ZS - NASDAQ

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the

Thank you, Bill. I'm pleased to share our first quarter results, which exceeded our guidance across all metrics. We delivered 40% revenue growth and 34% billings growth. Our operating profit and free cash flow more than doubled year-over-year, and free cash flow margin reached a record 45%. We exceeded the rule of 60 for the 13th consecutive quarter, at a significant scale of $2 billion plus in ARR, we are delivering a unique combination of high growth and high profitability that only a few SaaS companies have accomplished. In Q1, we executed well in a challenging macro environment and what is typically a slower quarter for us. The elevated scrutiny of large deals remains mostly unchanged. The increased frequency of high-profile breaches, coupled with impending SEC disclosure requirements has propelled

Thank you, Jay. Our Q1 results exceeded our guidance on growth and profitability, even with ongoing customer scrutiny of large deals. Revenue was $497 million, up 40% year-over-year and up 9% sequentially. From a geographic perspective, Americas represented 53% of revenue, EMEA was 32% and APJ was 15%. As Jay highlighted, from a new business perspective, Federal had its best new ACV quarter ever, growing over 90% year-over-year. Our new ACV outside of the Fed also grew year-over-year. . Our total calculated billings in Q1 grew 34% year-over-year to $457 million. On a sequential basis, total billings declined 37% quarter-over-quarter with a difficult comparison to Q4, which had a $20 million upfront billing on a multiyear deal. As a reminder, our contract terms are typically one to three years, and we primarily invoice our customers one year in advance. Our calculated current billings grew 33% year-over-year, a seasonal decline of 32% quarter-over-quarter. Our remaining performance obligations, or RPO, grew 30% from a year ago to $3.49 billion, The current RPO is approximately 51% of the total RPO. We ended Q1 with 468 customers with greater than $1 million in ARR, adding 19 such customers in the quarter. 14 of the 19 $1 million ARR customer adds were new logos, which was a record for Q1. The continued strength of this large customer metric speaks to the strategic role we play in our customers' digital transformation initiatives. We also entered the quarter with 2708 customers with greater than $100,000 in ARR. Our 12-month trailing dollar-based net retention rate was 120%. Turning to the rest of our Q1 financial performance. Total gross margin of 80.7% and compares to 80.7% in the prior quarter and 81.4% in the year ago quarter. Higher public cloud usage for emerging products drove the year-over-year change in the gross margin partially offset by approximately 60 basis points of benefit from a change in accounting attributed to the longer useful life of our cloud infrastructure. As mentioned last quarter, as a result of advances in technology and efficiencies in how we operate our server and network equipment. Starting this quarter, we extended the depreciable useful life of these assets in our cloud infrastructure from four to five years. Moving on, our total operating expenses increased 11% sequentially and 26% year-over-year to $311 million. We continue to generate significant leverage in our financial model with operating margin reaching 18%, an increase of approximately 620 basis points year-over-year. Our free cash flow margin was 45%, including data center CapEx of approximately 6% of revenue, Free cash flow benefited from strong collections for Q4 billings, including the $20 million upfront billings I mentioned. We ended the quarter with over $2.3 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Next, let me share some observations about the macro environment and our framework for guidance for the rest of the fiscal year. While the global macro environment remains challenging, and customers continue to scrutinize large deals from our perspective, customer sentiment seems to be stabilizing. Our customer engagements remain strong, and we have a large and growing pipeline. However, we want to be prudent in our assumptions given the sales leadership change. In our outlook for fiscal '24, we're balancing our business optimism and continued sales execution with ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties. With that in mind, let me provide our guidance for Q2 and full year fiscal 2024. As a reminder, these numbers are all non-GAAP. For the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $505 million to $507 million, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 30% to 31%, gross margins of 80%, including the change in accounting for useful life of server equipment. I would also like to remind investors that a number of our emerging products, including newer products like

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Brad

Great. Thanks so much. And congrats on a strong start to the year and nice to see the leverage in these results. Jay, your distinction of SASE has always been clear and it's perhaps no more obvious than right now at a time when traditional network security providers are having a tough time selling more and more boxes. And it seems they're paying you a nice complement as they all double down their focus on the cloud and SASE. So as this all plays out competitively and you're increasingly subject to the law of large numbers, how should we think about your ability to sustain high growth and specifically the rate at which you can scale your emerging product portfolio? Thanks.

Brad, very good question. It is flattering to see all kind of vendors becoming SASE vendors overnight. But the challenge for them would be, it's a different architecture. It's not an incremental change and feature you can add on to it. That's where we spent a dozen plus years building a true

Thanks. Appreciate it.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia of Barclays. Your line is open.

Okay. Great. Hi guys, thanks for taking my question here. Jay, maybe for you, just building off of that last question on some of the slowness that we've seen with the traditional network security guys and the challenges with appliances. The question for you is maybe do you feel like customers are more willing now to replace their appliance firewalls at least at the branch with SASE architecture like what

You know what I said many times, firewalls won't go away, but they will become like mainframes. We have been replacing firewalls at the branches from the last several years. Now that trend is accelerated. And from one of the new things that’s done to help accelerate the demise of firewalls and branches is our branch connector technology, which now we package to make it available. So you can become a Starbucks-like office in a matter of minutes rather than trying to wait for a long, long time. So we've seen a campus environment becoming just like that. The only place where firewalls have been playing a significant role for a while is the data center, the east-west traffic and the like. You know that traffic is going away from the data center and that demand has to go away. So a big thing for someone to do it right, had to really offer a Starbucks like branch and zero-trust architecture. Market has made progress with traditional SD-WAN. We think traditional SD-WAN is a transitory technology. And once we have [broached] (ph) the market with Branch Connector actually is the next big phase to make it simple. Very excited with the opportunity to make the world free of firewalls.

Makes sense. Thanks guys.

Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Henderson of Needham & Company. Your line is open.

I'm torn on what to ask, but I think I'll go with the question around the channels. So you guys have been doing a lot of work on expanding your VAR channels, expanding reach into federal, expanding reach into MSPs, expanding into the cloud arena as much as possible. Can you give us some sense of how you think the mix of your sales leads will be driven by those different channel opportunities as we move through the current fiscal year, please?

Sure. Alex, you rightfully said, we don't have a simple straight VAR channel that traditionally firewall and network security vendors had. We have VARs who play a role. We have system integrators and we have service providers. And then there's a separate set of SIs for federal business as well. Let's look at each of these areas. VARs were slow to adopt

No, I think that's good, Jay.

Okay. Thank you, Alex.

No comment on internal sales? Which is obviously a piece of it?

So yes. So we've increased our capacity in the quarter for our sales reps. Our plan is to increase capacity through the year. The one comment I'd make on Q1 is that we were - we did hit our expectations internally, but we expect to hit basically our sales targets for the year. The current sales capacity that we have supports our guidance. And as Jay mentioned, with the new leadership with Mike on board, we'll be looking to accelerate our hiring as we go through fiscal '24.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Joel Fishbein of Truist. Your line is open.

Thanks. And thanks for taking my questions. Great execution here. Jay, one for you, and then I'll jump back in queue. On these new advance plus bundles, obviously very exciting. Just can you share with - you said AIs included - some of the new AI included in that. Can you talk about adoption rates and whether or not you're getting any pushback on pricing as it relates to some of those bundles?

Yes. So we have had advanced bundles that include a bunch of functionality of

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Rob Owens of Piper Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe building a little bit on Joel's question. You mentioned in your prepared remarks with an example around data protection as kind of one of the faster-growing solutions and how it doubled spend at an existing customer. Just curious the potential for that and what you're seeing relative to typical uplift when you're able to attach that solution? Thanks.

You know when

Yes. Thanks.

The one comment I'll make is, we have more complete platform for data protection. And customers want one set of policies, whether they want to secure data at rest or data at motion. That's why it's picking up quite fast.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Gallo of Jefferies. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Appreciate the question. Remo, I appreciate the rationale on the full year billings guide. But just on methodology, is there any changes there? I mean you saw a strong 1Q driven by Fed stream why not pass along some of that beat. Is that solely due to the market? Or the go-to-market change conservatism? Or is there anything else you're seeing there with large customer calendar '24 budgets? And then maybe just to simplistically ask, is fiscal '24 billings more or less conservative now than it was 90 days ago?

Great question. So I mean the guide that we gave is solely related to basically the go-to-market with our new sales leadership on board. We feel it's prudent to do that. When you take a look at close rates for Q2 this year versus last year, we're being a little more conservative with our close rates this Q2. From a market - overall market perspective, the macro still remains challenging, but we feel that things - that there's more of an acceptance to

Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Thank you. Remo, I wanted to ask you about some of the idiosyncratic drivers in your federal business. And more specifically, as we think about all the momentum that you're seeing now, how should we think about the durability of growth in the federal vertical? Meaning, is this like a three to five year product cycle where we'll see a ramp and then we should be cognizant of a slowdown? Is it an 18-month to 36-month product cycle? How do we think about some of the visibility you have in federal and how it's going to impact your growth over the medium term? Thanks.

It's another great question, Gabriel. I'll start and then maybe Jay can come in also. We've invested significantly in federal. This is not an overnight basically what's occurring. This is occurring over the last five, six years of significant investments both from a platform technology as well as people within the federal organization that works for us. We're in 12 of the 15 agencies, cabinet agencies. As Jay talked about in the script, our growth rate in federal in Q1 was 90% year-over-year. I feel that we are very well positioned in federal, what we talked about, we've got incredibly strong federal team. And I feel that going forward, federal should be a good driver, potentially significant driver for

Yes. So this is the how I think about it. First of all, number of users in the federal commerce DoD, non-DoD. Yes, we do have 12 of the 15 cabin lab agencies, but they are in various stages. There's a big, big upsell opportunities there itself. Then DoD, just scratching the surface out there. So if you look at from a number of users' point of view, it's a massive market in front of us because we count number of users. Then there are workloads for federal. There's a whole range of IoT, OT devices in federal business that needs to be taken care of. So massive stuff, but then on top of that, it's a platform. Our platform has expanded, it keeps on expanding. So I think this is a significant growth opportunity for a long, long time. And then DoD takes us to next - sorry, federal takes to other federal friendly countries out there. They all want to follow the NATO friendly countries want to adopt what U.S. has done here. That's an opportunity for us. The state governments are getting very, very worried about adopting

Thank you for the color. And congrats on the quarter.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ruykhaver of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you. So Jay, we are seeing this convergence between cloud workload protection platform, [CSPM, CIM] a lot of other acronyms that are being thrown into this seat kind of bucket. We're also seeing a number of next-gen vendors that seem to have more of a product-led sales motion aimed at the developer, which contrasts with your approach, which is more a high touch A,B to C level. So as a product that fits between build and run time environment, and you could argue maybe that portfolio is shifting either to even further left. How do you balance those dynamics when you look to go to market with your CNAPP offering?

It's a very good question. So all those four letter acronyms you gave us. And we tried to track them. And there have been 100-plus vendors in that space over the past two years. So about a year ago, I used to see a new vendor show up every other day. For the last year or so it has slowed down and actually they're shrinking. But there's adjacent next to it. That is cloud workload communication. Cloud workload communication is about workloads soft, Internet workloads talking to each other. That's where our core strength comes in the

Yes. That's helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville of Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Hi, there. Thank you for taking my question. I mean, really impressive set of results, guys. So congrats on the start in the new fiscal year as you have with - you guys have shown very impressive momentum. I guess I wanted to touch on the leadership change. These two new executive level hires. How has Dali's role changed? Is he still at the firm? Or has he moved on? And if so, how can we expect his decisions to change going forward?

Dali has an active role as the COO of the company. He has played a phenomenal role in

Thank you so much.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of John DiFucci of Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Thank you. Jay and Remo both spoke about the challenging macro backdrop. And I think Remo, if I - correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said that you did not hit your internal targets for 1Q. I guess, what do you think the reasons for that were? I mean, you have new go-to-market people, and you explained that with the guide with Joe's question. And sometimes that means the previous people were an issue, but your COO is really good at it to say the least. I know Remo said customer sentiment is stabilizing, but I'm not quite sure how that sort of fits in. Has the macro gotten a little worse? Or is there something else that I'm not thinking about?

Yes. The macro has not gotten worse. And the comment, John, was related to quota-carrying reps. So we didn't hit our internal projections for internal reps. We do expect to catch up. We've talked about before on earlier calls, we're in a huge market opportunity. We're going to invest significantly in our company. You can see in the second half, we're going to increase our sales and marketing spend based on our guidance. That's related to just overall, we've gotten new CMO on board with Mike on Board. That was the gist of the comment. It's related basically purely to quota-carrying reps. We did increase capacity, but not to the levels we wanted. And from my perspective, John, it's really execution on our part. We need to execute better on that part.

Got it. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Tal Liani of Bank of America. Your line is open.

I'm sorry, I pressed on the mute button. Can hear me now?

Yes.

Perfect. Okay. RPO growth was slower. Also, the billing guidance was a tad below, although you hit the quarter, you're above the quarter expectations. So I wanted to ask about the discount level contract duration. Was there any change in the pricing environment or contract duration this quarter that is driving the lower RPOs? And also, how do I think about - I know you don't provide kind of quarterly, but how do I think about first half versus second half in terms of billings and RPOs? Thanks.

Yes. I mean a lot of questions in there, but I appreciate you bringing off. RPO decline, it's primarily related to federal. Federal is a big piece of our business. And when you look at federal, federal contracts or even though they're multiyear contracts, really take federal in for one year in our CRPO. So that was a big driver for that. When you take out basically federal out of the contract duration, really contract durations are comparable year-over-year and also quarter-over-quarter. Discount levels, no, not really seeing anything on a discount level perspective. I'd say it's the same and has been the same for a while. First half, second half, you can expect billings to be in the 42% range in the first half and the rest basically in the second half. But the RPO basically relates to - primarily relates to federal business, which is one year - one year recognized.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani of Citi. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Jay, this one's for you. You were very explicit about the success in the federal business coming from very strong wins and partnerships with federal SIs. So I wanted to better understand what the moat and differentiation is. And if you can help explain to us why this wouldn't necessarily cannibalize your direct business, which you're executing just fantastically in?

So our direct business versus channel business, almost all of our business is supposed to be changed. A few customers insist that they must do a deal directly with us. So the channel is supposed to bring leverage. The more channel partners are working closely with us, the more heavy lifting to do, better productivity, better our sales acceleration happens. So it's important for us. Now in a transformation sale like ours, the channel wasn't quite ready there to say, hey, tell me the latest box I'm ready to sell. We had to work with them to show them transformation. Federal government is driving big transformation at all levels. President's Executive order is asking for

No, that’s super clear. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Hamza Fodderwala of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Remo, regarding your comment on the sales changes and the impact of the full year billings guide. Just curious, are you anticipating the leadership change will drive a broader restructuring in the sales org? Like you saw a few years ago when Dali came on Board? Or is it going to be more incremental? Thank you.

Yes. So the leadership we have in our sales organization is very strong with what Dali has created. I don't see significant changes. Maybe Jay can speak to it, but I don't see significant changes. And again, the structure that we've built under Dali's leadership was a very strong basically structure.

Yes. In many ways, our sales process at

Helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Hedberg of RBC. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Remo, a question for you on the macro. There's been a couple of questions on billings and RPO and obviously, the federal strength. But I guess maybe I'm just a little confused because when I look back at your Q4 script, when you talked about the macros, you said you noted global uncertainty, but it seems to me like there was a change in tone from your comments here. I think you said - you noted customer sentiment is starting to stabilize. So I guess I'm just sort of curious, what drove that comment that things are starting to stabilize versus last quarter when you noted uncertainty? And is this something that happened during the quarter? Or anything that kind of prompt you to maybe change the script a bit from 4Q?

Yes. I'll let Jay comment to...

I think what I commented last time, was there's a slight reduction in scrutiny of the deal so the tone I exactly used. I think what we're seeing though, we are saying there's no change in macro the way we haven't seen. So macro is not playing a role at this stage. To say the forecast needs to be assuming macros not getting any worse than it has been.

Thank you.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Shrenik Kothari of Baird. Your line is open.

Yes. Thanks for taking the question, and congress on the great Jay and Remo. It's great to see your focus on large transformative deals in top accounts as you just highlighted, Jay. The ongoing traction with bundled offerings across your emerging new products contributing to the new business. So all of that speaks to create in-house kind of innovation model that you have talked about. Jay, how do you see the role of strategic M&A play in expansion plans as we are starting to see with some others especially around cloud and data security. And what if any potential areas to focus? And Remo, can you provide the new versus upsell split in the quarter and how it compares to the expected the 40-60 mix. Thanks.

Yes. Very good question. So with tighter funding and lots of security companies out there, we're seeing lots of attractive opportunities coming our way. We are looking at a number of innovative technologies and strong development teams. It's an option. It's done. A number of small ones in the past some time Yes, there are some areas, interesting technologies, especially in the new world of data and AI kind of stuff. It's an option we're keeping. I think you will not see us trying to buy revenue through an M&A. They're going to see us buying innovative, disruptive technologies that can help us get to market sooner, faster is important. And that integrates with our platform. I hate to see acquisition being done where you have standalone products, they don't work together with each other. But we are actively exploring those areas. There's no reason why we should not be. Remo?

Yes. And the new and upsell was 45% new, 55% upsell. On our year-end call, we said we expect upsell to be above 60%. That's still our expectation for the year. But for the quarter, it was 55% or so.

Okay. Thanks a lot, Jay and Remo. Appreciate it.

Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex of JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the question. I guess, Remo, I wanted to dig into margins and specifically maybe gross margins, I mean, you guys are about 3x the size you were 2.5 years ago. But you've hovered kind of in this just below 81% gross margins, give or take, 50 basis points or so. And I appreciate the comments you had that emerging products will initially have lower gross margins. I think that's been the case for some time. But how do we think as you continue to grow at an accelerated pace and scale, how can we expect that to impact your margins? How are you managing your infrastructure? And then maybe just an adjacent comment on sales and marketing, it seems as though that was quite a bit lower than billings. Did you hold back on sales and marketing spend ahead of the arrival of Mike and Joyce? Thank you.

Yes, a few questions. Did we hold back the sales and marketing spend? No problem. We hold back sales and marketing spend, not really. It's just the way things worked out. Maybe a little bit on the marketing side, but that's about it, but not really. From a gross margin perspective, our stated gross margin has been between 78% and 82% then you're right, Brian. We've been in the 80% range for a long time. The beauty of

That’s helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. And that is all the time we have for questions today. I'd like to turn the call back over to Jay Chaudhry, CEO, for any closing remarks.

My sincere thanks to our employees, our customers and partners for delivering a strong quarter. Thank you for your interest in

Thank you.