Zscaler Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
June 1, 2023

There are 13 speakers on the call.

Operator

For standing by, and welcome to the Zscaler Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. In the interest of time and fairness, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. You may get back in the queue as time allows.

Operator

In order to get into the queue, you simply will need to press star 11 on your telephone. If you wish to remove yourself As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Mr. Bill LaToya, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Zscaler Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. On the call with me today are Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO and Remo Canessa, CFO. Please note that we have posted our earnings release and a supplemental financial schedule to our Investor Relations website. Unless otherwise noted, All numbers we talk about today will be on an adjusted non GAAP basis. You will find the reconciliation of GAAP to the non GAAP financial measures in our earnings release.

Speaker 1

I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will contain forward looking statements, including but not limited to the company's anticipated future revenue, Calculated billings, operating performance, gross margin, operating expenses, operating income, net income, free cash flow, dollar based net retention rate, future hiring decisions, remaining performance obligations, income taxes, earnings per share, our objectives and outlook, Our customer response to our products and our market opportunity. These statements and other comments are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to risk and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control. These forward looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. For a more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the SEC as well as in today's earnings release.

Speaker 1

I would like to inform you that we'll be attending the following upcoming events in June. Bank of America Global Tech Conference in San Francisco on June 7th Canner's Security and Infrastructure Conference on June 9th, and we will also host an investor briefing focused on our latest innovations at our Zenith Live Conference on June 15. Now, I'll turn the call over to Jay.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Bill. We delivered strong 3rd quarter results with all financial metrics above the high end of the guidance we provided last quarter. On a year over year basis, revenue grew by 46%, billings grew by 40% and current billings grew by 44%. Our new business grew significantly across various industry verticals and we had approximately half of our revenue come from outside the U. S.

Speaker 2

We have a strong and loyal base of customers with gross retention rates in the high 90s. We have a disciplined approach to growth. And once again, our operating income more than doubled on a year over year basis with operating margins now exceeding 15%. While we continue to operate under tighter economic conditions, I believe the comprehensive functionality of our 0 Trust Exchange platform, Our strong execution and our customer first approach will enable us to navigate this macro backdrop and deliver on our guidance. Our consultative sales process enables our account teams to adapt to the changing business environment and stay close to our customers, especially at the C level.

Speaker 2

We are partnering earlier with CXOs To jointly create compelling CFO ready business cases that have clear ROI and payback periods. As our Q3 results demonstrate, this high touch engagement is helping get deals across the finish line. Our go to market engine enables us to close many large multiyear multi product deals. We are providing increased guidance For the full year, which we believe balances our business optimism and macroeconomic uncertainties. A few quarters ago, we noted that customers were increasingly scrutinizing their projects and budgets due to macro conditions.

Speaker 2

We've seen this elevated level of scrutiny continue in Q3. Nevertheless, we see high priority initiatives still moving forward. In my conversation with hundreds of IT executives, cybersecurity remains their number one IT priority. Traditional network security based on firewalls and VPNs cannot handle the complexity of safeguarding enterprises In what has become a work from anywhere world, given the explosion in ransomware and high profile data breaches, IT leaders are looking to phase out cash flow and mode security to adopt 0 trust architecture. Moreover, C level leaders from around the globe are telling me that the technical debt of the legacy network and security point products impedes progress and slows down business operations.

Speaker 2

Our business value message is resonating with customers. Our 0 Trust Exchange offers better security and user experience, while substantially reducing cost and IT complexity Compared to legacy networking and security, by consolidating Point products and embracing 0 Trust with Zscaler, Our customers are modernizing their security and increasing productivity, which gives them the competitive edge they need to succeed In today's rapidly evolving business environment, we also partner with many tech leaders to deliver easy, Jointly integrated solutions for customers, which increases our business value and creates go to market leverage for us. Our current marketing campaign called Beyond the Premier is a great example of the successful field collaboration With our tech partner CrowdStrike that is increasing our pipeline. In today's environment, our strategy is to double down on customer success. From presales to deployment and customer success management, we have built our organization to deliver measurable outcomes at the CXO level.

Speaker 2

We made a number of investments in customer success services, technical account managers, partner services and certification of partners, which together will help our customers move faster towards realizing business value. We now have 400 customers With greater than $1,000,000 in ARR, including over 35 customers exceeding $5,000,000 in ARR. In Q3, our new logo business grew approximately 20% year over year. Our proven experience at scale Makes us a partner of choice for customers pursuing their Zero Trust security journey. We have a blueprint for delivering greater value, And our net retention rate has again exceeded 125%.

Speaker 2

Happy Customers Buy More And our net promoter score of over 70 is a testament to our strong relationship with our customers. As we have indicated before, We have a 6x upsell opportunity with our existing customers for protecting their users. Our engineering team is innovating at a rapid pace and has expanded our comprehensive platform from securing users to securing workloads as well as securing IoT and OT. As I mentioned before, customers Increasingly buying Zscaler for users with bundles ZIA, ZPA and ZDx together. Let me highlight one such platform deal in the quarter.

Speaker 2

In an exciting upsell win, a fast growing global bank in APJ upgraded to Zscaler for users bundle for 150,000 users after deploying ZIA last year. With this upgrade, this customer is significantly reducing time to open new branches by 50% and eliminating the need for firewalls and MPLS network services. We are now a strategic partner to them as they continue to expand their footprint and transform into a cloud centric organization. This customer said It is the first time they have seen a security vendor that understands their business needs and aligns its solution to address them. With this latest purchase, this customer's ARR surpassed $10,000,000 This is So an example of the geographic diversity of our business outside the U.

Speaker 2

S. Today, we serve 8 Out of the 10 largest financial services and diversified insurance companies in the world outside of China, Over the past few quarters, I observed that analysts and investors often equate ZPA with VPN replacement. This is simply not true. ZPA replaces the entire inbound DMZ and ZPA is often purchased for all employees. In fact, over half of our ZPA customers have purchased ZPA services for all employees, hence delivering 0 trust whether they work in the office or at home.

Speaker 2

In Q3, ZPA was an area of strong growth and we saw large new logo deals that landed with ZPA. Let me highlight 2 such deals. A Fortune 100 logistics company made a 4 year multimillion dollar ACV purchase of ZPA and ZDx For 100,000 users, ZPA provides 0 trust application access architecture for their employees, partners and suppliers as it consolidates multiple point products, including multiple VPNs, load balancers, VDIs and dedicated private network services. As a result, ZPA is expected to generate a 300% ROI for this customer. In another ZPA Land deal, a global 300 tech manufacturing company made a 3 year 7 figure ACV commitment For ZPA and ZDx, for all 30,000 employees, cybersecurity was a top priority As their IP software development and manufacturing was being actively targeted by nation state actors and hackers.

Speaker 2

Another aspect of our market not well understood by investors is that scale and performance are paramount considerations to customers in the real world. When you are providing in line inspection, you cannot have a trade off between performance and security. Given our large opportunity and our success in the market, it is not surprising to see a number of vendors claiming that they have the same capabilities As we do, they built the products using something known as service function chaining in order to reduce their time to market. The reality is service chaining for inline traffic inspection using microservices results in poor performance. We are effectively trying to scale low performance.

Speaker 2

Our unique architecture with our patented single scan multi action technology Enables us to deliver comprehensive security at high performance and scale. We secure over 40,000,000 users from some of the largest global brands and we surpassed 300,000,000,000 transactions daily. We are the largest in line security cloud and no one comes close to us. Customers cannot afford to risk the mission critical operations with immature offerings from unproven vendors. Let me highlight a deal which showcases the scale of our platform.

Speaker 2

In a large SSE win, a global 30 healthcare insurance company purchased CPA and ZDx for 450,000 users and ZIA for 430,000 users. The incumbent CASB provider could not scale to even 5% of the employees when TLS inspection was turned on. At this customer, we are consolidating dozens of point products from a handful of vendors including DLP, CASB, web Our integration with Microsoft E5 suite across ZIA, ZPA and ZDx It was also an important decision factor for them. In addition, the customer will use Vscaler to rapidly integrate New acquisitions in weeks rather than months that are required by legacy network security architecture. Next, let me highlight a deal that was led by data protection.

Speaker 2

In our largest win in the transportation vertical, A Global50 company purchased the ZIA transformation bundle plus ZDX and advanced data protection suite For 165,000 users, Zscaler was chosen over CASB vendor because of our best in class capabilities In DLP, CASB, browser isolation, SSPM and SaaS supply chain security. And of course, Our proven cloud scale and resilience was a big factor. This deal started with data protection and quickly expanded to include web proxy, Firewall and SandBox and to implement direct to cloud architecture across their 6,500 locations. We see more customers buying our data protection along with ZIA and replacing their existing CASB point products. As these deals show, customers are embracing our expanded platform, including our 2 emerging product pillars, zdx for digital user experience and Zscaler for workloads.

Speaker 2

These emerging products are on track to meet our full year target This quarter, we had an upsell deal with a global 200 bank headquarter in APJ They purchased Zscaler for workloads for 70,000 workloads in a multi cloud environment. As an existing ZIA customer, It was easy and seamless for them to roll out Workload Protection, which increased their annual spend with us by 35%. We are also starting to close larger deals with our federal government customers as the Zero Trust deployments move beyond the initial land deals. A cabinet level agency purchased ZI and ZPA for 110,000 users to cover all of its sub agencies. After a thorough evaluation, we are standardizing on Zscaler to consolidate multiple point products across the agency And to comply with the President's executive order, which mandates federal agencies to adopt 0 Trust principles, Our highly scalable and reliable platform and our highest FedRAMP authorizations for both ZI and ZPA Have been key differentiators in this win.

Speaker 2

Having landed 12 of the 15 cabinet level agencies, we have plenty of opportunity to expand further with these very large organizations. To take our customer centric innovation to the next level, we welcome Shyam Nair as our new CTO, who will lead our R and D teams. Shyam has extensive experience in leading and scaling engineering and product development teams There are accelerated innovation cycles at Salesforce and Microsoft. He was a driving force in scaling the AI powered customer engagement platform at Salesforce, which is critical to the next phase of our AI journey. Let me highlight a few examples of how we are leveraging AIML to deliver better cyber protection today.

Speaker 2

Our first acquisition in 2018 was an AIML company. We leveraged the technology Together with Zscaler data to deliver far better detection for 0 day attacks. This resulted in reducing the number of files being sent to our sandboxing engine by 80%, reducing time to detection and improving user experience. ZDx, our digital experience service was launched 3 years ago. It was built from the ground up to leverage AIML Do not just show where performance is degraded, but what caused the issue.

Speaker 2

The data protection advancements we launched In October 2022, leveraged AIML to classify unstructured documents for policy enforcement Sure that customers can use AI applications safely. If their employees submit sensitive data to chat GPT like applications, Our DLP technology detects it and blocks it. While plenty of AI apps like ChatGPT, GPT-four, Bard And Bedrock use public data. AI powered cybersecurity for enterprises requires their own private data. Based on a proxy architecture, Zscaler's 0 Trust Exchange is like a private switchboard for all communication for users, workloads And devices that captures all communication logs, a whopping 300,000,000,000 logs per day.

Speaker 2

These are not DNS logs These are complete logs that have structured and unstructured data, including the full URL providing trillions of signals per day. Zscaler has AI experts and data scientists and the most valuable anonymized private data to customize and effectively train LLM models for the security domain. Imagine a world where our customers will know that they are about to be breached before they are breached, so they can proactively prevent the attack. Using AI, I believe Zscaler has the opportunity to predict Most of today's ransomware and other sophisticated attacks on our customers. We plan to launch a number of innovations, including many For AIML and Zenith Live, our Annual Cloud Summit in mid June in Las Vegas, I invite you to join us.

Speaker 2

In closing, we believe that we are still in the early stages of a significant market opportunity To disrupt 30 years of traditional network security and capture a large share of our $72,000,000,000 addressable market, Our Zidolt Trust Exchange is built on a unique architecture that securely connects users, devices and applications Using business policies regardless of their location, we believe our 10 plus year track record of running a massive inline cloud That has to be highly reliable and available makes Zscaler the go to platform for vendor consolidation, Cost savings, increased user productivity and better cyber protection. We remain focused on creating shareholder value by driving customer centric innovation, new business growth and increased profitability. Now, I'd like to turn over the call to Remo for our financial results.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Jay. Revenue in Q3 was $419,000,000 Up 46% year over year and up 8% sequentially. ZPA product revenue was approximately 20% of total revenue, Growing 66% year over year. From a geographic perspective, Americas represented 54% of revenue, EMEA was 31% And APJ was 15%. Our total calculated billings in Q3 grew 40% year over year to $482,000,000 Until we get more certainty around the macro environment, we believe looking at total billings on a sequential basis can be a relevant measure of our billings performance On a sequential basis, billings declined 2% quarter over quarter, which is better than our normal seasonality.

Speaker 3

Our calculated current billings grew 44% year over year. Our remaining performance obligations Our RPO grew 36% from a year ago to $3,023,000,000 The current RPO is approximately 50% of the total RPO. Our dollar based net retention rate was once again above 125%. While good for our business, our increased success selling bigger bundles, selling multiple pillars from the start and faster upsells within a year Can reduce our dollar based net retention rate in the future. This is not a metric we try to optimize quarter to quarter, which could lead to variability on a quarterly basis.

Speaker 3

At the end of Q3, we had 400 customers with greater than $1,000,000 in ARR, up 39% from a year ago. The continued strength of this metric speaks to the strategic role we play in our customers' digital transformation initiatives. We also ended the quarter with 2,432 customers with greater than $100,000 in ARR. Turning to the rest of our Q3 financial performance, total gross margin of 80.2% compares to 80.4% in the prior quarter And 80.6% in the year ago quarter, higher public cloud usage for emerging products drove the year over year change in gross margins. Our total operating expenses increased 3% sequentially and 33% year over year to $272,000,000 primarily due to higher compensation expenses.

Speaker 3

Operating margin of 15.3% increased approximately 600 basis points year over year. Following our optimization efforts in Q2, we're seeing higher efficiency and supporting roles across the departments. Our free cash flow margin was 18%. We continue to expect our data center CapEx to be around the high single digit percentage of revenue for the full year. We ended the quarter with over $1,970,000,000 in cash, cash equivalents and short term investments.

Speaker 3

Next, let me share some observations about the macro environment and our framework for guidance. From our perspective, the global macro environment remains uncertain and customers continue to scrutinize large deals. We're seeing deals getting larger as customers are trying to consolidate more and accelerate their security transformation around our 0 trust exchange. Customers are expanding their commitments with us from a targeted use case to a much broader platform centric approach. While good for our business, larger deals take longer to close as customers introduce more checks and reviews.

Speaker 3

In addition, in select instances, we enable new strategic customers to ramp into larger subscription commitments. Typically, these ramp deals reduce our 1st year billings, but will grow into a higher annual run rate level in the 2nd year. We are entering Q4 with a record pipeline and our customer engagements remain strong. However, predicting close rates in any 90 day period Has become more challenging in this environment. Our guidance assumes that new business will take longer to close over the remainder of the fiscal year in view of the macro.

Speaker 3

As a result, we're assuming a slightly lower close rate in Q4 compared to Q3. We will continue to balance growth and profitability. In our outlook for Q4, we intend to deliver operating margin expansion of more than 400 basis points year over year. With that in mind, let me provide our guidance for Q4 fiscal 2023. As a reminder, these numbers are all non GAAP.

Speaker 3

For the Q4 of fiscal 2023, we expect revenue in the range of $429,000,000 The $431,000,000 reflecting a year over year growth of 35% to 36%, gross margins of approximately 80%. I would like to remind investors that a number of our emerging products, including ZDX and Zscaler for workloads, We'll initially have lower gross margins than our core products. We are currently managing the emerging products for time to market and growth, not optimizing them for gross margins. In addition, we'll continue to invest in our cloud infrastructure as we scale with the growing demand. Operating profit in the range of $69,000,000 to $70,000,000 net other income of $13,000,000 Income taxes of $6,000,000 Earnings per share of approximately $0.49 assuming 157,000,000 fully diluted shares.

Speaker 3

Please note that starting the fiscal 2023, we adopted the new accounting standard, which requires the use of the if converted method for calculating EPS. To account for our convertible notes, you will need to add back $360,000 and quarterly interest expense. For the full year fiscal 2023, we expect revenue in the range of $1,591,000,000 to $1,593,000,000 or year over year growth of approximately 46 percent calculated billings in the range of 1.9 $74,000,000,000 to $1,978,000,000 or year over year growth of 33% to 34%. Operating profit in the range of $224,000,000 to $225,000,000 Our guidance reflects approximately 400 basis points of Operating margin improvement compared to last year. Income taxes of $21,000,000 Earnings per share in the range of 1.6 $3 to $1.64 assuming approximately 156,000,000 fully diluted shares.

Speaker 3

As noted earlier, to account for our convertible notes In EPS, you will need to add back $1,400,000 in annual interest expense. We remain confident in our ability to capture our large market opportunity while increasing profitability. We'll balance growth and profitability based on how our business is growing. The recurring nature of our Business model gives us good visibility on top line revenue and allows us to adapt quickly to changes in market conditions to deliver On our operating profit and margin goals, with a large market opportunity and customers increasingly adopting the broader platform, We'll continue to make disciplined investments to position us for long term growth. Operator, you may now open the call for questions.

Operator

Certainly. And one moment for our first question. Also, we'd like to remind you that please limit yourself to one question, you may get back in the queue as time allows. Our first question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick from Deutsche Bank. Your question please.

Speaker 4

Excellent. Thank you so much guys for taking the question and congrats On a strong Q3, especially in light of all the craziness going on in this world. Jay, I wanted to ask you about The U. S. Federal opportunity really seems like you've got a number of good things happening there.

Speaker 4

You're now in 12 or 15 cabinet level agencies. Can you double click on the opportunity and pipeline ahead? And maybe talk just more about your strategy in public sector more generally, not just Fed, but Sled and maybe international government as well. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Bren. As we have been saying for the last several years, We made early investments in federal certification, federal income on some of the highest level of certifications. In fact, We use the same certification to get what's known as state ramp certification that states require. So we have very strong presence in a number of At state wide level, we've done well there. On the federal front, as we said, We got early lands and got 12 of 15 agencies, but now they're beginning to do full rollout and that's what we're beginning to see.

Speaker 2

And it's being also helped by White House guidelines, 0 Trust implementation and of course certifications are helping. We created a public sector vertical some time ago that covers U. S. Federal as what I said part of it. So very happy to see the performance of both.

Speaker 2

We have a strong pipeline for federal sector sorry for public sector for Q4 and We feel good about it. It was natural for us to expand beyond U. S. And what we've done is looked at the West Friendly nations are NATO friendly nations who depend upon FedRAMP certifications for protecting their federal governments and we have a Pretty good degree of engagement with those countries and we expect to share more success with you in next year and beyond.

Speaker 4

Excellent, Jay. Thank you so much for the color.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg from RBC. Your question please.

Speaker 3

Great. Thanks for taking my questions guys and congrats on the strong results. Jay, for you, You spent some time talking about generative AI and the ability to monetize it with large data sets. I'm just curious, how do you think about A couple of years from now, are we going to be able to see that generative AI was actually a tailwind to growth? And perhaps Could there be additional pricing, perhaps consumption element that could support LLMs, expanded usage in the future?

Speaker 2

Yes, Matt, all of my comments. First of all, AI is being kind of used in some of the current products To do better threat detection, better data protection and the like, that's number 1. Number 2, as AIML gets picked up, There will be bigger cyber risks. It's a race with bad guys. They'll be able to do some of the more sophisticated attacks A lot more easily than they can do today.

Speaker 2

That means companies like Zscaler will need to step up to provide protection against such And you know the protection requires, so to do good stuff with AIML, you need 3 things, good data scientists, You need large language models and you need high quality large volumes of data. While many companies can hire data scientists And large language models are becoming open source and will probably be available more easily. The data will become the new IP, the new value to entry. Zscaler with 300,000,000,000 logs Per day and trillions of signals, we have probably the most precious private data and that we anonymize and feed it to our large language model to give us an advantage that I believe other competitors would not have. These things While they enhance the functionality, but expect us to have new SKUs, new products that'll give us Plenty of upsell opportunity, so I expect AIML to expand our TAM.

Speaker 5

Thanks a lot, Jay.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question Comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski from Wells Fargo. Your question please.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you and congrats on another amazing quarter. I wanted to ask about, I guess, I mean, a number of questions here, but I guess, I'll go with the one question on the ramp deals. Something you started talking about at the start of the year. And it seems if I'm understanding this correctly that Right now, what we're seeing is the headwind piece of those ramp deals.

Speaker 6

And so you're not getting any benefit really from those. And I guess, when those start to anniversary after year 1, that's when you start to see a tailwind from The ramp deals when those customers move to more of a full price for their subscription. If you could just walk us through sort of the timing of When you're seeing that shift from headwind to tailwind from these ramp deals? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. I mean, it's a great question, Andy. I'll take it. I take a look at ramp deals in Q3 of last year and Q3 of this year. The percentage amounts are the same.

Speaker 3

So there's really no headwind Forward tailwinds related to the ramp deals. Ramp deals started coming in a few years ago and now That's basically pretty much the same on a year over year basis. I do expect ramp deals to go forward as we go forward. If you take a look at basically the duration, the billings duration, our growth rate was 44% short term. That basically was related to duration.

Speaker 3

The duration that we had in Q3 of last year Was at the high end of our 10 to 14 month range. And this year, the duration basically was slightly above the midpoint. So ramps did not create basically the positive impact to our billings, short term billings. It was really duration.

Speaker 6

Got it. Thanks, Raimo. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 5

No problem.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Joel Fishbein from Tuohy Securities. Your question please.

Speaker 7

Hi. Thanks for taking the question and again congrats on the margin outperformance here and expense discipline. So I guess a question for Remo, and I know you addressed it a little bit on the call, but I'd love to take a little bit step further about the methodology you consider And making sure that you're not sacrificing growth as you continue to expand margins at this pretty impressive level. It's going to be a balancing act and I know you have some levers there that you're pulling, but it looks like it's got to be pretty difficult. I'd love to just understand that or

Speaker 3

peel the onion back on that. Yes. From our perspective, When you take a look at the market size that we talked about at our Analyst Day a few years ago, it's a $72,000,000,000 market for our addressable market. It's Much bigger than that. You take a look at where we're in the $1,500,000,000 or so The penetration into this market, our ability to upsell also 6x that still remains.

Speaker 3

We will balance profitability and top line growth. Our focus is still top line growth. But if you take a look at as you called out the margin expansion, 600 basis points, margin expansion in Q3, 400 basis points margin expansion for the full year, that's outstanding, but that's the model that we talked about. When your top line slows down, you're going to get that natural leverage. I want to make sure that our investors recognize We feel that we are in a great position to move forward.

Speaker 3

We're going to continue to invest, and we're going Balance basically top line growth and operating profitability. Having said that, to give you more Clarity related to fiscal 2024, current street consensus is about 15.5% operating profitability. I think a good place for The Street to be fiscal 2024, just to give you kind of a framework, is in that 15.5% to 16% range. I do believe that gives us plenty of room to invest and really to continue to capture this market.

Speaker 7

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question from Barclays. Your question please.

Speaker 4

Okay. Hey guys, thanks for taking my question here. Jay, maybe this question is for you. First of all, the numbers speak for themselves. I wondered if you could just address the competitive backdrop a little bit.

Speaker 4

Certainly, it doesn't appear in the numbers again, but I know that there was some noise out there with competitive quadrant stuff. Wanted to see if you just had any views on that. And more importantly, whether you've seen that maybe make its way into customer conversations at all?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Saket. So regarding the Magic Quadrant, I believe that customers are the real judge and I'll give you three points why I believe They view Zscaler as a real leader. Number 1, as you said, they're voting us by spending on Zscaler. In fact, in Gartner's Pure Insight ratings, which is a customer survey done by Gartner, Zscaler is the only MQ leader who is in number 1 in 8 Gartner's categories. So they have 8 categories.

Speaker 2

We are number 1 in 8 of them, that's wonderful. And also, we have expanded our vision far beyond just SSC for users. We do SSC for workloads, IoT, OT, B2B and all the like. There have been a number of conversations that I had with customers, as you know, I talked to 100 and 100 of customers. I can tell you more than a dozen at Please have asked me, hey, what is this MQ?

Speaker 2

How could this show up? I said, I don't know. You are the judge. So is it impacting our performance? No.

Speaker 2

Is it impacting our engagement? No. I think we're focused on Building, delivering, keeping our customers happy. Our NPS score sits north of 80. So very happy with what you're doing and we'll keep on executing.

Speaker 4

Very helpful. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question Comes from the line of Sterling Auty from MoffettNathanson. Your question please.

Speaker 8

Yes, thanks. Hi guys. Jay, you talked about the success and kind of the go to market function and customer success teams. I wonder if you could just highlight for us Remind us the timing of when you did your big hires, where you are in the capacity of your sales force and what the hiring might look like going forward Extend

Speaker 5

the durability of the growth that you're seeing currently.

Speaker 2

Yes. At a broad go to market level, Our goal is to make sure we keep on hiring at the right pace in broad go to market team as well as some of the takeoff teams that help us push forward some of the new product. We did Moderate from the hiring as we saw the market come down quite in the past couple of quarters. Do you want to lose give some more color to it?

Speaker 3

Yes. From a capacity perspective, we were in good shape. When we did the we reduced our work At the end of Q2, one of the things we talked about is we're still going to prioritize basically quota carrying heads and R and D. That's still the case. We are in a hiring mode.

Speaker 3

We'll continue to hire. One of the things I've mentioned, Sterling, is that Not lost on us is that this is a huge market opportunity. We're going to invest. We'll continue to invest in hiring and R and D Throughout the company for that matter, but really what we did in Q2 was to better position ourselves to make the proper hires going forward and that's what we're doing.

Speaker 5

Makes sense. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of John Fauci from Guggenheim Securities. Your question please. Thank you.

Speaker 9

So this quarter was, as people have said and you So you preannounced it. It was really a strong quarter. And looking at the numbers, it looks like real clean results. It's nice to see that. But it's also odd to see that in this environment.

Speaker 9

And you guys have talked about that things are the difficult environment has continued. So I'm just trying to figure out like what changed for you guys this quarter relative to the past two quarters. Not that They were you struggled more in the last two quarters, at least from our measures of new ACV signings. And this quarter was really strong. I mean, was it I mean, you did talk about larger deals.

Speaker 9

Were there any like sort of anomalous large deals out there? Or is it just really just you guys Buckled up and are executing better. What happened? What changed?

Speaker 2

So this quarter was strong across all areas. Americas and APJ were particularly strong on a year over year basis. And last quarter, we said some of the large deals over deals in Americas were taking longer to close. We also said those deals were not cost, but just delayed and we did close good number of those deals. From a vertical perspective, it was very well diversified.

Speaker 2

Strong verticals for federal, for financial services, healthcare And transportation, our large and major segment did well. We highlighted a number of 100,000 plus user deals. So the fundamentals of business are very strong. Customers are not going to delay cyber As a priority, it is a priority. Cost saving is a big priority as well and we do well in both areas, Cyber as well as cost saving.

Speaker 2

I can tell you when it comes to cyber companies, you're probably the only company that delivers Significant ROI because we are actually eliminating a bunch of point products. So it is fitting well. It's A tougher market, there's more scrutiny, but our foundation is strong and our pipeline is strong.

Speaker 3

Remo? Yes. I'll echo what Jay mentioned, pipeline, maturity pipeline execution, strong across the board. Americas was strong, APJ was strong, federal was strong. Again, I think the key thing, it was really good And our sales organization on a worldwide basis.

Speaker 3

Related to large deals, mega deals, we talked about mega deals when we 1st went public if the deals are greater than $10,000,000 We've up that now. Mega deals are Deals of greater than $20,000,000 There were no deals of greater than $10,000,000 We did have one deal of $10,000,000 in the quarter.

Speaker 9

Thank you very much guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Roger Boyd from UBS. Your question please.

Speaker 10

Great. Thanks for taking the question. And again, congrats on the very strong results. As we think about fiscal 4Q and fiscal 2024, it sounds like you're Broadly being pretty conservative around close rates. But Jay, you had

Speaker 6

talked a little bit about some

Speaker 10

of the efforts you've made internally to get in front of budget I guess I'm wondering relative to a few quarters ago, are you feeling incrementally better about controlling your own destiny, Your ability to influence sales cycles and just curious how material these internal efforts have been in practice? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. So this tougher market has made us a lot more sophisticated than we were before. For example, for new logos, What have we done? We are now doing early engagement. Our sales team is getting good and engaging at sea level early on in the cycle.

Speaker 2

Number 2, we had to refine our business value case, CM4 ready case studies a lot more. No longer annual numbers are good enough, not I want to go in the quarterly level to see when the ROI can be done. Our engagement with cloud marketplaces have gotten much better because we are leveraging the annual commit That's already annual spend that's already committed to the hyperscalers. Now we had to do ramp deals More frequently, which is kind of to meet their timing of the budgets and the like. For upsell, we had done a number of things in the past few quarters.

Speaker 2

We are ensuring that customers are realizing the value more and more. Our customer success team, our TAMs are doing a great job. And then the product specialist team we put in place for emerging products. That's working well. It's working very closely with our field sales team.

Speaker 2

So having a great highly differentiated platform, which We are not a firewall company that's trying to pivot to 0 Trust. We're not a CASB company that's pivoting. This is our core business, our North Star from day 1

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Mike Walkley from Canaccord Genuity. Your question please.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks. Rema, you talked a little bit about future lumpiness in dollar based net retention, I guess, given some large deals that you'll grandfather in. But can you share with us kind of that mix you expect to maybe fiscal 'twenty four of new logo Sales versus upsell, is it still around a sixty-forty ratio given that 6 times upsell opportunity?

Speaker 3

Yes. I mean, net retention rate is something we don't guide to or look at. Our mix this year, we're expecting forty-sixty new versus upsell. We look at really As we look at new and upsell, this is the drivers in total. And what we've talked about before is we believe the best measure for Vscaler is really billings.

Speaker 3

125% is outstanding.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question Comes from the line of Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Your question please.

Speaker 11

Hey guys, this is Patrick on for Josh. First off, just wanted to congratulate you all on the great results and what's been a tough environment. Clearly, the mix checks in the quarter We're not exactly correct. So I was wondering what

Speaker 6

do you think is sort of

Speaker 11

driving that disconnect between the strong numbers put up in the quarter and then the general feedback from the channel we've heard recently.

Speaker 2

So I think this is not new. We have said Many, many times that we are not a typical security company selling boxes through typical bars. We are a transformation play. It's a high touch sale and working closely with customers and sometimes large SI's. That's how we do business.

Speaker 2

These channel checks will always be misguided. Okay. I mean, that's how I personally look at it. When you are driving transformation at the CE level and whatnot, it is different. So I would say, Yes.

Speaker 2

Let's be more refined in channel checks. Look, our business is Our customer engagements are very strong. Our differentiation is very strong. Yes, our competitors are trying to create FUD. They're trying to Mislead the market, it's our job to make sure we educate them, we communicate them.

Speaker 2

But the best results we do When customers deploy Ion Technology, then they say, we're able to turn on 20,000 users in 7 days and results are amazing. And then they say, if you really contrast, I've only seen a couple of cases where they say, yes, we got a competitive solution. This thing is still struggling out there. We are trying to extend our network from our office to the cloud. It's old school architecture.

Speaker 2

So I do believe that in spite of all the noise and thought that comes from out there, our engagement, our The way we are executing in the market, the way we are innovating and now the new area of AIML where we have a unique advantage of better data, Better private logs with structured and unstructured data. We will do better than any of the Vendors out there, maybe a comment on unstructured data. Every vendor has logs. Logs are simply Should be around where are you coming from, where are you going. The most intelligent information that generative AI can use comes from URL, which could be hundreds of bytes long.

Speaker 2

And that's where you figure out what all is going on. Most of the firewalls don't have any URL. They domain level stuff. As we do some of the stuff, I believe we'll further increase our lead. And Eli, that will give us additional time and further growth that we are striving for.

Speaker 2

Got it. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Adam Borch from Stifel. Your question please.

Speaker 5

Awesome. And thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe for Jay, you talked in the script about increasing traction with Zscaler for users. And I'd love to get a sense, when a new customer comes in, any way to About the mix of new customers that are taking Zscaler for users from the start and how should I think about the overall mix of Zscaler for users within the install base? Thanks so much.

Speaker 2

Yes. So thank you. Zscaler for users, this bundle was created about a little over a year ago and we have seen Very, very good growth of this combined bundle. And we have some customers who go with just the ISAPA. We actually had some customers interesting, a large customer who actually started with ZPA and ZVX at the same time.

Speaker 2

But overall, The bigger bundle to eliminate a bunch of point products is the Tangerine. And as I had said even 2 or 3 years ago, it's a matter of time when every customer buys CIS, EPS, ZDx for every employee And that trend is happening more and more. And as we said before, if we do so, our current customers, our spend Their spend with us could go through 5 or 6x kind of stuff. And I think we are tracking well. And we are tracking well For two reasons.

Speaker 2

1, customers are seeing value, they are realizing value from it. Number 2, we're actually able to remove a bunch of phone Products and show ROI and that actually gives them more incentive to buy more from us.

Speaker 3

Yes. And customers that have bought CIA, ZPA and CDX, it's more than 25% of our total customers. So it's definitely getting traction.

Speaker 5

Awesome. Thanks again.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Srinikathari from Baird, your question please.

Speaker 12

Hey, thank you for taking my question and congrats on the strong execution despite the macro. So for Jay and Reno, feel free to chime in. You mentioned on sequential basis, You saw better than normal seasonality. And then of course, you guys touched upon your factors, you're starting to close larger deals with federal. You of course are seeing benefit from kind of strategic customers ramping into larger commitments.

Speaker 12

And then of course execution, high touch engagement is helping to get to Finish Line International. Can you help us unpack some of these drivers in terms of Maybe relative impacts on this better than normal seasonality? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Speaker 3

I think everything you mentioned is 100% correct. I'm a traditionalist. I'll go back to what I feel. I think it's better execution on our sales organization.

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, All the factors aligned, but we are still in the tougher environment where there's a lot more scrutiny. And it's doing better execution, but if you got good product offerings that are highly differentiated And there's a need for it because customers do want to save money and better cybersecurity. That's really what's positioned as well.

Speaker 3

Yes. I mean, just a follow on, customers recognize the ROI. It is significant. The ability to simplify your network is significant also. Architecture related to inline cloud, multi tenant architecture, Not only for users, but workloads and IoT, OT and B2B, That's a vision basically Zscaler.

Speaker 3

The pioneer with all this is Zscaler. The leader, if you take a look at our penetration into the Fortune 500, which is 40% in Global 2,000, 30%. I mean, CIOs, CISOs, they talk to each other. We do, I mean, customer advisory board meetings, Jay, we do one like an average, like 1 a week, I believe. I mean, Companies typically do this once a year.

Speaker 3

We do it once a week. And so what is the strength? It's all things I mentioned and your comments, it's pretty much across the board, all those things.

Speaker 2

One point I'll make, which hasn't come across so far And in this discussion, what we do being the switchboard is probably the most critical mission critical business service And it must work. And so customers basically want to go with a proven vendor who knows how to operate and run and manage such a massive cloud. It is becoming a differentiator when a new vendor comes and say, I got the cloud too. And then the customer is saying, what's your track record? What's your experience?

Speaker 2

That's helping us. One other area that's helping us with some of the new private companies and all customers are kind of very off Fine to go with someone who may be losing a lot of cash and who may not be around tomorrow. That's helping us as well because Customers are looking at vendors who will be around and who will be the leaders in the same.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Peter Levine from Evercore. Your question please.

Speaker 8

Thanks guys for squeezing me in. We've seen one of your competitors come out this quarter with a very specific campaign kind of targeting you guys or somewhat kind of reverse engineering your tech. So Jay, is there any validity behind kind of what they're building? Explain to us the complex Lift and shift customers overnight and if you're even seeing any attrition on that front. And then just one quick one for Raimo.

Speaker 8

Thanks for the color on the Fiscal 'twenty four margins, but to the extent you can, any color or high level discussions you can share with us now on how you're thinking about the growth outlook and to what extent is macro playing into that thought process? Thank you guys.

Speaker 2

So every vendor has a core competence And they do very well in that competency. A firewall company will be a great firewall company. A CASB company will be a great CASB company. And someone who does CDN and DNS should be a good CDN and DNS company. You can try to pivot, But that competence you build and create over years years is very hard.

Speaker 2

If I came and told you that in 1 year, I'm going to build the best firewall, Well, it will be hard for me to say that because I can't say make statements like that. Okay. But when companies try to pivot, It takes a while and especially pivoting to do something that's in line, multi tenancy, figuring out all the cyber threats without slowing things down It's hard. It's an architectural change. We believe the intellectual property, the IP needed to do so is very hard.

Speaker 2

That's number 1. Number 2, The amount of traffic one has to handle to really deliver the service, your gross margins Unlikely to be sitting some of the 50s 60s and not like 80% where we sit at, it's because we purpose built our stuff. So it is not unnatural for us to see the competition trying to come and say, maybe I can get into this space. I have many times described Zscaler being the inline business, almost like an ERP application. Vikram, there are thousands of SaaS applications out there.

Speaker 2

They are point product. They can be built. How many ERP vendors do you see out there doing SaaS? Very few, it's hard. Sitting in line is hard.

Speaker 2

We think that gives us a big, big Barriers to entry for others to compete and we are not selling. We are expanding our platform at a larger pace. So do I kind of Try to focus too much on some of the competitive campaigns that are kind of trying to spread lies on. I don't. We focus on innovation.

Speaker 2

We focus on our customers and Doing well.

Speaker 3

And top line growth, we'll talk about that on the next call for year end.

Speaker 8

Thank you, guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question our final question for today comes from the line of Joseph Gallo from Jefferies. Your question please.

Speaker 4

Hey, guys, really appreciate the question and great job on the billings performance in a tough environment. I appreciate the commentary regarding the year over year mix ramp deals in F3Q. Is F4Q the same expected year over year mix based on the pipe you guys are seeing today? And then just any other colors or commentary on how to think about F4Q billings, which appear seasonally conservative? I know you mentioned lower close rates, But is there anything else timing, renewals or anything else we should think about?

Speaker 4

Thanks, guys.

Speaker 3

Yes. Ramps, I would consider the same quarter over quarter. Just remember, it is a tough compare. Last year, our billings growth was approximately basically, I think it was close to 60% Billings growth in Q4. Also, we had a strong Q3.

Speaker 3

So basically, it's a tough compare.

Operator

Thank you.

Speaker 2

All right.

Operator

This does conclude the question and answer session. I'd now like to hand the program back To CEO, Jay Chowdhury, for any further remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you for your interest in Zscaler. I hope to see you at Zenith Live In Vegas in a couple of weeks, I would also like to thank our shareholders, our customers and our partners.

Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

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Key Takeaways

  • Zscaler delivered Q3 results above the high end of guidance with 46% year-over-year revenue growth, 40% billings growth and operating margins exceeding 15%.
  • The company boasts a highly loyal customer base with gross retention rates in the high 90s, a dollar-based net retention rate above 125%, and 400 customers each generating over $1 million in ARR.
  • Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange gained momentum in Q3 via large bundled deals (ZIA, ZPA and ZDX) across industries and geographies, including strategic federal wins in 12 of 15 cabinet-level U.S. agencies.
  • The firm is leveraging its AI/ML capabilities and the industry’s largest anonymized private data set—300 billion logged transactions daily—to enhance threat detection and predict sophisticated cyberattacks.
  • For Q4, Zscaler raised its outlook, targeting 35–36% revenue growth, approximately 80% gross margin and over 400 basis points of operating margin expansion year-over-year.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Zscaler Q3 2023
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