Kip E. Meintzer - Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Tal Payne - Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Gil Shwed - Check Point Software Technologies Ltd..

Gregg Moskowitz - Cowen and Company, LLC Jonathan F. Ho - William Blair & Co. LLC John DiFucci - Jefferies LLC Karl E. Keirstead - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc. Shaul Eyal - Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. Andrew James Nowinski - Piper Jaffray & Co. Walter H. Pritchard - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. Michael Turits - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.

Philip Winslow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC Ken Talanian - Evercore ISI Fatima Aslam Boolani - UBS Securities LLC Jayson A. Noland - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. Keith Frances Bachman - BMO Capital Markets (United States) Erik L. Suppiger - JMP Securities LLC.

Greetings and welcome to the Check Point Software First Quarter 2017 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Kip E.

Meintzer, Head of Global Investor Relations. Thank you, Mr. Meintzer. You may begin..

business, financial performance and customers; the introduction of new products, programs and the success of those products and programs; the environment for security threats and the trends in the market; demand for our products and services; our expectations regarding taxes; our expectations for shares outstanding calculation; and our business and financial outlook including our guidance for Q2 2017 and full year of 2017.

Because these statements pertain to future events they are subject to various risks and uncertainty. Actual results could differ materially from Check Point's current expectations and beliefs.

Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences are contained in Check Point's earnings press release issued on April 27, 2017, which is available on our website, and other factors and risks, including those discussed in Check Point's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Check Point assumes no obligation to update information concerning its expectations or beliefs, except as required by law. In our press release, which has been posted on our website, we present GAAP and non-GAAP results, along with the reconciliation of such results, as well as the reasons for our presentation of non-GAAP information.

Now, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Tal Payne for a review of the financial results..

48% of the revenues came from the Americas; 35% of revenues came from Europe; the remaining 17% came from Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East, and Africa regions.

From a deal size perspective, the number of customers with aggregated transaction value over $1 million increased by 16% to 50 customers this quarter compared to 43 customers in the same period last year. Transactions greater than $50,000 were 70% of total order value compared to 69% in the first quarter of 2016.

Operating margins for the quarter were 54%, in line with our expectation. Our income tax rates for the quarter came at 17%. The reduction of tax rate for technology companies in Israel from 16% to 12% is subject to tax regulations that are expected to come out in the near future.

This quarter, we adopted new accounting standards under which the excess tax benefit of our (06:26) is now reflected in our income tax provision, whereas previously it was reflected in equity.

In addition, under the standards, we recorded deferred tax assets as of January 1, 2017 in an amount of $86 million and increased retained earnings for open balance sheet. This is purely a new accounting treatment and does not change the cash taxes we pay in the U.S. Since the adoption of the standards, our tax rate may vary based on stock price.

GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2017 was $183 million or $1.08 per diluted share, an increase of 15% from the first quarter of 2016. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $202 million or $1.20 per diluted share, an increase of 13% year-over-year and at the top-end of our guidance.

As our share price levels elevated since we guided in January, the number of fully diluted outstanding shares used in calculation of our EPS was approximately 1 million higher than we expected originally. This highlights even more the EPS achievements.

Going forward, based on the current share price and buyback levels, we expect number of shares to continue reducing by approximately 1 million shares a quarter, reaching approximately 165.5 million shares in Q4 2017. Our cash balances continued to be strong. We reached $3.797 billion at the end of the quarter.

Our cash from operations for the quarter increased by 10% to $355 million, in line with our strong collection from customers. We continued to implement our share buyback program during the quarter and repurchased approximately 2.6 million shares for a total cost of $248 million. Now, let's turn the call over to Gil for his comments on the quarter..

Thank you, Tal, and good morning to all of you joining us on the call today. Tal just spoke about we had very nice performance during the first quarter, continuing the trend of the last several quarters.

We're experiencing great customer uptake in our key focus areas of cloud, mobility and threat prevention, which is reflected in the continued triple-digit growth across these product lines, underscoring the success of our platforms and the investment we've made.

Customers are continuing to consolidate their infrastructure with Check Point and our value proposition of exceptional security with our unified architecture is resonating quite well.

Just last week, I met with a financial customer that said, three years ago I was promoting a best of breed strategy with multiple vendors, since then I've switched to Check Point's unified solution and I couldn't be happier.

Every customer that I've met with in the past few weeks has echoed their need to increase their security footprint but are unable to add head count and complexity at the same pace. This is leading customers to realize the benefit of the Check Point architecture that enables far better security with no compromises.

We continue to see increasing number of customers beginning to realize that cloud security should be (09:42) and that mobile security should be a critical part of their security strategy.

Keep in mind, that we are the only company today that has a cloud solution for all leading cloud environments, including the private cloud environment of VMware, Cisco ACI and few others, and the public cloud of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. As I've mentioned before, we've begun to see cloud sales picking up nicely.

Finally, our focus on new customers is also resonating well with our sales force and channels, and it was reflected in number of nice new deals win during the quarter. We're seeing some good examples of customers from all sectors – retail, industrial, government, and many others – standardizing on Check Point and switching from other vendors.

As you could imagine, I'm quite pleased with our results so far. In the beginning of the year, we talked about our focus on the future of cyber security.

Last week, during our Check Point Experience user conference (10:44-10:50) Check Point Infinity our revolutionary new security architecture designed to meet the critical security needs of enterprises and organization of all sizes.

Infinity is the first consolidated security platform that spans across networks, cloud and mobile, leveraging common infrastructure, threat intelligence sharing and open interfaces.

It offers unparalleled security across network, cloud and mobile while also providing pre-emptive threat prevention to help ensure its customers are protected against the growing number of sophisticated known and unknown attacks before they occur.

Another differentiator of Infinity is the single management console with modular policies and integrated threat visibility to efficiently centralize security.

Infinity is incorporated across all Check Point's products and, with the introduction of Infinity, we also announced new versions of our key products such as R80.10 for our security gateways, SandBlast Mobile for the iOS and Android, and the new generation of super high-end data center security gateways that will provide the highest level of threat prevention at pretty much any seat.

With Infinity, Check Point arms customers with innovative solution that allows them to elevate their security infrastructure and adapt to changing business needs as well as the evolving threat environment. One of the most main damaging threats showing up in organizations today is ransomware.

Hospital, retailers and many others are just some of the types of organizations that are being impacted by this damaging malware. To combat these threats, we introduced Check Point Anti-Ransomware technology that enables businesses to stay protected against cyber extortion and even the most sophisticated ransomware.

Overall, I believe we are executing nicely on our plan for the year. There are still many things that needs to be done, but we've started the year on the right note.

Now, you all know my usual caveat, the future is hard to predict and there are many additional factors and challenges that can lead to outperformance or underperformance that must be taken into consideration when we provide projection. So with that, our financial outlook for the second quarter reaffirms our annual projections.

We expect revenues in the range of $440 million to $465 million and non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $1.17 to $1.25. GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately $0.14 less. There is no change to the full year outlook. With that, I'd like to thank you once again for joining us on the call today and open the call for insightful questions..

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Gregg Moskowitz of Cowen and Company. Please proceed with your question..

Okay. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, guys, and congratulations on a strong start to the year. It sounds, Gil, like SandBlast did very well again, but I'm wondering if you could elaborate on where you're seeing the strength.

For instance, is it mostly selling into installed base or is it helping to drive a lot of new customer acquisition as well and, also, are you having success displacing incumbent APT solutions or is it primarily greenfield?.

Thanks for the question. It's a very good one. I think it's all of the above. I've seen customers replacing some of the incumbent dedicated APT solutions. I don't want to name names, but I think you can guess which one.

I've seen many cases when it's with the installed base, and I think we're also winning a lot of new customers, showing them the overall architecture and our ability. So, from the example that I've seen in the last few weeks and from the analysis of wins that we've done just recently, I think that we're winning in all these three areas..

Okay. Thanks, Gil.

And then just one another question; what are your expectations around customer adoption of Infinity and what can that do for the financial model? And then, also, do you need to add more endpoint technology to truly fulfill your vision?.

So I think Infinity doesn't change in a big way the financial model. Its part of the existing products that we have and it's a bigger picture. After launching it in the conference last week and meeting with many customers, I think the message is resonating very well to the customers now.

It's a much easier way to look at what we're doing and put it under the Infinity umbrella than to look at different products and different capabilities. It's a separate thing. So I hope it will result in higher level of adoption of our technologies.

In terms of the endpoint, actually, our latest endpoint technology, the SandBlast Agent that we have for endpoints, I'm talking about PCs, not just mobile because the mobile world is different.

It's actually resonating very well, even though I don't want to – I'm not looking at us as a competitor replacement for the traditional antivirus vendor, I'm looking at that as an additional layer addressing the more sophisticated need.

It's in the real way to fulfill the end-to-end advanced threat prevention capabilities not in a way to get into the, I think, the market of antivirus which is already saturated..

Terrific. Thanks very much..

Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho of William Blair. Please proceed with your question..

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the strong quarter.

I just wanted to start out with your comments around the public cloud opportunity growing nicely and maybe if you could give us a little bit more color in terms of where you're seeing the opportunity set grow there and perhaps maybe what the impact is on your edge of network firewalls as well?.

I think the cloud security is a great addition to what we're doing on networks. And I think what many companies – what I've seen with many companies is that in addition to our data center, in addition to our existing application, we are building new applications on the cloud. I think, in many cases, they don't realize even that they need security.

They believe that if they take a server on the cloud, it's a cloud by a well-known vendor, it must be secure. And they don't realize that as much as these cloud companies are doing good job to defend themselves, the server that you're getting on the cloud is sitting there wide-open on the center of the Internet. So, it needs to be secured.

I think we see customers that are starting to realize that. They don't have tools to incorporate that into their existing enterprise management capabilities, into their existing enterprise security policies.

And by the way, it's very, very hard to do, because you don't have control of where these servers are, which servers are where, and these are all the capabilities that we are building into our cloud security like auto-scaling with the cloud like connecting it to the enterprise management just like they are used to with our management solution.

And I think we're starting to see pickup. It's still small, but I think, right now, we're seeing that our public cloud solutions are equal in size and maybe even higher than the private cloud solution, and that's a very good trend. And as I mentioned, overall on our cloud solution, we're seeing triple-digit growth..

Fantastic, fantastic.

And then, relative to the long-term deferred, that grew a little bit more quickly than the short-term deferred this quarter, can you just talk about maybe the dynamics there around some of the duration of your contracts?.

Well, both of them were very healthy as you can see. Typically, I will say about long-term contract that it can fluctuate, some quarters can go higher than the others; depends on the size of the transaction. It many times depends on the customer budget and their needs. So when I look at the short term, you see it still grew by 15%.

Long term, it can grow one quarter and the next quarter it can go down, this is one of the good quarters and it moved even further up..

Great. Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line on the John DiFucci of Jefferies. Please proceed with you question..

Thank you. The question is for Gil.

Gil, what do you mean by a unified architecture? Are you talking about products that are simply being integrated under one vendor or is it a commonality of certain foundational technical components across products that are typically thought of independent of each other?.

So, it's the second, which basically we have one architecture, one common infrastructure, the technology to identify threat is shared between the product, the technologies to block threat is shared between the product, of course, the management is the same software, the same management console.

And I think where things are different is that each device or each component of the infrastructure might have different enforcement methodology. In one end, it can be the network software, but knows how to pull the data from the network. In other places, it's the mobile software and so on.

But the software is the same software, it's not just product integration, it's the same foundation..

Okay, great. And if I could, Tal, just a quick follow-up; you've talked in the past about a greater percentage of your sales being radical revenue, and this shows in your results.

Can you roughly tell us about what percentage in the sale was radical, let's say, a year ago versus today and where that can likely go?.

If I recall, it was – update and maintenance is a similar number because its going in a slower rate, the subscription was about 20% and now it's 27% growth, so it's around 22%, it's probably around 62% right now, but it's a – I can calculate it in a minute and I'll give it back to you..

Okay. Because if that continues as a – the reason it's interesting to us is if it continues, obviously, the radical part can repeat itself going forward and it's also those renewals are much more profitable than when they're first sold. So it helps both with growth but also profit..

Yeah. Of course, just bear in mind that as we add the new blades and more products that we launch are as part of the subscription, the subscription portion is growing and we've seen it very consistently since probably 2008 or 2009 when we came with the software blade architecture.

So the trend is clear that more and more portion of our revenues are coming in subscription. So I expect it in general to continue and go up. How much is really depends where it will find the balance in the future, but I think it's going to continue growing.

When you look at cloud as well, majority of the services that we provide on the cloud are monthly payments or annual payments or by the job, and therefore they're also part of the ratable subscription portion. So, in general, I would say the trend of continued increase, I expect it to continue..

Okay, okay. Thanks. And after you – if you figure out that number, that be great, where it is today versus in the past. Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line of Karl Keirstead of Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question..

Thank you. One for Gil. One for Tal. Tal, on the maintenance discount issue, you had mentioned last quarter, I think, that it was – it had stabilized versus what happened in 4Q; if you could provide an update for this past quarter. And then, for Gil, I'd love to ask you about the impact of the public cloud.

And I don't mean demand for vSEC or your virtual products that are deployed on AWS, Azure and GCP, but what I mean is, whether as your clients evaluate a future move to the public cloud model, whether that's changing their behavior for purchasing Check Point products that are deployed on-premise.

For instance, might some of them need fewer, but higher throughput appliances, any color there might be interesting. Thank you..

I will take the first one. First, maybe I'll just conclude the answer to the previous question about the portion of the ratable revenues versus the product revenue. So in 2008, when I joined, it was about 40% product and 60% update and maintenance, so the support portion. So it was around 60% on the ratable. Now, we are – in Q1, we were 71%.

In the average 2017, we were 67%. So every year, its increasing 1%, 2%, so it's growing and it's becoming more stable model. So that's to the previous question. Regarding your question to the discount, I'm not going to update it every quarter, because obviously it can fluctuate back. The stability we've been seeing since Q3 continues.

So the levels of discount in Q3, Q4 and Q1 are very similar, which is great news. The increase that we saw was in Q2, if you recall last year, so we had an increase in Q2 last year and since then we saw the stabilization, which is nice..

And about the cloud, I haven't seen that the cloud is changing a lot of customers' behavior on their physical network. They still have physical network; they still need to secure them. Sometimes they need to connect them to the cloud, which means that they need some appliances or some devices to do the VPN to the cloud.

The cloud, in most cases, again not all of them, but in 99% of the cases, is an extension and expansion for the existing network..

Okay. Thank you both..

Our next question comes from the line of Shaul Eyal of Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question..

Thank you. Hi, good afternoon, guys. Congrats on my end as well with respect to another solid set of results.

Gil or Tal, can you talk to us on ASP trends, discounting trends? Are we seeing some moderation, even some stability as it relates to ASP, then also in the context of the competitive landscape?.

Yes. So I'll say when we talk about ASP of products and per product family stayed stable, so that was nice. Obviously, the average ASP is dependent on the mix per quarter. When we talk about update and maintenance subscription, we did see – and that was my previous answer, we see stabilization there since Q3 last year.

So I don't know exactly what was in Q2 last year. It's probably the fact that when we launch a new product, our sales teams are focused on introduction of our new product. They did a great job there. We see an increase in our product core plans, management, emulation, advance threat protection in general.

So the team is focused on selling the new product and maybe there was some increase in the subscription in the support, discount as a result. We talked about it in length last year, but since then we saw stabilization on those levels..

Got it. And Gil, over the past few quarters, have you started taking any different approach the way you look at your distribution channels, anything specific you can share with us? And also maybe one word about the strong performance I think you guys had seen in APAC this specific quarter. Thank you..

I think we keep making changes and adding more resellers. There's no change in strategy, and I think our major relationship with the channel are – all the relationship, not major. I think all the relationships in the channels are very good and we are expanding and we are growing them.

And I think we are seeing some nice turnarounds for resellers that were lower performers that are now becoming much higher performers. We're signing up a little bit of new resellers, so there is no change in that..

And on APAC, maybe just a word?.

I think APAC has been a region that's performing very, very well in the last few quarters; very nice growth rate, leading the growth rate for a few quarters. I think the execution there is quite nice. Nothing, I mean, primarily positive. And of course between countries, it's varied.

Some countries that are behaving better, there are some countries that we're making changes. But, overall, as a region, I can't be happier. If the entire world would behave that way, we wouldn't need this call..

Good luck. Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski of Piper Jaffray. Please proceed with your question..

All right. Thanks. Congrats on the quarter. So you had a very big product launch, including two new high-end appliances.

Do you think you experienced any sort of pause in spending at any of your large customers ahead of this launch, similar to what one of your competitors cited on their earnings call?.

No, not this time, I think..

Nothing extraordinary..

First, I think we're keeping our launches relatively organized and orchestrated in a way that usually shouldn't impact that. And second, the software version shouldn't have an impact on the timing of orders and the 64k and the 44k high end appliances are relatively small in terms of their overall revenue impact, so it shouldn't have that impact.

So, no, we're not expecting anything..

Okay, great. And then, you had strong growth in Europe as well this quarter again.

Do you think GDPR is driving growth in Europe or is it still too early for that tailwind?.

I think GDPR is a very interesting subject and we started talking about that, we're starting hearing conversation. At this time, it may be create some awareness, but I haven't seen yet it changing the sales. So I think we are at least six months to one year before that.

Of course, the GDPR regulations, I think, are going in place in May of 2018, if I recall correctly. So there's still little bit of time before this kicks in, but companies are starting to get interested..

Okay, great. Thanks..

Our next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please proceed with your question..

Thanks. I guess two questions, both for Tal. On the U.S. performance, I know you had some difficult comps there, but that business probably grew slower than you've seen in the last few quarters.

Just wondering was there any difference in demand trends or anything else happening in the U.S.?.

I remind you that Q4 was a stellar quarter for Americas. We had the strong double-digit booking. We talked about it. We don't talk about the booking, but I can tell you that they had also this quarter double-digit, although both Europe and (31:02) was stronger than the U.S.

So I'll say maybe just a fluctuation between quarters are following a very, very strong Q4..

And then a previous questioner asked about long-term deferred. And if I look at that trend, it has been very, very steady growing two to three times or more faster than short-term deferred.

So there really hasn't been any fluctuation in terms of the trend of long-term growing much faster than short-term? And I'm wondering, therefore, if we could just return to talk about duration and what duration is on contracts..

It does fluctuate, but all – the reason – I can take the credit for it and say, look at the 20%, but another thing – long-term contracts are really affected by – sometimes by large transactions, and large transaction can fluctuate easily between quarters, and that's why I'm saying also look at the short term.

So this quarter was very strong in long term and short term, as well you see the same with Q4. By the way, you're right that, for the past many quarters, it was very strong, but I'm realistic to know that there can be fluctuation because you can have transactions of $20 million, $30 million value that can fluctuate between quarters.

So, yes, we had a good quarter in long term, as well we had very large transaction this quarter. You can see it also in transactions that are larger than $1 million continued to move up, but my nature is just saying that what can happen and in general it can fluctuate..

Okay. Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turits of Raymond James. Please proceed with your question..

Hi, Tal, Gil. I wanted to come back to SandBlast.

Obviously, you said that it's strong and you're selling to both new and existing, but can we talk about the financial impact as much as we can? It's being bundled in with initial sales so it wouldn't be much impact there, so how is it impacting renewals? Is it driving up renewal rates and can you give us some sense maybe about how big an impact it's actually having on billings?.

So, first, before we break to the financials, let's say, I don't know if Tal remembers all the data in her head, I can say, you can buy this part of the initial product, but it's not bundled for free.

There is always an option to buy a product, with the Next Generation Threat Prevention with SandBlast, which is the advanced Next Generation Threat Prevention, which is one layer up, so it's not given to customers for free, they choose it.

The second year, if they can, of course, decide to renew it or not and that has an even bigger impact, and we are also seeing many customers that haven't purchased the product with SunBlast a year, two years or three years ago, and are now purchasing the SunBlast for the first time as a new subscription to the product.

So, I think we're seeing a positive effect from all of that with customers. I don't have in my hand the breakdown between the specific packages, but I think they're all doing quite well..

Yeah. And I'll just say that when you look at this subscription revenues that grew 27%, then a lot of the growth is coming from people moving from the Next Generation Firewall to the Next Generation Threat Prevention. And from Next Generation Threat Prevention to Next Generation Threat Extraction, which is the highest value package.

All the Next Generation Threat Extraction packages are not bundled as part of their plans as a default, it's all of them an option to choose, and that's why all of them are a choice.

You're right that it's bundled together with a few other blades and not only the threat stimulation in there, but it's real dollars and that's why you see 27% growth in your subscription revenue line..

Okay. Thanks.

And can you – a separate question; any comments on the carrier market and progress there?.

We had some nice carrier deals actually in some parts of the world that are expanding, nothing major that I can say. The deals are all quite interesting, but I don't think that we've seen a big change in shift or the potential expansion that we can still have with the carriers..

Okay. Thanks, Gil. Thanks, Tal..

Our next question comes from the line of Philip Winslow of Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question..

Hey. Thanks, guys, for taking my question. Gil, just a question for you, and then Tal, maybe you can chime in as well.

If you look at just the range of appliances you had, wondering if you could give us just some color on just pricing and demand trends from sort of the high end to the lower end, anything that you'd call out in Q1 or in your pipeline versus what you saw last year..

I think that varies a lot because we have product launches, we have product introduction and so on. In Q1, we actually had two new models that are not necessarily the biggest model. One is kind of the mid range, one is the low end of the appliances, and they both took off very, very nicely.

And overall, in the first quarter, if there's something notable that I can mention is that mid-size – small to mid-size appliances have done extremely well. So we sold much higher number of appliances there, won many new customers, and that's a very good traction on the segment that we didn't necessarily been focused on.

Again, that doesn't change our focus. Our focus is still on the mid-size to high-end and on the major enterprise market, but we're seeing success in different aspects of the market now..

Thanks, guys..

Our next question comes from the line of Ken Talanian of Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question, Ken..

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. So, first, I was wondering if you could describe how your pipeline looks for the remainder of the year compared to your pipeline this time last year..

I don't think that we generally discuss that or that we disclose that information. I think, as you read from our projection, we're in line with our plans and we're quite optimistic about 2017..

Okay.

And second, given your launch of Check Point Infinity, I was wondering if you could give some insight as to how this might change your go-to-market strategy and, specifically, are you reducing SKUs, will you incentivize reps to sell bundles and what if any impact do you expect on your sales cycle?.

Right now, I don't think it will have a big effect on any of that. I think the fact is mainly that customers will see the value of the integrated architecture of buying multiple solutions from us. And this is consistent with what we've been doing last year as well.

So it's not that we've now started for the first time to promote the link between cloud, mobility and the network security. I think we give it a better umbrella and a better technical foundation and that's, I think, a good thing.

Now, remember, the big foundation in the management and the integration and so on that's evident in R80 and especially R80.10, the new gateway software version that's about to go to market any day now.

This is things that we are talking about for years, it's not – the software version of R80 went to the market last year, the R80.10 is about to go to market now, but this has been things that we've been promoting for a long time and vary the implementation of the new architecture..

Understood. Thank you very much..

Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani of UBS. Please proceed with your question..

Good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. Tal, a question for you about the guidance for the full year; I know it embedded some product deferral assumptions as it relates to the new appliances that you're shipping.

But I am wondering if you can help us understand what proportion of the existing installed base now has the new appliances? And the reason I'm asking is just wanted to get a sense of if there is going to be a step function, higher product deferral assumption in your guide when the installed base takes on the new appliances? And a quick follow-up if I could..

So, first, a very, very small portion of our installed base is with the new appliances. That's the potential for the future three, four, five years for the refresh opportunity with the customers. So that's in terms of our installed base. Our installed base is massive and typically it can be five, six, seven years for refresh of customers.

So that's the potential for the next few years. When it comes to the effect on the P&L that once you annualize, then you should be pretty much in line. Obviously, it depends on the percentage of the transition. And regarding that, I can't follow up anymore, it's already the fifth quarter, so it's impossible.

That's why I embedded it in the guidance to start with..

Fair enough. And I know you've done away with kind of the à la carte blade options and kind of moved strictly towards the bundled blades, but can you remind us what some of the larger blade presence is in the base and maybe quantify what proportion of your entire base has actually adopted maybe two or three plus blades? That's it from me. Thank you.

So, from the advanced blade, of course, the firewall blade and the VPN blade, everyone in our – firewall blade is used by 100%, the VPN blade is probably by very high percentage. From the more advanced blades, the IPS intrusion prevention blade is the number one. I think its adoption rate is more than 50% today. So, it's very high in the marketplace..

And when you talk about the mobile and the advanced threat protection, then this is lower, which is – that's why part of the growth – the main reason for the growth in the subscription, which is the right potential that we have there..

That's helpful. Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line of Jayson Noland of Robert W. Baird. Please proceed with your question..

Okay. Thank you. I guess I wanted to ask on Infinity. You guys are known for management of the network with the consolidated platform here, including mobile.

Does this help drive endpoint business? I know you've had product out there for a long time, but does this accelerate that part of the market?.

I think it does. I see reenergized interest in our endpoint product. And again, I think part of it is driven by the management, part of it is driven by the new SandBlast Agent that we launched last fall.

And I think SandBlast Agent has an amazing set of advanced threat prevention capability that I think are the best in the industry in terms of getting forensics, in terms of blocking sophisticated attacks and so on. So it's a real advanced tool that many customers really like.

And that from what I've heard from customers in our Check Point Experience conference, they really see the nice way of getting all the architecture together. So, in one console, they see full threat visibility. They can block the incident, they can investigate the incidents, and again, all with one system..

And....

Again, I still don't expect us to be a mainstream endpoint vendor in that respective market..

Gil, would it – are there any changes to the go-to-market that would help there? So that's a different buyer obviously sometimes and you might be able to accelerate revenue with some go-to-market additions..

Our focus right now is not on the endpoint buyer traditional anti-virus. What I do see is a change in the buyers in the industry in general.

We're seeing that more and more organizations are moving more responsibilities to central security authority and I've seen organization that for years we sold to the firewall group which was part of the network division and now, after many years, that group has moved to the security part, to the CISO or to a specialized security division.

And that really helps us with the story of consolidation and with our unified infrastructure because we can speak to one person. I think even on our conference last week, we saw more CISOs attending than ever before.

So I think we are elevating the level which we are going on the organization and, more important, these people that before were just consultants or less important, they are becoming more and more important in the buying decision..

Thank you..

Our next question comes from the line of Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please proceed with your question..

Hi. Thank you. I had two I wanted to ask, if I could. The first is on the competitive environment. Your billings growth the last two quarters has improved meaningfully over the last couple of years and this is one of your highest billings growth quarters in some time.

And yet, as we look at one of your primary competitors, even if they make the numbers that they're guiding the Street, there's been meaningful deceleration with Palo Alto in particular.

And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on why you're seeing changes in the competitive landscape?.

I can say, we invested quite a lot in 2015 and 2016 in expanding on our focus areas, where we talked about the mobility and the advance threat protection. We start to see the result of this investment. So, for us, it's clear why it's happening to us. Hopefully, we continue to execute on that.

When you talk about competitors, I think you need to ask them specifically what's going on. They have less effect. We see the subscription going up, product going down. I would have said that was expected as well, but it depends on your opinions on that and the management..

And I think we are seeing with the maturity of some of these competitors, the customers are saying we bought their product a year ago, three years ago, because it was hot and interesting and considered new. And now you realize that your product is better.

The uniform answer that I get from many, many customers is that our catch rate and the security level is much better, not to mention the management, and the management I think is known for a very long time.

Nobody has thought anything differently, but we are seeing customers that are saying, guys, that's not – again, your security level is simply much higher and that's why we like your product and that's why we switch to your product..

Okay, great..

(45:50) replacement and our customers that tested some competitive product or not just tested, but actually used them for a while and decided to standardize back on Check Point..

Okay, great. I'll ask my follow-up then if I could.

One of the previous questions was about cloud and pricing, and I realize cloud is typically priced on a different level, that is to say, usage, but how do you – when you're pricing vSEC in particular relative to the on-premise solution, how do you think about the pricing – deflationary impact associated with pricing on the cloud versus the on-premise world?.

It's actually the pricing is quite positive. In the last few weeks and few months, I did a lot of learning on how people buy the software on the cloud and what's the pricing model in our industry on the cloud.

Again, remember, the pricing models are still in their infancies, still beginning, but right now, we can sell in very competitive prices on the cloud and still make a – and still have a very positive impact on our comparable price. Now, on the cloud, there is two major models that people buy.

One is called bring your own license, in which case, they buy a license through the regular channel and so on, and the license can be a similar license to what we have today. And another one is really purchasing on the up-store of Amazon or Microsoft and so on.

In both cases, I see the pricing model works quite well, remember, that means that most of the transaction will be priced on an annuity, on a subscription basis and not on a – or not by a permanent license to start with. But still the pricing is very big, the comparable pricing is still quite positive to the existing pricing model..

Okay, all right. Thanks very much, gentlemen..

Our next question comes from the line of Erik Suppiger of JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question..

Yeah, thanks for taking the question.

I'm curious, in your cloud activity, what are customers doing with – and in particular, on AWS, what are customers doing with the AWS firewall? Are they using that at all or how do they look at that functionality versus when they use your products? Is it complementary or do they just not use it at all?.

I think it's complementary. I think, remember, every operating system today, there is a built-in firewall, on every router, there is a built-in basic firewall for the last – since before we started, for more than 25 years.

On every Linux, there is a built-in firewall and that hasn't changed the behavior of our industry because the requirement from our firewall or an enterprise grade firewall are far, far higher than the built-in pocket filter or basic firewall that exists on these products.

And that's why, by the way, today, as I mentioned, a big portion of our installed base uses things like intrusion prevention and now we are moving to the more – two higher levels of the advanced threat preventions. And I think that's the value proposition that we bring today to market.

Now, on top of that, add to it the fact that customer may have a multi-vendor environment, actually, triple, on the network, on the cloud and even in the cloud they might use different cloud environment, they will need things like auto-scaling and they will need centralized management or consistent management and not to mention that, especially, on sectors that are concerned about it, they need to standup with regulation.

So we'll need to have the report which says that all of our gateways or all of our servers are protected with the right level of security. And I think this is the level of secure – this is the level of things that we can do which the built-in firewalls don't do.

And again, this is not different then why don't you use the built-in firewall in Linux which hasn't changed our industry..

Very good. Thank you..

There are no further questions over the audio portion of the conference. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks..

Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you during the quarter at the conferences as such. And we'll look forward to hearing from you today on the phone. Take care and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks..

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time..