that direction, my billings changes. It does not change anything in my pipeline, My close rates or in my demand function at some point.

So -- we're just keeping giving ourselves flexibility because this quarter, we saw a lot more negotiations around those topics. We just don't want to be held hostage to those can negotiations where we have to go finance deals to get TCV in that because billings is a TCV metric. PCVs important if I'm concerned about churn. I have very low churn across my product category. So I'm very happy to collect my money on an annualized basis that that's what's needed to make sure that I don't get pressure on financing, I don't get pressure on having to give larger discounts. I retain flexibility. I do a lot of PCV teams. I do a lot of financing, but this allows me the flexibility. So I want to make sure is there is no change in the demand function in the market. There is no change in our revenue forecast.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

The next up is going to be Hamza Fodderwala from Morgan Stanley followed by Brian Essex from JPMorgan. Hamza, go ahead.

[Hamza Fodderwala, analyst]

I just want to start by offering my thoughts and condolences to all your employees in [indiscernible]. To kind of similar vein to Saket's question, I mean, billings growth is certainly not bad in the context of many of your peers growing single digits, if at all. I'm just curious because your guidance is still assuming that growth will sustain for the full year. So what's giving you that confidence given the cost of money, given the hardware digestion that you can sustain that high teens billings growth given what you're seeing in the market?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

So Hamza, as Saket mentioned to our pipeline, we have visibility to our pipeline. So we know there's business out there. We have not seen customers walk away from deals in Q1. It's not like people don't want to do business. We've been very consistent on hardware and our hardware expectations for the last 12 months. We are retaining our consistent expectations on hardware. We don't expect any lumpy movements up or down. We expect it's going to grow steadily in the 0% to 5% range as we've always been talking about.

So I think from that perspective, I think to use Saket's word, we feel reasonably derisked on what's out there in the future. Q1 is the first quarter allows us -- we have lots of pipeline, we have visibility to. I think I want to reiterate again, we are retaining flexibility. Can I go finance of course, I can -- kind of go finance it through your deal to NFS or $7 billion of cash I can, which you'll have a cosmetic impact or giving you better billings. But what I don't want to do is finance bad deals. This allows me the flexibility of not having to finance them. Nothing changes. I still give my revenue for the year. I still get my CRPO, I still get my annual buildings. I just don't get year 2 and year 3 billing that changes my total billings forecast for the year. It's cosmetic, it's mathematic, but it's interesting to see how the Street interprets it.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thank you, Hamza. Next up, we have Brian Essex from JPMorgan, followed by Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Brian, go ahead, please.

[Brian Essex, analyst]

Thanks, Walter. Akash, maybe wonder if I could dig in on M&A a little bit. Pretty meaningful volume of M&A from a dollar spent perspective this quarter after not having done some for a while. How would you describe the overall environment? How would you, I guess, message to investors the level of M&A that you might do over the next, I don't know, couple of years? Is this more of a one-off IP and actual hire that you saw a great opportunity to pick up? Or might there be something meaningful in terms of a longer-term trend or even put through your sales pipeline as you scale this over your platform or scale both of them over your platform?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

So Brian, thanks for the question. Look, we have not changed our point of view. We have always maintained that we're going to sustain M&A at a level close to $1 billion a year. So we haven't done 1 for a while, too. And if you see, if you split the 2, we did a cloud security one, and we've been pretty consistent in that rough range in the $150 million to $250 million range in terms of adding cloud capability as we see the market evolve.

So I think that's kind of consistent where we are we saw unique opportunities, as I mentioned, 36% of workers or independent workers. They don't get a SASE remote access solution. We saw more and more discussion in the market where RBI was not covering every use case and managed devices were not all your mobile phones don't have management for security. The last few hacks that happened to mobile devices. So from that perspective, customers are asking what is my solution and now what we didn't want to do is to have to deploy yet another independent solution, which is disconnected from our overall SaaS capability.

And like we do, we always pay attention to the market. We figure [indiscernible] had the best tech in the space and they were just about to go was to go to a go-to-market sort of inclusion or exposure important -- that will be the other companies. So -- and from that perspective, we saw an opportunity, and we think it's a great fit. It actually makes us the most comprehensive SASE solution. We are going to integrate them deeply into our SASE solution where customers will be able to use enterprise browsers RBI or our Prisma Access client. So it's -- I don't want to call it a one-off, we have one-off sounds that will never happen again. But I think it just happens to be the time where we did 2 at the same time. They're in 2 different platforms, 2 teams are integrating them, so it's not overhead to the organization. But we're going to keep our cautious approach towards eating what we can digest.

So I shouldn't expect anything that is off the regular pattern we've we've sort of shown about time now.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thank you, Brian. Next question is going to be from Gabriela Borges at Goldman Sachs with Roger Boyd at UBS on deck. Go ahead, Gabriela.

[Gabriela Borges, analyst]

I want to ask about the 2 dynamics that you're talking about in your business. The firewall cycle on the 1 hand, and the cost of money impacting billings duration on the other. How do you think about the potential that these 2 dynamics are actually connected, meaning product mix is also having an impact from billing solution? And how do you think about the risk that cost of money dynamics get worse before they get better, thereby impacting the full year guide for billings again as we go through the year.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

So thank you, Gabriela. Look, the firewall business actually is a is a one-shot business. You sell a piece of hardware and you get paid for it. It's not a ratable business, right? The ratability comes from our subscriptions and services. It's usually there. We have to look at it from an NGS perspective. Our duration this quarter was on the lower end of duration. It's reduced. It went down because we took more annual billing deals or we took shorter duration contract with our customers. So from that perspective, I think we feel comfortable given the visibility to our pipeline for the rest of the year that we've created flexibility for ourselves on delay, then we're going to keep having this debate where you keep calling it guiding down on billings. I want to keep calling it flexibility. You're going to keep calling it guiding down on billings. I keep telling you it doesn't change my numbers. So we just agree that we're going to be saying that because I don't -- nothing has changed the prospects of Palo Alto for 3 months ago.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

All right. Thanks for your question,.

[Dipak Golechha, executive]

Maybe just to build on that, Walter, I'd say just recognize that we're also maintaining our cash guidance, which would be the other area where you may get concerned we're not concerned on that front.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Great. Thanks, Gabriela there. Next question is from Roger Boyd at UBS, followed by Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank. Roger.

[Roger Boyd, analyst]

Just looking at the XSIAM pipeline, that $1 billion is a pretty impressive mark. Just any color you can provide on the size of the length of those deals as we think about it from an ARR perspective. And I know you've talked about the 3x ARR upsell or expansion potential. But just any color on the size of those deals and how we should think about that kind of flowing into opportunities over the course of fiscal '24?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

I'm trying to make sure Lee guess to answer some questions at.

[Lee Klarich, executive]

Want to show up next time. I will.

Yes, we're -- look, we've obviously, over the last few quarters, talk about XSIAM and the the interest we're seeing from customers is very strong, and it's been the fastest sort of growth of a new product that we've ever seen. I think it speaks to a couple of things. One is just the need in the market from customers to go through the SOC transformation. Nikesh talked about the speed of attacks, increasing relative to disclosure requirements and things like that.

And obviously, the number of attacks simply going up as well. That's driving the the technology need to have a different solution, a better solution when driven by AI and automation. And that's exactly how exam was built, and that is what's fueling the interest. The second part of this is, with XSIAM, we're able to replace several of the customers' legacy point solutions in the [indiscernible]. So we are consolidating multiple independent piece parts with a single XSIAM deployment. And third, with each deployment of XSIAM, this is a significant investment the customer is making in us, so very base investment or 3-year investments in some cases, because they are standardizing their stock on a new fund they want that long-term runway with us. This is not a short-term decision they're making. So all of those factors are what are fueling the strong pipeline that we shared and the early customer success we're having with that saying.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Next question from Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank, followed by Fatima Bolani at Citi.

[Brad Zelnick, analyst]

I wanted to ask about your new hardware lineup and the release of PAN-OS 11.1. I noticed some of the newer features like Quantum Security an advanced wildfire patient Zero prevention. Just wanted to get your take on the extent to which the new platform can catalyze demand as customers try to look to take advantage of the innovation? And maybe if you could help us compare contrast versus prior product cycles?

[Lee Klarich, executive]

I always get excited about the NextGen firewall releases. Of course, made a big friend -- the -- look, what we announced was a new high-end chassis. So 1 that scales beyond a terabit per second. And so there's Obviously, this is sort of the largest, highest performance networks out there, service provider and in some cases, large enterprise environments. The same -- we are not ruggedized platforms, platforms that can go to plus 50 degrees Celsius, minus 40 degrees Celsius because there are harsh environments out there that also need to be protected, right?

So this is expanding the use cases that we can support with our hardware next-gen firewalls. The other pieces you mentioned are also equally exciting from a software perspective. Quantum is still likely a ways off, but there's a lot of companies that are starting to prepare for that, thinking about what happens in post-quantum cryptography in the advent of potential launch computers and what that will mean. And so -- this is the start of a set of quantum security capabilities that we're launching for our customers.

You mentioned Advanced Wildfire. We added proxy capabilities. We added AM capabilities. There's a lot of innovation that's in this release. generally in what this drives is customers to look to be on our latest Gen 4 or newer hardware architectures which, over time, means harbor refreshes and upgrades. And so all of that is good and helps our customers get to the most secure state.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Next question is Fatima Boolani at Citibank followed by Joel Fishbein from Truist. Go ahead for Fatima.

[Fatima Boolani, analyst]

Either for in cash or Depak, some of your pipeline commentary is what I wanted to unpack. As you think about the composition of NGS ARR for the remainder of the year. And bearing in mind some of your product pillars are I'm not going to say maturity, but certainly, they're more penetrated than others. So I wanted to get a sense of how you're thinking about contribution by pillars your ARR expectations for the year and to the extent anything there has changed. And I recognize that you love all your product pillars equally. But any distinction.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Given this very kind of you to remember prior answers, but I tried to give a free view of that in our prepared remarks, where I said where we continue to see steady execution in hardware, endpoint and cloud. So they're following an expected trajectory. We see the pipeline. And I said the excitement and upside is coming out of SASE and XSIAM. And we see that there are large SASE network transformation deals out there, which these things have anywhere from 6 months to 12 months closing cycles.

So we would have to know what's in the pipe for the rest of the year to have some sense of comfort. We also said we grew that business 60% in the first quarter of SASE. We already cannot brush enough about XSIAM, as you know, so far. So the $1 billion pipeline, we're hoping we'll close in the next 6 to 9 months, interesting XSIAM pipeline shows us faster than SASE pipeline for deals closed at. So because SASE's often very competitive, their POCs involved. There are feature comparisons putting out in 1 or 2 other companies. In the case of XSIAM, you're really competing with the incumbent.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Next question is from Joel Fishbein at Truist, followed by Joe Gallo at Jefferies. Joe, go ahead with your question. .

[Joel Fishbein, analyst]

This is for Nikesh and Lee. Nikesh, you called out recent ransomware attacks and also the SEC new requirements. I'm curious, number one, is there -- is that helping to drive business? And what products essentially would that be driving Palo Alto and why you're sort of in a unique position to sort of address some of these issues?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Yes. So it's interesting, Joe, let me connect that to something we announced yesterday. So first of all, I said the activity is at an all-time high. every day, you read about ransomware attacks. Now the SEC regulations are actually not kicked in yet. I think they kick in December. But you're seeing some companies go out there and start to sort of self-report in anticipation because they're all petrified of course. When you get attacked. So I think you're going to see more and more disclosure and we've been trying to parse it more activity or more disclosure. That's so it's a good question. I think it's more activity. We've seen more and more activity.

Our team does a research. We've had the maximum number of inbounds to our incident response team in the last month than we had before. So clearly, anecdotally also, it's sort of come true that this is what's happening. Now typically, the anatomy of an attack for us, from our vantage point, is that when we get engaged in incident response, typically, we go in and we deploy protection sort of suite where we go and put XDR everywhere and we'll go anchor analytics to make sure we understand what happened and where the sort of the bad actions may still be resident in a customer's infrastructure.

Now typically, when we do that and believe they don't want us to leave with our stuff. They want us to be more stuff back in case guys come back. So from that perspective, the incident becomes a need, unfortunately, because of the attack, but it becomes a lead for us and that creates a whole bunch of product conversations around whether we're going to deploy end points. whether we need to upgrade their firewalls or they need to go down a cybersecurity transformation. I'll tell you, 9 times out of 10, every 1 of those customers ends up in the cybersecurity transformation because they discover that they have a lot of stuff that they should have upgraded or or changed in that process. So that's kind of what happens. Those are the products which typically end up in those customers.

[Dipak Golechha, executive]

And maybe I'll just add 1 point. Nikesh described the multi-exportion ransomware attacks being on the rise, 37% increase. The key to that is a lot of companies have sort of become used to, call it, normal encryption-only ransomware attacks. So they had invested in backup. So that when that happens, they just back up from a clean backup and they're back in operational. These multi-exporton attacks actually steal data and then export the target. And so this can't simply be double with the backups. And this is driving a need for better and greater investment in prevention of the attacks and not just the recovery side. And so that connects the sophistication to the investment lease as well.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Next question from Joe Gallo at Jefferies followed by Gray Powell of BTIG, Joe go ahead.

[Joseph Gallo, analyst]

You've made several acquisitions, further bolstering cloud. Congrats on that 12 module. Nikesh, when do you think the platform message truly cements itself in that market as it currently feels like the Wild West -- and then has the pricing environment stabilized there at all?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Great questions. Yes, the pricing has stabilized. We saw tremendous pricing pressure in the last fiscal year with the emergence of a few competitors who were willing to do whatever it takes to try and dislodge our platforms or our solutions. So I think it's fair to say that pricing is beginning to stabilize. I think what's interesting is we are seeing customers come the second time around and start looking at the platform. I think the first wave so far, and there's still part of the customers that still that way.

First wave is still very module-driven. I want to see SPM solution. I want a Snap solution and I want to look at SCA. So you'll find that there are different people in the customer's organization who are responsible for different pieces of the cloud security pie and end up trying to look for best of breeds kind of like replicating what happened in enterprise security. But as soon as they start putting big deployments at scale of any kind, they have to start having a lot from us. We just told you we had an $18 million deal for a platform for a large SaaS company. We don't have every large SaaS company which ion the platform. At so every large SaaS company needs a platform because they have 8 different tools that they're not able to stitch together.

So I think it's going to be sort of a sort of recursive journey where we'll show that we'll land in some customers and some customers, other people will land with their modules, but eventually, each of those customers has to go through a platform conversation. So we're sort of focused on our platform story. We're focused on making sure we make our platform more and more robust. I was at a CIO went before this this morning. There are 30 of them there. And the first question was, it was interesting, you guys bought DIG or did a security posture management, how is that integrated into the following 5 things we have running and like, well, the following 5 things will talk to each other for you.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thanks for the question, Joe. Next question from Gray Powell of BTIG, followed by Ben Bollin at Cleveland Research.

[Gray Powell, analyst]

Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Yes. So maybe a broader question. It's pretty clear that the firewall space or that there's headwinds across the firewall appliance space this year is impacting everyone. But you're still guiding Q2 billings to about 17% growth. Your closest competitor is guiding to minus 5%. Historically, you've been fairly correlated with them. So I know you can't speak to their business -- but can you talk about what's different on your side why you're more insulated? Is it more the NGS portfolio? Is it data center exposure? Is it share gains? Is there just anything you can kind of help us to think through those dynamics?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Yes, all of the above. Sorry I'm trying to -- I mean I can't process which competitor he's talking about, but okay. Look, we are in multiple businesses. In our firewall business, as we said, on the hardware business, we see that 3% to 5% as being where the market is and some of that we achieved refresh on that we achieved through our own customers expanding so that we achieved to replacement of other people's firewalls. We in the last, I'd say, 18 months, we've been very diligent about making sure we normalize for the effects of backlog or supply chain in that guidance and that thinking and you see that in the numbers.

So I don't think that's going to change much for us. I can't comment on other people's billing variability. We just saw the impact of billing variability to our numbers this quarter. So I'm sure they have the reasons of building variability. In terms of SASE, as I said, we're we compete with a different set of people, not with the hardware people. We saw 60% growth this quarter and we have visibility on the pipeline for the rest of the year, which gives us comfort that there is business to be had there.

We told you about XSIAM, which is again a category which is more in the soft management space, which is a different set of competitors. You're talking about XDR. It's the difference set of competitors. And then cloud security, where our competitors more startup. So I think the portfolio allows us to look at different growth rates in different pipelines, across the spectrum. As I said, the demand function is not going down for cybersecurity across the board. The only thing that's changing is people say, I'll do a 2-year 1-year deal or a 3-year or a 5-year deal, I'll pay you later, you finance it around year-over-year. That's the only confusion you're seeing I think if you do all that in the market, you can figure out the underlying growth rates are strong for some people in certain categories.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Our next question comes from Ben Bollin at Cleveland Research, followed by Itai Kidron from Oppenheimer. Go ahead, Ben.

[Benjamin Bollin, analyst]

I wanted to piggyback Gray's question a little bit. When you look at the underlying product revenue, how much of that is physical appliance versus the software form factor. And then a follow-on would be interested in your thoughts on how the trajectory of branch firewall looks over time as customers adopt more VMs and SaaS to get that scale -- that's it.

[Dipak Golechha, executive]

Yes. So let me take the first part of the question. I mean, our product revenue when Nikesh talked about 0 to 5% is actually across hardware, virtual firewalls and another software that's counted in product revenue. We talked about that a lot last time then. I think it's very customer specific in terms of what their actual needs are. So again, rather than trying to pass through each of them, I think it's looking at the aggregate we feel pretty comfortable in that 0% to 5% or 8% -- so software is about 35% or about 30% this quarter. Right ?

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

And you can see that in the gross margins. Our gross margins continue to improve for product because software is obviously a higher gross margin product for us.

[Lee Klarich, executive]

And then I think your second question was around what is the impact of this on the branch deployments. The -- there's really primarily 2 models for the branch. One is a SD-WAN only branch. That tends to be for smaller branches where all of the security -- or just about all the security moves into SASE is cloud delivered. And the second model is a nextgen firewall typically with SD-WAN built-in branch, which is still often connected back to SASE for global network connectivity, et cetera. So the so the shift to software in SASE doesn't replace the need for the branch to have that local intelligence and to be an extension of the customer's network and ultimately, the extension of the network security posture, zero-cost posture every way.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thank you.Next up, Ittai Kidron from Oppenheimer followed by Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. Go ahead, Ittai.

[Ittai Kidron, analyst]

Thanks, Walt. Depik I can just not sure I got the answer for Ben's question quite right. On hardware, can you tell us exactly hardware, what percent of revenue that is -- and Cisco in conjunction to you right now reported also results, and they've talked about -- they've significantly took down their next quarter guidance in the view that for the last 2, 3 quarters, a lot of hardware was sold but not installed and so there'll be some digestment period in there. My question to you, when you sell firewalls, how much visibility do you have into how much of that is actually goes and sit on the shelf is actually gets deployed in the field. And so is there a risk or is there a blind spot here. Where you might not know exactly how your customers are handling hardware -- firewall hardware and could that catch up somehow with our business as well.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Okay. So I don't -- I did not listen to the Cisco call because we're here and even if I had the time, I wouldn't. So I don't understand, it's a very large hardware business. Remember, other is a small part of our business, a, b, we only report in revenue what we sell and ship to the customer. So there's nothing -- if it's sitting on the shelf at a customer than it's still sold from our perspective.

[Ittai Kidron, analyst]

Yes, but I don't have any color to interact. But you have visibility especially again installed.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Yes, every [indiscernible] that is deployed has to be registered with us. So we have reasonably good visibility into firewalls that are sold to deployed. And any -- I would say, it's fair to say and there are specific issues where a customer may have out extra firewalls because the [indiscernible], but there's no -- I say there's no uncharacteristic or different activity we see in the last 3 months that has been away from the normal. So we don't have suddenly the last quarter, a lot of customers going a lot of firewalls. I think I'm going to try and guess, but there was this whole backlog situation and supply chain problem where people may have bought ahead because we're expecting supply chain prices to continue. And now they've got a bunch of stuff that is ordered sitting around that they can deploy, they don't order more, we don't have that situation. We never went down that bot -- we didn't get a lot of backlog. We shipped -- we never went past 12 things of shipping in our product. So we did -- I know that in the industry, some people are up to 1 year in terms of shipping backlog. We have 12 weeks or back to 4 to 6 weeks. So it really is not an impact for us from that perspective. So I think that should give you some better sense of what the spread is. We have reasonably decent visibility into our pipeline can be up or down the margin? Yes, but nothing as substantive as what you might have seen from other people.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

Thanks, We'll take our last question from Patrick Coville at Scotiabank. Patrick, go ahead.

[Patrick Edwin Colville, analyst]

All right. Thank you, Walter, for squeezing me in, and I've got a bit of a sore throat, so sound a bit like Jason Statens forgive me for being a bit quiet. To me, the standout metric was the non-GAAP operating margin, which was 28%. Typically, 1Q is like the low watermark for margin -- but based on your guidance, it's actually kind of predicted to be the high watermark. So I guess I presume [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] to be dilutive, but Dipak are there any other puts and takes that we should consider around operating margin?

[Dipak Golechha, executive]

No. I mean, I think you obviously talked about the talent and, which is part of the rationale for the annual thing. We did have some expenses that we expected to incur in that will now come later in the year, some around the marketing areas as well. But I would say it's just normal course of operating business. And fundamentally, I think Dig and Talen explains the majority of the rest. I will just say on a year-on-year comparison, we did have hiring that had a different level of hiring activity this year, it's a lot more normalized in terms of how we're ramping. So there's just a little bit of base factor calculation in there, but nothing really added to.

[Walter Pritchard, executive]

All right. Thank you, Patrick, for your question. Thanks, everybody, for participating. And with that, I'll pass it over to Nikesh for his closing comments.

[Nikesh Arora, executive]

Well, thank you very much again, everyone, for taking the time to attend our earnings call. I would be remiss if I did not use the opportunity to thank all of our employees across the world and the ones in [indiscernible], especially given what's happening in that part of the world. I also wanted to thank all of our partners and customers for trusting Palo Alto Networks.