Another quarter, another chance for Palo Alto $PANW to completely change up how it tracks customer counts within its Next-Gen Security segments.
This company cannot decide on what the hell to report for custs on Prisma SASE (Zero Trust), Prisma Cloud (CNAPP), and Cortex (XDR).
This time in Q4, they morphed from "pure" SASE customers (Access + Cloudgenix) to now include PANOS SD-WAN (their other SD-WAN before Cloudgenix acquire) and "SaaS Security subs" (WTF that is).
So they last revised this KPI in Q1, and now revise it AGAIN in Q4. WTF!
All this does it further bury their Access (Zero Trust) customers in a sea of SD-WAN custs and now broader platform SaaS subs.
And if you want to compare the 3556 SASE customers reported in Q4, look to the footnotes in the Q3 and Q2 slides (3160 and 2915). (Sorry, no Q1!)
The lack of CEO experience worked out so well last time they decided to go for it again. Let's look at his background...
He came out of their Meraki division, which Cisco acquired back in 2012 for on-prem Wifi & network appliances that are managed centrally via a cloud-based platform. It has expanded into SD-WAN appliances, connected IoT, and mobile device mgmt. ...
Of course, an edge network is one giant software-defined network. But not sure how this appliance-heavy experience is relevant to running a global edge network with CDN, WAF, & serverless computing capabilities. ...
... and hints of a few small things coming this week
"... driving down costs of core cloud services, pushing the boundary of our network to our customers' doorsteps, and investing in new technologies that may someday disrupt the web as we know it today"
which to me, reads as...
- transferring data between clouds & across the edge
- spreading the reach of the edge, like the Borg
- embracing web3/decentralization (as just stated on CloudflareTV kickoff by @eastdakota)
An investment strategy: buy and forget
Another: buy and shift (from low to strengthening convictions)
Another: actively trade a well understood core
Another: actively trade market / momo
Another: bungle around just jumping on tips
(I am “buy and shift”)
A concentration strategy: widely diverse port
Another: concentrate to highest of diverse convictions
Another: heavily concentrated into conviction (under 12)
(I am “heavily concentrated”)
Selection strategy: pick specific themes or industries or sec trends to ride
Another: deeply understand a concentrated core
Another: use a selection service or trading platform
Another: pick an open guru and follow blindly
(I am “deeply understood core” in “specific themes”)
I am not impressed with $FSLY's performance or mgmt ... yet again.
Rev +40%, decelerating -4pp YoY. That isn't the issue; they are usage based and bounce around.
But it's their first Q of SigSci -- adj out the $6M (an analyst had to wiggle out in Q&A), and they grew 30%.
Sorry, but for my rules, 30% rev growth is NOT hypergrowth.
Looking forward, guidance for Q1 was 32-36% YoY growth, but again adj out SigSci's expected 8M, and it's really 19-24% YoY. Terrible! Clearly no Compute@Edge contribution either.
Customer growth was +20% and enterprise custs slower at +12% (+3.5% seq). This is where I see the fracture in execution - you cannot scale if you aren't intaking new custs at a rapid rate.
Good news here: A new CRO was hired, hopefully to correct this.