Check Point at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Focus on Growth and Efficiency

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ:CHKP) participated in the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. The company’s new CEO, Nadav Zafir, outlined a strategic vision focused on customer engagement and market positioning while acknowledging the need for cultural and operational shifts. The tone was optimistic yet realistic, highlighting both opportunities and challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Check Point is prioritizing a hybrid mesh platform, focusing on SASE and workspace security.
• The company aims to balance profitability with growth, leveraging AI for efficiency.
• New CEO Nadav Zafir emphasizes cultural shifts and talent infusion as growth drivers.
• The company is not significantly increasing its workforce beyond the current 7,000 employees.
• Check Point is optimistic about its competitive edge in the security market, leveraging its long-standing experience and AI capabilities.

Financial Results

• Profitability and Growth:

- Focus on areas where Check Point can be a leader, with minimal margin sacrifice.

- No significant increase in workforce planned beyond 7,000 employees.

• Product Revenue Growth:

- Acceleration in Q4 and Q1, driven by new Quantum firewall engines.

- Competitive replacements due to better performance and pricing.

• Subscription and ARR:

- Refresh cycle offers cross-selling opportunities to boost long-term subscription revenue and ARR.

Operational Updates

• Strategic Focus:

- Emphasis on hybrid mesh, workspace security, and external risk management.

- Partnerships with companies like Wizz and Illumio to enhance offerings.

• Cultural Changes:

- Shift from engineering-focused to go-to-market-oriented culture.

- Increased customer engagement and talent acquisition.

• AI Integration:

- Becoming an AI-first company to improve efficiency with products like AIOps and PlayBlocks.

• SASE and Perimeter 81:

- Perimeter 81 scalable to 60,000 seats, with focus on integration and feature parity.

Future Outlook

• Growth Levers:

- Focus on culture, talent, and profitability balance to drive growth.

- Profitability lever is the last to be activated due to difficulty in reversing it.

• SASE Market:

- Hybrid mesh approach with flexible architecture and open platform.

- Competitive advantage from 32 years of experience and threat cloud AI intelligence.

• Macro Environment:

- No significant impact observed yet, but potential future effects acknowledged.

Q&A Highlights

• SASE Cannibalization:

- SASE seen as part of a hybrid mesh platform, not cannibalizing firewall market.

• Competitive Environment:

- Consistent competition, with security as a key differentiator in the enterprise market.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a comprehensive understanding of Check Point’s strategic insights and financial performance.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: All right. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Brian Essex. I’m JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst.

Thank you all for joining us. Today, I’m really excited to have the new CEO of Checkpoint, Nadav Zafir and their CFO, Rui Golan. Before we get started, so one thing is I’ll leave ten, fifteen minutes at the end of the session for Q and A if anyone has any questions. But before we kick it off, we’ll throw it to Kip in the back to do our safe harbor.

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Hey, thanks, Brian. During the course of the presentation, there may be forward looking statements made. As with all forward looking statements, there’s lots of risks and uncertainties. If you’d like a full list and wanna get a good night’s sleep, take a peek at our risk factors in our 20 F. And as with all forward looking statements, there is no duty to update except where required by law.

Back to you, Brian.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: All right. Great. Thanks, Kipp. And Nadev, Rui, thank you very much for joining us this morning. Maybe to start, I think at breakfast we talked about your one hundred and forty nine days in, that’s the number.

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yes.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Would love to get a sense of and I know you spoke with Gil for a long period of time before you took on the role, but would love to get an understanding of your expectations going into the role and then how that’s matched with what you’ve experienced over the past one hundred and forty nine

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yes. Thanks, Brian, and thanks for having us. Good morning, all. So one hundred and forty nine days in, I spend about 50% of my time on the road speaking to over probably over close to 200 customers, over 150 channels, trying to speak to the relevant people, whether it’s the leadership or the people on the floor, met with, probably over a thousand checkpointers. So it is a good time to sort of reflect, where I think the state of the union is.

I don’t think I have major surprises. After one hundred and forty nine days, I think we have a solid, in some areas, superior product. I’m convinced, that we can block and tackle more than anybody else in the industry. But also not surprised that in terms of our voice in the market, our marketing effort, our funnel creation, our ability to put out a narrative there that is more about the attackers and our customers rather than our own products, is something that we need to improve and we need to improve, you know, imminently. Beyond that, our vision about a hybrid mesh flexible platform, a platform or an or an IT infrastructure that is the reality of most of our customers and how we solve that with the null platform, think, is resonating, which is encouraging.

There’s a lot more to do there. And finally, you know, we’ve we’ve made substantial changes, and so far so good in terms of pulling more go to market leadership into the c suite, starting to infuse new talent into the organization. Some we’ve announced, some will come in the next few months. So all in all, I think a good start. I told you over breakfast, there’s a there’s a cult Israeli movie that when they ask, you know, how do you run an Australian marathon?

The answer is you start with a sprint and then you constantly accelerate. I think that’s what we need to do. We need to move fast with a sense of urgency, and we’re just at the beginning of the journey.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. And and you sound like a very competitive person. I I I wanted to ask, you know, if you if you take a step back and you look at where Check Point was ten years ago, measured by revenue, Check Point was number one, right, within your primary peer group. Now you’ve got a few peers ahead of you from a revenue perspective. Is the goal to get back to the top of that podium?

And what is the I guess, what is your strategy for getting there and what needs to happen like in terms of what you accomplish in a given

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: I mean, looking forward, it’s I think we have different levers to accelerate our growth and our market share. Lever number one, which we’re already doing is focus. Our strategy is a little bit different or somewhat different than some of our competition. We don’t think we can be everything for everyone. So it’s a focus strategy is one example of how you use that lever.

We announced that we’re not going to be focusing on CNAP, on cloud observability capabilities and posture management. So we joined forces with Wizz under the umbrella of our philosophy of an open guard and open platform. That’s one lever. And those folks that were working on CNAP have now been repurposed to work on where we wanna be a podium player. So that’s the first lever.

The second lever, we spoke about is culture. We need, to go out there with a sense of urgency. We need to be more vocal and we need to understand that being an engineering company at heart is not enough. The idea of, you know, you’ll build it, they’ll see it and they’ll come is not necessarily enough. We need to build it, but we also need to explain what’s different about it, why it matters.

Third, is infusing new talent. And fourth, obviously, is thinking about the ratio or the balance between our profitability and our growth. And we’re using all these four levers. The last one is probably the last lever that is the profitability lever because activating it is very easy, deactivating it is much harder.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Right. Maybe we’ll touch on one of those points. And I think, you know, I’ve had several investors ask me and then another one this morning asked me on the culture piece. You’ve made a number of changes at the executive level. What are the steps you’re going to take from a cultural perspective and how I think you touched on a little bit, but how would you describe the culture maybe what it was the past few years and how you’re going to make it what you want it to be?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yes, I think number one is from a predominantly engineering company, we need to be more focused on our go to market, all the way from our narrative, our channel, our funnel creation through marketing and where we spend our time. Most of our competition is here in the center of the market, whether it’s in Boston or in New York or in the Silicon Valley or in Texas. And our headquarters is far, far away. To be here, we needed to get on a plane and cross the Atlantic. It is what it is.

We need to do it more and more. So that’s a real cultural change. The way to do that is to bring the right people on board and the way to do that is to lead from the front and that’s what we’re doing. Beyond that, it’s instilling a sense of urgency. So I’m trying to at least two customers a day, meetings for me personally.

And those meetings, we learn things and we share them, very openly, very candidly. It’s not to, it’s it’s not to criticize any specific person, but it’s to learn together, on the marketing side as an example, how do we talk more about the attackers, and the challenges that our customers are facing every day rather than talking about our own products and their feature list and why we’re doing something better than someone else’s. To give you an example, one of our ethos at Checkpoint is, prevention. We block 99.9 of zero plus ones. Now raise your hand if that means a lot to You know, it’s hard.

And it and also for practitioners, it’s hard because that means that we are saying, listen, give us a premium, because we are helping you prevent suffering, but it’s hard to prove that. What does it mean that we block 99.9% and our closest runner-up blocks 80%. What does that delta mean in real life? Now I don’t wanna walk away from that ethos because I think it’s the right ethos. In fact, when I look at where the world is going in the next few years, especially around AI, I think that prevention first, is going to be more relevant than it was before because without getting into the nitty gritty details, AI is going to make some of the detection and response capabilities.

And when you look at cyber, you’re always talking about, you know, your hygiene prevention, detection, response. Detection and response will become less relevant. And so I think we have an advantage here, but it’s not enough that we understand it. We need to be able to have the right narrative, and that narrative should go across 7,000 checkpointers and another 10,000 people, with our channels. It needs to be crisp, it needs to be direct, and it needs to be relevant to the people that are making decisions, and they need to understand why it makes a difference.

Mhmm. I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job in doing that, and I think it’s imminent to change that. Now I’m I’m not naive to think that you can sort of flip the culture overnight, but we are seeing good signs so far.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: How have things been throughout the company in terms of retention, enthusiasm? Are there other quantifiable things that you can point to to at least understand how stable and happy your your employee base is and as you kind of

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: like go through these changes? I’ll be very candid. I I I don’t think we have a retention problem, but we do intend to infuse new talent into the company and we don’t necessarily planned to have a much larger company. So, it’s imminent to get new talent. It’s our job to identify, the great experience that we have and our experienced folks who has the passion, the hunger, the capability, the flexibility, the propensity to actually change because it is a changing market.

Those that do are a great asset. Those that don’t, we need to be very empathetic and compassionate, but we need to move forward. We owe it to our customers, we owe it to our channels, we owe it to our investors, and that’s what we’re going to be doing.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. Maybe Rui, the fourth lever that Nadav mentioned was balancing the ratio of profitability and growth. Help us understand how we might be able to, I guess, understand how you’re going to manage that going forward if clearly everyone from the top down wants the company to grow faster, but you have to be aware of what you’re doing in your margins. How is this going to play out over the next few years?

Rui Golan, CFO, Check Point: I think Manav mentioned it that we are trying to focus on areas that we believe that we have the the opportunity to be a podium player. Or we’re already a podium player, or we want to be leaders there. Nada, we mentioned the Wiz partnership that we had a few months ago that we moved resources top I mean, resources from from Synap to other areas that we believe that we can focus more. I think we are doing more of that in the company. And and, you’re you’re looking on profitability, But we have today already a thing also, and Adam mentioned that we are not aiming now to increasing, if you know, the size of the company because we have already today 7,000 employees.

Mhmm. And I think the steps that are being done in the last few months, like bringing new talent, moving resources from areas that we want to less focus to areas that we want to focus more, I think that will help us also to to to show accelerate growth with minimal, I would say, with sacrifice some of the margin, but not significantly.

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: And I’ll add one more lever. How long does it take any of us to craft a thoughtful, important, sensitive email? You know? So two, three years ago, you know, it could take us half an hour. If this is, like, a really important you wanna make sure that every work throw it into Copilot.

It’ll it’ll happen in thirty seconds. We are becoming more efficient. The same is happening with coders. And so that’s another lever. We can really do more with less, and that’s one of the races that all of us are racing.

It has nothing to do with the attackers. It has nothing to do with, the product itself, but I think we can do more with less and that’s going to be one of our tasks going forward. And we need to be an AI first company everywhere.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Have you made any progress on that front yet? And I referenced IBM at their event last week talked about 40% improvement in productivity just in their FP and A group, right? Things like automating journal entries, things that are repetitive, but there’s a lot of opportunity there and customer service could be another one. Anything that you’ve done so far where you have like quantifiable, like results of deploying AI to become more efficient and productive?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yeah. And you need to separate that to what we’ve done for our customers to make them more efficient. So we have a product within our hybrid mesh platform like AIOps. You go out there and you measure the health of your posture within the network and you start doing things preemptively. Not only you do preemptive for the customer, but we can also see stuff that’s happening with other customers and translate that into a scenario.

So that’s one thing that we’ve already introduced. Then we have PlayBlocks, which allows you to save a tremendous amount of time with policy enforcement and changes. Policy enforcement and changes in large enterprise is a really, really, really hairy problem. It it it’s it’s very it’s it’s very complicated. It could be 10,000 lines of Excel that have a history of twenty years.

AI is really good at solving those problems, so that we’re doing for our customers. Inside, I don’t want to say that we have quantifiable metrics yet, we will, but anecdotally we’re seeing it all the time. You’re seeing a certain group come up with a new product in two days instead of two months, but it’s to be candidly, it’s still anecdotal for us.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. Maybe we can hit on the first lever, your focus and not being everything to everyone. How do you where are you drawing the lines in terms of where you’re going? I think at CPX, you called out a few segments like micro segmentation. You mentioned the partnership with Wizz for the segmentation piece you partnered with Illumio.

What are you going like as you kind of build the company, what areas are you going to move adjacently into? And then where are you going to draw the line and say, well, that’s not something that we’re a best of breed vendor and so we’re going to

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: put that So right now, three different areas. The main and most important is hybrid mesh. And within that, the most important thing is SASE. And we’re looking to see where we need to augment that, if it’s not organically where we can make acquisitions to supplement what we already have and and in terms of feature lists, etcetera. Then in our CloudGuard, you mentioned segmentation.

That’s that’s another area which I think we need to look at. That’s the partnership with Illumio. And we’re looking at other things within the hybrid mesh, And it’s always we always have the opportunity to either either build it, buy it, or partner, and the partner is real. It’s it’s a it’s a part of our OpenGarden philosophy. Illumio, Wizz, you’ll see more.

The the second area that we’re looking at is workspace. So at the end of the day, today, you’re buying disparate products. You have your laptop security. You have your mobile security. You have your browser security.

You have your email security. At the end of the day, from a from a practitioner solution based, you can look at it as one problem. You have your connected infrastructure. That’s the hybrid mesh. And now you have personas, humans using that connectivity to get their job done.

So we want to bundle that. Over here, we’re sort of launching that on the heels of the success of our email product, which we announced is going to cross 200,000,000 within a year. It’s not a huge number, but it’s already becoming substantial. And on the heels of that, we want to add endpoint mobile browser. So stuff that will augment that, stuff that will complement that is is on our radar.

And then finally, external risk management on the heels of the acquisition of Cyberint. The nice thing about those three areas is that not only they’re complementary, they’re also looking at different buying personas. Right? So the hybrid mesh is still more around the traditional infrastructure engineering IT folks. Workspace is a more straightforward security sort of buying persona And actually is also something that is more of a top down approach because looking at the organization from the outside in could be something that’s interesting for the Chief Risk Officer, for the general counsel.

So different buying personas and it allows us to approach our customers from different angles, not necessarily just from the IT infrastructure engineering side.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. Maybe to touch on one of those points on SASE. Now that Premier 81 is generally available, scale up to I think what 60,000 seats. Where are you in the go to market process with SASE, particularly because we’re now hearing about a lot of demand in that But from a competitive perspective, it’s very competitive. Just want to see how you’re positioning the company to compete in that SASE market and how effective you think that’s going to be?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yes. I’m going to say I’ll say three things and what’s our claim to fame and why we think we have the right to win here. Number one, it’s looking at this not as a SASE solution, but as a hybrid mesh infinity platform solution. So something which is sort of fully integrated into other connectivity tissues within the network, such as our firewalls, WAFs, SD WAN, etcetera, as one infrastructure. That’s number one.

With that, the second thing is the unique architecture. It’s more we have a flexible architecture. It allows you to consume your security in different ways. It’s not cloud only. So if you look at some of the incumbents like Zscaler, for example, yes, a good solution, but it’s cloud only.

That has its limitations. It has its limitations on prevention. It has its limitations on usability and latency, and it has its limitation on cloud cost. Because if you’re cloud only, you’re always going to the cloud even when it doesn’t make sense, from a cost performance perspective. So that’s our second angle.

And the third angle is, you know, this is an open platform. So, you know, you can use it with different products. You don’t have to you’re not confined into one platform, you can have multiple platforms that work together. And I think those three angles is sort of our play here. As an example, we have thirty two years of experience.

We have like almost 100,000 customers. What that means is that we and we also have a threat cloud AI intelligence feed that we can actually feed into each one of the node in this hybrid mesh environment. From a philosophical perspective, this is the way to approach uncertainty about the future through the idea of a complex adaptive system where every node in this hybrid mesh, sometimes we’re talking about millions of nodes, has the same intelligence, the same capabilities as the whole central system. Every node can connect to every other node. Every node can import and export data and knowledge, and the whole system as a system is constantly adapting to what’s happening in the outside world and to the threat level.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. And if we think about, you know, how the partnership with Wizz is rolling out, relatively new. And if we think about what’s going on with your customers within CloudGuard migrating over versus new customers coming in because of Wizz, where are we in each of those processes and how meaningful can this be?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: I think it’s early innings. We just announced this a couple of months ago and there’s a lot of work still to do there. But number one is the integration, number two is the migration, number three is the cross selling. So we’re working on all three. I think positive signs and all.

Time will tell you if we can actually fulfill all the potential there. When you think about cross sell, there are different options, right? We can go to a customer and say, hey, here’s why you should migrate from our Synap to the Wizz platform. Here’s why it makes sense to you. Is a very we’re getting very positive stuff.

The other thing is, hey, you don’t have, you’re using a third party. This is why you should think about Wizz and vice versa with customers that don’t have our hybrid mesh. Here’s why users consider our hybrid mesh. The one plus one here gives you real value.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: And is that is that does that lead into a situation where your customer only needs to manage one relationship? Like, what is it from the customer perspective? Because now you’re gonna have like two different vendors in that cloud security market.

Unidentified speaker: You want

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: to address that?

Rui Golan, CFO, Check Point: Yeah. I think in the end, today, I mean, it’s still not it’s not done yet. But today, Wisk, I mean, if someone would like to buy Synap of Wisk so he can buy it through our null platform, In the end, they will get the support from both us and and Wizz. It’s gonna have be integrated together, but the the I mean, the goal is that one person would be able to support both Synap Wizz because we are we build a team that will be designated specifically to this integration in all areas, in the r and d, in the go to market, in the support that we are we’ll work together with Wiz and see how we can in the end, we don’t want that the customer will be in a position that we need to call to separate separate companies in order to get the support. But again, it’s still not something to it’s still not done yet.

Still the disintegration is something going in process, but that’s the goal. Got it.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. I think we have about ten minutes left. I wanted to open up for questions. If anyone has a question, please raise your hand and wait for a mic and we’ll get you a mic. Otherwise, I have more questions.

Okay. I wanted to dig in on Perimeter 81 a little bit as well. I think now that it’s at scale, what are the next steps for that platform as we kind of like go through the rest of the year?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: So in the short run, it’s three things. I think we’re already in a position where everything that we can add to the perimeter to one SASE solution is in. So when you roll out SASE from Checkpoint today, you’re not just getting the connectivity layer, but you’re also getting the policy that can be propagated into every node. You’re getting the threat intelligence into every node. I think that’s already done.

What what we still need to do, and this is a process that we’re putting a lot of effort on, is two things. Number one is some of the feature parity that we still have, especially when you look at enterprise. Some of the features that are necessary for some of the enterprises is still not there. We’re looking to close most of these gaps by the end of the year. And the second thing that we still need to do is scale.

You mentioned some numbers. I think today for enterprise, we are ready for very large enterprise. We are still in a process of finalizing some of the R and D that we need to do for Perimeter eighty one. And the last thing is the incorporation of Perimeter eighty one and SASE into our large sales force. So not just as a standalone sales force, but as a part of the general sales motion at Checkpoint.

So instead of having 100 sellers, they’ll have 1,000.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Great. And the next one wanted to ask about your quantum product cycle. So last year, which was pretty exciting at CPX, you announced 10 new quantum firewall engines. And now those have gone through the certification processes at enterprises. And I think we saw in 4Q nice acceleration in product revenue growth in 1Q even better.

How much of that was product cycle driven? How much of that was refresh cycle driven? And are you seeing any refresh benefit from peers that are talking about it in the market?

Rui Golan, CFO, Check Point: So I think if I’m looking since we launched these new appliances, I think still most of this product refresh coming from existing customers that are replacing the old appliances with our new appliances. But definitely, see more and more competitive replacement with these new appliances. I have to say still not enough. But definitely our position ourselves with these new appliances in much more attractive compared to the peers with much better performance, much more the pricing is much more attractive. So I think we do see the results, and we see more competitive replacement.

I think we can do even better there. Mhmm. But and I and I and I think every this kind of refresh cycle is also a significant opportunity for us to do more cross sell. Mhmm. Because every opportunity that we are doing today, refresh, even of existing customers, we ourselves our field will will try to sell the email security.

We’ll try to sell together with the the SASE. Yeah. So it’s a huge opportunity that’s coming with this refresh cycle. So that’s definitely an opportunity that we need to leverage. And and that in on the long term should affect positively.

If it will work well, should work positively will affect positively our subscription, our ARR.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: You mentioned price per performance. Who are you typically seeing competitively? And what is that pricing environment like? I mean, I think some of your peers being relatively aggressive on price. How do you manage that competitive situation when something like that happens?

Rui Golan, CFO, Check Point: So I think the competition is there for many years on the firewall. It’s not I don’t think that we didn’t see any any significant change in the last, I would say, twelve months. I know that we got the we held the announcement of our competitors about platformization and and might be more aggressive around the discount. I do have to say that when I’m looking on our specifically on the Refill cycle, I didn’t see any significant change in the discounts there. Again, I think we also launched it with much better performance.

So we are in the end, our customer wants the best product. They want the best security. Yeah. And I think that’s that’s why I mean, when you are looking on our installed base, which is enterprise and large enterprise, they they care about the security. They don’t want to they they want to get the best security, and they are willing even to pay a little bit more if they can get the best security.

So on the referral cycle, I don’t see any significant change on on the pricing.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay. And then maybe I didn’t ask the macro question. From a macro perspective, are you seeing any pressure year to date? And then maybe part B of that question is what about April to now like April to now, past month and a

Rui Golan, CFO, Check Point: half or so? I can start and then Adaf can end. I don’t see any I mean, I don’t see any change since we are now what we announced in when we announced the earnings, I think in April, like three weeks ago. I don’t see any change that’s coming from the macro. I mean, we had just last week, we had our sales leadership in Israel, and we had discussion around the around the around, of course, this quarter.

They don’t see any as of now, we don’t see any any change in the behavior. Again, it might be changed in the next few weeks. I also remind us all that most of the deals are coming in the last week of the quarter. Mhmm. So, again, right now, they don’t see any change.

But, you know, it’s something that we we took into account in our guidance because of this some kind of uncertainty that we see in the market. But as of today, we don’t see any change there. And nothing from your

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: end in terms of conversation?

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Really, look, we’re in volatile times. We wake up every morning to bad news, good news, changes. It’s just the nature of the times we’re living in right now. We we don’t see any significant impact yet. In fact, volatile times usually cyber becomes even more imminent.

So, so far, we’ve been insulated, I think, from some the effects of this. But obviously, we’re going to be affected from macro just like anybody else. So keeping our eyes wide open, but haven’t seen anything dramatic so far.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. Thank you. Any last questions from the audience? Maybe if you go wait for a mic, she’s coming up right behind you. Otherwise, I’ll have to repeat the question.

Unidentified speaker: Just going back to SASE, how cannibalistic is the SASE opportunity? Or do you see it being to your firewall market over the next few years? So as customers are going through the refresh cycle, maybe for campus or for your enterprise firewalls, Are people just replacing that with SASE instead? Just curious of what you’re seeing.

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Yeah. No. I saw SASE for a hybrid mesh platform vision is critical. I don’t think that people are replacing their firewalls, but they’re looking at a at an infrastructure solution. And that’s where the this idea of a hybrid mesh comes in.

A hybrid mesh has, data centers, branch offices, multi cloud, remote workforce, and you need to provide an infrastructure for all of that. And that’s where SASE comes in. I do agree that it does make sense for customers that are looking to migrate into SASE from their traditional solutions. They are thinking about what is what kind of a vendor relationship do they want. You know, do you wanna get a different SASE provider than a a your firewall provider?

The answer is it might make sense to bundle it. And although I’m not a fan of one size fits all consolidation, there are areas and this is one of them where you do want to consolidate. So that’s one of the reasons that SASE is so important for us, not just for accelerating growth, but also for our existing installed base.

Brian Essex, JPMorgan’s Security Software Analyst, JPMorgan: Got it. Super helpful. With that, I think we’re about out of time. So thank you everyone for joining us and thank you Nadam and Rui. Thank you.

Really appreciate it.

Nadav Zafir, CEO, Check Point: Thanks folks. Thanks Brian. Thanks.

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