Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website at Checkpoint.com. During the formal presentation, all participants are in a listen-only mode that will be followed by a Q&A session. During the presentation, Checkpoint's representatives may make forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can relate to future events or future financial and or operating performance. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statement. Any forward-looking statements made only as of the date hereof and Check Point Software undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements except where required by law. In our press release, which has been posted on our website, we present GAAP and non-GAAP results, along with a reconciliation of such results, as well as the reasons for our presentation of non-GAAP information. If you have any questions after the call, please feel free to contact Investor Relations by email at kip at checkpoint.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Nadav Zafrir.

Thank you all for joining us today. Our Q2 results were in line with our expectations and we continue to make tangible progress strengthening our go-to-market organization. We're actually encouraged by improving execution and a growing sales pipeline. We expect Q3 to mark the trough followed by a stronger Q4 that supports second half performance and we are maintaining our 2026 guidance. As a next step, we are significantly expanding our sales capacity by hiring hundreds of additional salespeople. We've launched a focused hiring campaign, reflecting our confidence in the long-term growth opportunity. Over the past few weeks, I met with more than 1,000 security leaders at Check Point Engage events in Chicago, Paris, and Singapore. Their message is consistent and unmistakable. Our industry is at an inflection point. AI, and particularly the latest frontier model, is driving a collapse in scarcity of adversarial capabilities. This is democratizing and industrializing sophisticated cyber attacks and challenging many of the assumptions that have guided cybersecurity for decades. We cannot stop AI adoption and we must prepare to defend against sophisticated attacks at unprecedented scale. This is the time for decisive action. At Check Point, securing our customers' AI transformation means executing the fundamentals better than ever, while building the next generation of cybersecurity and we must do it in parallel. The fundamentals start with prevention. Powered by a threat cloud AI intelligence, more than 100 AI agents, and telemetry from millions of enforcement points, prevention first security is in our DNA. But fundamentals alone are no longer enough. We must build security that operates at machine speed, learns continuously, and evolves as AI evolves. And so today, I'm excited to introduce the industry's first AI network firewall. We believe AI has created a new class of network traffic, and it deserved a new class of firewall. The AI Network Follower gives customers visibility, control, and security for prompts, agent actions, and model interactions. The AI Network Follower is a part of our AI defense plane. It's a full-stack AI security platform continuously trained on our threat research and intelligence. and build to protect applications, users and agents from AI-based attacks. With the release of the AI network firewall, we're embedding the AI defense planes across networks, private and public cloud and SASE, giving network security teams control they can put in place today. Beyond AI demand across our emerging technologies portfolio remains healthy. Subscription revenue grew 12% year over year in Q2, and we continue to integrate the capabilities from our recent acquisitions across the platform, strengthening our competitive position and expanding the value we deliver to customers. We're building momentum by expanding our go-to-market capacity and strengthening our product portfolio. The launch of our AI network firewall combined with our AI defense play reinforce the Check Point's mission of securing our customers' AI transformation. We remain focused on disciplined execution, accelerating growth and delivering long-term value for our customers, our partners, employees and shareholders. And with that, I'll turn over the call to Roei to review the financials. Thank you, Nadav. One moment.

Great, so thank you Nadav, and thank you everyone for joining the call. As Nadav mentioned, the second quarter was planned with 1% growth in revenues, driven by 12% growth in subscription revenues. Our total revenues reached $674 million, and we're 1 million below the midpoint of our projection, as a result of lower product revenues, as a lower demand for firewall appliances. When we're looking on our subscription revenues, it reached $333 million, and we're at the midpoint of our projections. Our adjusted free cash flow reached $161 million, $1 million above the midpoint of our projection and represents 24% of our revenues. Our non-GAAP EPS was $2.55 per diluted shells and exceeded our guidance and grew by 8% year-over-year. As mentioned, we had 1% growth in revenues, while our deferred revenues grew by 7% to $2.25 billion. Our calculated billing totaled to $639 million and was similar to last year, while our current calculated billing grew by 2% to $641 million. Our remaining performance obligation grew by 7% and reached $2.55 billion. Our current RPO reached $1.6 billion and a presenting 4% increase compared to last year. As we indicated in the call back in May, we expected lower product revenues, mainly as a result of our disruption affected by the changes we made in the go-to-market organization. Our product revenues declined by 14% in the second quarter. As we are looking on the second half of the year, we do expect to see similar trend in the third quarter with our firewall appliances, while we do see significant improvement in our pipeline, in the opportunities, in the qualified opportunities in Q4, and we do expect to see a back to growth in product revenues in the fourth quarter. When we are looking on the subscription revenues, it continues to accelerate to 12% growth this quarter, driven by the strong demand for emerging technologies, As email security and SITEMA continue to have a strong demand. When we are looking on the third quarter, we do expect slightly acceleration in our subscription revenues as a result of large appliances deals that were pushed from Q3 to Q4 and have also an impact on our subscription line items. As indicated, our total subscription business continues to be strong as we continue to experience strong demand for our emerging product portfolio, which remains the primary driver for our revenues growth. In the second quarter, if we are looking on the email security, CTEM and AI security, accumulated they exceeded 40% growth in ARR year-over-year, while the calculated billing from these products grew by 35% year-over-year. Looking on our revenues by geographies, so our revenues from EMEA in America were 44% each for the second quarter, while the remaining 12% came from Asia Pacific, similar to what we had last year. When we are reviewing, we are looking on our P&L for this quarter, so our gross profit increased from $585 million to $588 million, representing a gross margin of 87%. The slight decrease in the gross margin was explained due to higher memory costs. Our operating expenses, excluding R&D grants, increased by 13%, while on a constant currency basis, our operating expenses increased by 11%. Our Q2 results include approximately $28 million of benefits from R&D grants to be received from the Israeli government. When we are looking on our operating expenses, net of R&D grants, the expenses were $328 million and increased by 5% year-over-year. The net increase is primarily as a result of increases in our workforce and as a result in continuing investment in AI security and investment in our sales and marketing programs. When looking on the operating income, it continues to be strong at $260 million or 39% operating margin. Our non-GAP net income increased by 1% and reached $264 million, while our GAP net income reached $194 million and decreased by 4% year-over-year. Our non-GAP EPS grew by 8% and reached $2.55, 8% growth year-over-year, while our GAP EPS was $1.87, a 2% increase year-over-year. Our number of fully diluted outstanding shares for Q2 was 103.5 million shares. And while we continue to do our buyback, we expect the number of shares for the next quarter to decrease by approximately 1.5 million shares. Moving into our cash flow and cash positions. So our cash balances as of the end of the quarter was $4.2 billion cash and marketable securities and deposits. Our adjusted free cash flow reached $161 million as planned in line with our projections. We also continue to do our buyback program and purchase approximately 2.5 million shares for $325 million this quarter at an average price of $131 per share. During the quarter, the company announced also a $2 billion expansion of the company's share repurchase program. So we're going to continue to do this buyback. To summarize, so from one end, definitely strong demand, continuous strong demand for emerging technology led by email security and CTEM. That's becoming more and more significant to our total business. On the other hand, we did see, as expected, lower demand for firewall appliances this quarter. As I mentioned, we do expect similar trend to continue also in Q3, but definitely we do see significant improvement on the appliances business in Q4, and we do expect to be back to growth in Q4 in the product revenues. We're going to move to the guidance, to the business outlook. So first, regarding the full year, we're not touching the full year guidance. We're maintaining the same guidance as we gave you back in May in the last call. Looking on the Q3 outlook, so the total revenue range is between 655 to 685, subscription revenue between 332 to 343. Non-GAAP EPS between $2.43 to $2.53 while our adjusted and the GAAP EPS is $0.70 less and our adjusted free cash flow expected to be between $235 to $265 million. It is important to note as I mentioned earlier that we do see significant opportunities and deals that are expected to be pushed from Q3 to Q4 and therefore that have an effect a negative impact mainly on the appliances revenues and as I said we if I'm comparing to what we've seen in the pipeline for Q4 in May and now definitely we do see even stronger pipeline for Q4 definitely it's a more back and loaded deal it's also is a reflection of what of the go-to-market disruption that we've done but definitely we do see a positive sign First, of course, with the emerging product that continue to have a strong demand and also with the appliances and the firewall, we see positive signs that we are seeing the end in Q4 in terms of the decline and going back to growth in Q4. Thank you, and we are moving to Q&A. Kip, the floor is yours.

We can't hear you, Kip. As with always, please keep your question to one question for each time around. Today, to begin, we're going to have Joseph Gallo from Jefferies, followed by Patrick Colville from Scotiabank.

Hey guys, thanks for the question. It was great to hear about the investment and sales capacity. Can you just remind us what the normal cadence of sales ramp to productivity is?

I'm just trying to understand better the confidence in a 4Q rebound when hiring today would be more indicative of 2027's benefit.

Thanks, Joe. The latter. The impact to sales is expected in Q1 and Q2 of 2027. The guidance and what we're expecting for Q3 and Q4 does not take into consideration the ramp-up. Thank you for joining us. It's really meaningful and it's a company-wide effort. So the guidance that we gave today does not take that into consideration. That is sort of preparing for a stronger 2027. Thank you.

All right, next up is Patrick Colville, followed by John DeFucci.

Thank you, Kip. I guess I wanted to ask about kind of mythos preparedness and advanced AI preparedness. There's a lot of excitement in the market around what advanced AI means for cybersecurity. You kind of touched on this in your prepared remarks a little bit, but just vis-a-vis checkpoints specifically, are you seeing changes in buying patterns as a result of enterprises kind of Concerned about the risks brought on by advanced AI models. And then I guess, specifically, like, where is that hitting the financial model? Is it the firewall layer for checkpoints? Is it the non-attached subs? And any changes to sales cycles?

Yeah, great question. So if you zoom out, Really, the phenomena that we're seeing is very interesting. When you think about it from the attacker's perspective, you want to think about it from an ROI perspective. So the way we see it is from the attackers now have access to resources that they didn't have before. That's what we call the collapse of scarcity. They literally have access to what used to be very scarce resources. And that's sort of what leads into the democratization and industrialization. So we're going to see more sophisticated attacks at a much higher cadence. That is happening already, but we think it's going to accelerate within the next couple of years. So when you think about the security paradigm or the assumptions that we have around security, we're seeing signs that some of these assumptions and the current paradigm does not necessarily withstand the change that's coming from the attackers. And that leads us to like an Acunian way to really a world between two paradigms. And so that's what I mean when I say, number one, going back to fundamentals. This is the proactive prevention first. That's our DNA. That's where we shine. That's what our customers expect from us. And we have to do everything that we have learned just much better, much faster, much more diligently. At the same time, in parallel, we have to look into the future. We have to imagine different possible futures, give them different probabilities and start simulating how the attackers are going to change. So, for example, I believe we believe that detection and response are going to be much less relevant because we're going to have to go to automatic remediation at machine speed. and so we're making massive investments. Last year we spoke about hiring hundreds of new individuals to build the next generation. Today we announced the launch of the first AI network firewall integrated into our AI defense plane. And there's a whole strategy around that. Now to your question about the buyer's perspective, I think that they realized that on the one hand, Back to basics. And at the same time, they're looking to what's next. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I think the continuous threat exposure management based on three acquisitions that we made that is growing last quarter. We spoke about that growing at almost 100% is a part of that. Why? because it gives you the ability to understand what's coming at you, but also creating a real pathway to understand what the real threats mean and automatically remediating that in an open platform approach. And that's why CTAM, for example, is having such success. At the same time, the reason I'm so excited about the AI network firewall is that it's also happening at the network level. And so customers that already have our firewall can now also take advantage of the network to understand what their employees are doing, what agents are running and control that. So I really think to summarize, it's sort of a tale of two cities. On the one hand, Everything that we've learned, we must do better than we've ever done before. At the same time, we're creating the new technology, the new products, and I think within the next couple of years, you'll see a new paradigm emerging. So that's sort of the story of where we are right now. I think that in some way, some of the frontier models may be hyped, but the phenomena is a phenomena cannot be overhyped. So we're seeing it in a very tactical level in the amount of vulnerabilities that are out there and how fast we need to patch them. And so that's what we're doing today. But as we move forward, we need to change that paradigm. and we're working on this in different buckets. The last one is actually running these models on our own software to make sure that we can simulate, imagine and get ahead of the curve before attackers do it.

All right. Next up is John DeFucci followed by Brian Essex.

Thanks, Kip. Nadav, I sort of have a high-level question, I think. I mean, Check Point's always been a respected technology company and a thought leader in its field. Long before the term platformization came out, I remember your predecessor talking about the Infinity platform, and I know it became products too, but it was a platform. It was the first time we had heard about one company working to secure an enterprise from top to bottom. Even today, partners in the field acknowledge the strength of the technology at Check Point, but there seems to be a customer perception of the sort of dreaded word legacy, even though your install is really loyal and pretty much Check Point diehards. I guess, what is it, other than hiring a lot of new go-to-market people, that you think has to be done to change that perception? Because that's really important. That's hard. And is the issue really just not enough feet on the street?

No, I think it goes beyond that. Not enough feet on the street is one thing, and that's why we started this campaign. And this is a second phase of the go-to-market changes that we announced last time. So now that we've stabilized, we're ready to add hundreds of new people based on the new model in the organization or the reorg that we announced. I think second, it's marketing, right? So we need to be louder. I really believe that when it comes to this world that we're walking into, this world where on the one hand, security, real security, proactive prevention has never been more important. I think that's our DNA, and I think we can provide real security based on the current paradigm. And at the same time, the announcement of the first AI network firewall, it's a big announcement. It's taking the firewall and preparing it for the AI era. but not as a standalone to your point but as a platform play and this is where integrating the AI network firewall into the AI defense plane and having the ability to look at different choke points within the network not just for observability but also for enforcement is a huge advancement and we are seeing the demand for our AI capabilities Thank you very much. and when you bring all these things together, it makes us very optimistic about the future. One thing that I'll say about the platform, yes, consolidation is important, but I think it needs to be an open platform, right? And an open platform means that we acknowledge the fact that number one, the approach should not be a monolithic approach. Thank you very much. which I think is one of the strongest features that Check Point has. Within the next few months, we're going to offer our customers the ability to manage different products and different firewalls even if they are our fiercest competitors because at the end of the day, especially in the mythos era, we just don't have the time to take care of things one by one with an SLA of days and weeks. We need to be able to see what's coming. We need to be able to understand what the real impact may be. We're using AI to do that, to actually simulate the paths to the vulnerabilities that we're seeing and then We're moving into an automatic remediation capability, whether it's patching or virtual patching or segmenting or segregation within the network, so that at the end of the day, we can have this real proactive prevention-first mentality and at the same time starts with a new paradigm of autonomous remediation.

By the way, that... I totally agree.

I totally agree, and some of it is already happening. Some of it is work in progress. And I think we're starting to see the impact. We're starting to see that turn into the funnel. And as Roei said, we're already seeing a very strong Q4 ahead of us.

Thank you. All right. Thank you, John. Next up is Brian Essex with J.P. Morgan.

Great. Thanks, Kip. And thanks for taking the question. Nadav, I want to follow up on some of that commentary, particularly with regard to platform in your AI firewall. And I think it's great to see the innovation of the platform. I think that's another thing that we've heard customers are really focused on is the rate of innovation to kind of build that platform. Would love to know, you know, what is your vision in terms of how you see the AI firewall technology stacking up against what seems to be an emerging AI gateway market? Are you targeting platforms that span? I mean, I guess, are you thinking about expanding the platform to span across broader observability, tracing, performance optimization, cost control features, which is one thing that I think sales are very focused on? Or do you intend to stick towards more security and governance? It seems like maybe some of your peers are looking at things more than a consolidated, broader observability and security platform, but would love to know what your focus is going forward.

I want to start by saying that we need some... I would say humility as we try to understand where this is going. There are different possible futures in where this is going. And I think we must look at it from different perspectives. One perspective, which I spoke about at length, is the attacker's perspective. The second perspective is different industries and how they are adopting AI. So again, a lot of hype, but it's a process. And there's a lot of trial and error within this process of adoption of AI, whether it's sort of the bread and butter that all of us have already. It's the employee usage of AI. Thank you very much. The Securing the AI Adoption Journey. And the way we approach this is with our customers. And so we have a design partner program with different industries, with different verticals, because health is different than finance, and finance is different than energy, and energy is different than production and logistics. For each one of them, we have to sit down with our customers, understand where they're going in the next couple of years, simulate what kind of new threats emerge from that, and coming up with the right mechanisms to govern, to control, and to secure these new capabilities So that on the one hand, they can deploy it, but from a different perspective, they can do it with security in mind. Being very direct to your question, Brian, we are focusing on the security part. But security is becoming much broader than just observability. Observability in many ways, when you think about the next paradigm or the emerging paradigm, doesn't really matter. Because going to the SOC or to the CISO or to the VP of Engineering and giving them a list of things that may go wrong is not going to help them. We need to be able to autonomously remediate. And so we're building those capabilities. But at the end of the day, we're not looking to go beyond the security level. We think security is very broad, very deep. We're building very deep capabilities. But when you think about controlling this from a cost perspective, that's not necessarily where we're going. Of course, when you have the observability, you can add that to it. Super helpful. Thank you.

Thanks, Brian. Next up is Todd Weller, followed by Adam Tindall.

Thanks. Nadav, I'd love to get your perspectives on potential AI tailwinds for the network security business. There's different kind of angles to this. There's AI application and infrastructure deployments related to that, AI data centers. and then there's an angle around potentially increasing traffic volumes and spectrum requirements. So how do you think about framing those dimensions? How do you think about magnitude and timing of those opportunities? And then within your kind of core large enterprise base today, what are you seeing any of that and where do you think we are?

Yeah, I think that to your point about the tailwinds for security, I would look at it from, I think there are two different aspects that are relevant to look at. The first one is how the network is a part of the overall AI defense plane. and the overall AI defense plane is on the device, it's in the cloud, it's in workloads, it's in the DevOps and the network is at the heart of that and needs to play within that and that's why the introduction of the AI network firewall as a part of the overall AI defense plane is so important and I think that's going to have a meaningful impact Thank you very much. which is becoming an open platform and allows us to manage different components and different vendors, different firewalls connected as a platform to the continuous threat exposure management which gives us the ability to understand the intelligence from the outside in, the attacker's path and combining that is one aspect. The second aspect is emerging new capabilities that enterprises are building. So for example, some enterprises have already invested and some are thinking about investing in In AI factories, right? So localized capabilities sort of going back on-prem, whether it's because of privacy issues or cost issues. We're also seeing a plethora of rising investments in different parts of the world. regarding data sovereignty, which is another issue. And finally, very specific data centers that are going to be either for inference or for training, which require different capabilities. If you remember, a few months ago, we announced that we're working with NVIDIA to embed our firewall capability within the GPU level because in those data centers, Latency is so important and east-west traffic is so much more imminent that we literally need to do it at the hardware level in order to remain very, very efficient. And so that's the second tailwind that we're seeing. However, to be transparent about that, that is something that we're seeing in a little bit of a further future. So 2027, we need to start seeing that.

All right. Thanks, Todd. Next up is Adam Tindall, followed by Shauli Al.

Okay, thanks, Kip. Nadav, I wanted to ask on the business outlook. You're reiterating the fiscal year guidance this year, and if I backed into the implied Q4, you're going to need to do about an $800 million revenue quarter at the midpoint of guidance. And I was going back through the model. I've never seen that. That would be a record quarter. You also mentioned earlier that guidance doesn't take the ramp into consideration. So, I know it's more of a Roei question on guidance, but I wanted to hear from you the debate over setting that expectation today and what markers you're looking at for Q4. And Roei, any comments that you could give us on billings? I know we kind of lost track. We were thinking 6% to 7% for the year entering the year. We've got this very difficult comp in Q3 that I think some are struggling to model. So just correct us a little bit on the billings trajectory as well. Thanks, guys.

Rory, you want to start? Yeah, I'll start. Yeah, so definitely you're right in terms of your calculation for Q4. It's around 6.5% growth for Q4 in order to be in the midpoint. I mentioned during my script that we do expect to be back to positive growth in product revenues. I remind you the main headwind that we see today on our revenues, the decline in revenues, is coming from the product revenues, which declined this quarter for 14%. are expecting to be similar levels in Q3. And in Q4, we are expecting to be back to green, to be positive in product. So that's one aspect that definitely is. And I remind you also that Q4 is a more product-driven quarter. The portion of product out of the total revenues is bigger than any other quarter in the year. So that's one aspect. and again, I think that when we are looking on the funnel for Q4, I know that it's much higher than what we guided for Q3, I mean this growth, but when we are looking on the funnel, on the qualified deals, I'm talking about qualified deal, I'm not talking about now potential stuff, we do see much better funnel, much better pipeline for Q4. And again, we went through with our sales leader on all the large deals, everything. And again, some of them are deals that have been pushed from Q3 to Q4, that again, expected to be pushed because there might be some that will be placed in Q3, but Q3 is more tricky because of the summer. So we took a more conservative approach that some of these significant deals will be pushed to Q4. So definitely it's a high bar in terms of Q4. But when I'm looking on the internal metrics, there is the support for that. And you ask about the bidding. So you're right. When we started, I'm not giving any guidance for bidding, but I was asked about bidding for the year when we started the year. It was a mid-single digit, we talked about 5-6%. When we came back on May, we talked again, because of the higher disruption that we did see, it resulted more back in low the deal. And we do see it in the numbers for Q2. And when I'm looking on H2, I don't want to give any specific guidance, but definitely I do see much better buildings in Q4 in terms of growth. Q3, you are right that the comparables are tougher. So there might be, as we said, Q4 might be more challenging with billing. But Q4, definitely we are expecting, again, if we are looking on the funnel, on large deals, and definitely we expect to be a strong billing quarter.

Yeah, just to add to that, Adam, Remember that when we spoke in our last earnings, we were very transparent about the reorg that we did in our go to market org. That's going according to plan. And so that's why we think Q3 is the trough. And when we look at what's happening in the future in Q4, like Roei said, we're seeing a much better outcome. And that's why we are maintaining the guidance. With regards to the hiring, the reason we're not taking that into consideration is the natural ramp up. So it's the second phase. And in fact, when you think about it now, because this is a company-wide effort and many of our folks beyond selling need to recruit and onboard. And so actually, we're not going to see the impact of the hiring in 2026. We're only going to see the impact of the hiring in 2027. Right. So some of it in Q1 and hopefully more of it in Q2. But it's the prudent thing to do. And it's a part of the plan and a part of the strategy that we spoke about last time. And for us, hiring hundreds of new sellers is obviously a great investment. And we're investing in our future. So last year, we spoke about hiring about 500 new R&D folks to start doubling down on the future products for the AI era. Now we feel we're ready with some of the products. We've done the reorg and we're ready to ramp up. But as you said, that's only going to have an impact in 2027.

Just one more comment about billing, Adam. I think it's important to say it. I understand that you are following billing. It's important for cash flow and stuff. But it's not the only metric that we are looking at. We are looking on new business. We are looking on RPO, which is, I mentioned it today, with bookings. I can give you an example. This quarter, the billing was affected. I didn't mention discrete, but because again, I thought that it's not, probably I would be asking about it. But again, the billing this quarter affected, for example, from large deal that was renewed. It's not only renewal, it's renewal and new business that last year we built annually and this year we built quarterly. This alone A loan has an effect of two points on our billing this quarter, just moving from annually to quarterly. And we are flexible with that. I mean, it's a large deal, very large deal with new business. You don't see it in the billing because we are billing it quarterly. I approve the quarterly billing on that aspect. But again, if we would build it annually, probably our billing will look much better for this year, but it wouldn't change the fact that our RPO grew by 7%. So I totally understand the importance of billing and give you some kind of prediction of what's going on in the business. But definitely, it's not the only metric that we are following.

All right, guys. Thank you, Adam. Next up is Shaul Eyal, and that'll be followed by Shranik Kotharis from Baird.

Thank you, hi, good afternoon guys. Maybe Roei or Natal still double-clicking on this head count. When we're saying hundreds of new people, what is it, 200, 300? And how do you think about it geographically from that perspective?

Yeah, so I'll start, Roei, you can chime in. When we say hundreds, yes, we're talking about, you know, by the end of the year, we need to hire approximately for our go to market a headcount of about 300 more individuals. Thank you very much. America, Western Europe, a little bit more, but it's across the globe, APAC, etc. Some of it is at the frontline sellers, what we call the generalists, but also specialists. For example, we spoke about AI. We're seeing the funnel growing very substantially. In some cases, we just don't have the people out there that can actually go out to customers and do the POCs. And so we have to ramp up that very, very fast. Obviously, just getting the heads is not enough. Thank you very much. We launched the campaign and we hope to be able to get to the right people that want to join us for this ride. Thank you.

All right. Next up is Shrenik, followed by Joshua Tilton.

Great, thanks for taking my question. So totally understand the internal execution disruption around go-to-market, but just on your specific comments on firewall appliance demand softer than you expected, right? And some of the peers are seeing stronger firewall demand, AI infrastructure driven So just Nadav and Roei, can you help unpack that a bit? What are your customers actually doing? Are they extending the useful life without refreshing right now? Are they shifting focus towards more AI-centric enforcements, which is sort of elongating cycles? Are these pushes primarily rep transition driven or are customers fundamentally re-evaluating the The scopes and the architecture in the AI era as well.

Where do you want to start? I'll start. So I think it's a combination, Shrenik. I think it's a combination of first, I think, internal disruption that's affecting our execution that Again, our execution in Q2, I mean, we've seen the numbers, was not what we wanted when we started the deal. But I would say it's a combination of internal disruption and definitely also behavior of customers that I think, again, some of them, you know, we are looking on the memory cost. I mean, it's something that I'm spending significant part of my time for, you know, to... to find a way to make sure that we have enough inventory to give to our... By the way, it's not only for appliances, it's also for internal users. So again, probably it's a combination. I don't think it's a clear, there is no clear answer for that, but definitely when I'm looking, and I think it's mainly, when I'm looking on our business, I think it's mainly internally, mainly internally because I'm looking on the funnel, I'm looking on deals, I'm looking that our go-to-market is being stabilized and I'm looking that we are now, we have very interesting opportunities, qualified opportunities that are located in the second half of the year mainly in Q4 that makes us feel more positive that it's more internal and less external.

Yeah, I would say that the demand is there, right? We're seeing it, you're seeing it with our competition as well. That's why we're so excited about the announcement of the AI network firewall today. The Unified Management that we're coming out with and hopefully the fruits of a lot of investment that we put into this in the last couple of years will start to show. And then the optimism comes from what we see already in Q4 and that's why we're doubling down also to get ready for a higher growth in 2027. Having said all that from the customer's perspective, Look, I think that a top of mind for them right now is, like I said, first of all, go back to basics and fundamentals. This era calls for patching at an unprecedented pace. That's just one example. And so we're also building the capabilities To do that with them and for them, not just for our own products, but again, we have to have the total security in mind. They're also getting a lot of pressure from the executives and the board to adopt AI, whether it's to allow employees to use it or new applications and agents that are now running within the... So it is a transition time. What I believe is that it calls for us to continue doing what we've always done, which is prevention first, but at the same time really changing the industry. And that's both on the network level with AI network firewall and the new unified management, but at the same time combining that with our workspace, our CTAM, our AI defense plane, and going forward probably more capabilities that we will need to add to this in order to build this open platform that our customers can rely on for their secure AI transformation.

All right, next up is Joshua Tilton followed by Junaid Sidiqui.

Hey guys, can you hear me?

Yep. You got a shirt on.

Just for you, Kip. Maybe a quick clarification and then my actual question. On the clarification side, maybe this is for Roei, but I understand you're reiterating the full year outlook. and you guys are confident in what it implies for Q4. But I guess what I'm trying to understand is, when you think about what is implied on a quarterly basis, is this how you expected it to play out when you first took guidance down 90 days ago? Or did something change between now and then that we're pointing to a much stronger Q4? And then maybe just to follow up on my actual question for Nadav is, What happens when we get past the disruption from this year? You ramp hundreds of salespeople. All these products are on fire. Everybody needs to replace their car and firewall with an AI firewall. What is the durable growth profile that we should be expecting when we move past the disruption, sales ramps, and all the sexiness around some of these newer products starts to really come through the model?

So I'll start and then Nadav can take it. So regarding the guidance, so when we gave the guidance in May, so actually we did expect slight improvement in the third quarter in terms of appliances. I mentioned during my, you know, in my presentation that we did see, we do expect more deals that will be pushed from Q3 to Q4, mainly on appliances, that affecting not just appliances revenues, but also support and subscription revenues because they have an attached It's bundling and they have an attached revenue of subscription and support to every client. So I would say that the expectation in the beginning, back in May, that Q3 will be slightly better, slightly better, not significantly better, slightly better than Q4. But because of the deal being that we are expecting now to be pushed from Q3 to Q4, that's how we are projecting now.

Nadav? Going forward, looking at 2027 and beyond, from a general industry perspective, I think the security demand will continue to grow. Because we're between two paradigms, I think that we will see meaningful changes over the next couple of years. And we need to get ready for that. Our vision of securing the AI transformation through an open platform means that we have a lot of integration to do, for example, between the network and the continuous threat exposure management. There's a lot of integration that we need to do between workspace and AI. So there's a long roadmap ahead of us. And at the same time, we also have to keep our eyes wide open to what's out there from the emerging startup community that is doing some very exciting things and we're looking at that. The combination of that vision and strategy that we're starting to see the fruits of with the stabilization of the go-to-market and the hiring of new people obviously makes us optimistic. And I think that the hit that we took will position us for a better outlook going forward. Obviously, we're not giving guidance now beyond that. It's not a short journey. This is a company that has been around from the beginning of cybersecurity history. We need to build it for the next decades. It's a process. It's a journey. And I think that we're seeing it going according to plan right now. And hopefully more good things to come.

All right. Next up is Junaid, followed by Saket Kaliya.

Great, thanks Kip. Nadav, you've previously indicated SASE is still around 12 to 18 months away from supporting your largest enterprise customers at the scale that you envision. What milestones should we be watching over the next year and how close are you to being able to compete for the same global deployments targeted by the market leaders?

Yeah, thanks for that, Junaid. So yeah, SASE is an integral part of our hybrid mesh proposition and part of the platform. We're now at a point where in terms of capacity, we're already ready for the enterprise level. and integrating SASE into our unified management as we speak. I think we already have a proposition that in some aspects is best in class. For example, we have the best latency with our hybrid device architecture. It's fast and easy to deploy and manage. And so I think we're ready to go bigger with our SASE and this is the time to do it. So we're focused on it. We have a very strong and capable R&D team. A part of the hiring that we're doing is focused specifically on specialists. that will go out and do this. And more important than anything is to put that as part of the platform. So connected to the firewall through our hybrid mesh management so that our customers can push their policy both to the SASE remote access internet AI defense plane. There is a lot of work to do there, but we've made a lot of progress and we're ready to go bigger as I indicated before. All right.

Thanks, Junaid. Next up is second, Kalia, followed by Eric Keith, who will most likely be our last caller today.

Okay, great. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question here. Roei, maybe for you. I'd love to dig into the sales investment just from a financial perspective, right? I'm sure that we can all take a shot at the financial impact of hiring 300 additional resources. And just to be clear, that sounds like it's the right thing to do to invest for growth. Not necessarily looking here for guide for next year, but I want to make sure it's asked, is there any way that you want us to think about the margin impact of that investment, understanding that it's short-term payment

I would say that regarding, first of all, the hiring impact will be less for this year because it's going to be mainly for next year, the hiring. But I would say for next year margin, I would wait for the next course because we have actually, we have the next week, we have our kickoff, our planning for next year, for next year, for 2027. and I don't want to give you anything because it's still very early stages. I would say let's wait for the next call. Totally get it. Thank you.

All right, next up is Derek Keith. Thanks, Kip. Roei, Nadav, maybe just to come back one more time to the 3Q, 4Q seasonality. So can you just put a finer point of what changed since last quarter in terms of why you're expecting deals to push? Is this internal execution just giving you a little bit more prudence, or is there something changing on the customer behavior side that maybe...

I think it's less customary. Again, we've done a very thorough analysis going through our pipeline for Q3 and Q4. I think we have, I would say, a bit more product approach about Q3. We are taking a more product approach in terms of deals that are going to be pushed from Q3 to Q4. I'm taking it because Q3 is usually a tricky quarter because of the summer, you know, people are in vacations all the days and are back to work only on September, so we're taking a more prudent approach, but definitely I think we do see improvement and more stabilization in our auto market and therefore I think we are going to be safe. I think we feel confident with expanding our world to market now after being stabilized after the disruption that we had in the first half of the year.

Nadav, do you want to add something? Again, H2 back-end loaded, so a lot riding on Q4.

It's about having a better execution. and making sure that we have the right headcount and the right people as we go into 2027. As Roei said, that's what we're starting to plan for now.

All right, everybody. That's going to conclude today. We thank you all for showing up and participating and we'll be seeing you shortly hereafter in the analyst calls. and the rest of you that are following us today. We'll see you throughout the quarter. Thank you and have a great day.