On Thursday, Check Point Software (NASDAQ:CHKP) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://checkpoint.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_H0Jb19RNRDCOm-TJnjIquw#/registration
Summary
Check Point Software reported Q2 revenues of $674 million, with a 1% growth driven by a 12% increase in subscription revenues, though product revenues declined by 14%.
The company is expanding its sales capacity by hiring hundreds of additional salespeople, reflecting confidence in long-term growth opportunities.
Check Point introduced the AI Network Firewall as part of its AI Defense Plane, targeting AI-based attacks and aligning with the company's strategy to secure AI transformations.
Q3 is expected to be the trough, with a stronger Q4 anticipated, supported by a growing sales pipeline and deferred deals from Q3.
Despite current challenges, the company maintains its 2026 guidance and sees significant improvement in the sales pipeline for Q4.
Adjusted free cash flow reached $161 million, and non-GAAP EPS was $2.55 per diluted share, an 8% year-over-year increase.
The company announced a $2 billion expansion of its share repurchase program.
Management emphasized the importance of AI security, discussing the democratization of sophisticated cyberattacks and the need for proactive, prevention-first strategies.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
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, Check Point Software's representatives may make forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally 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 statements. Any forward-looking statements are 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 checkpoint.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Nadav Zafrir.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
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 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 models, is driving a collapse in scarcity of adversarial capabilities. This is democratizing and industrializing sophisticated cyberattacks 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 our ThreatCloud 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. 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 deserves a new class of firewall. The AI Network Firewall gives customers visibility, control, and security for prompts, agent actions, and model interactions.
The AI Network Firewall 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 built to protect applications, users, and agents from AI-based attacks. With the release of the AI Network Firewall, we're embedding the AI Defense Plane 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 Plane, reinforces Check Point Software'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. With that, I'll turn the call over to Roei to review the financials.
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
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 as planned, with 1% growth in revenues, driven by 12% growth in subscription revenues. Our total revenues reached $674 million and were $1 million below the midpoint of our projection as a result of lower product revenues and lower demand for firewall appliances. When we're looking at our subscription revenues, they reached $333 million and were at the midpoint of our projections.
Our adjusted free cash flow reached $161 million, $1 million above the midpoint of our projection, and represented 24% of our revenues. Our non-GAAP EPS was $2.55 per diluted share, 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 $2,025,000,000. Our calculated billings totaled $639 million and were similar to last year, while our current calculated billings 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, representing a 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 the 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 at the second half of the year, we do expect to see a similar trend in the third quarter with our firewall appliances, while we do see significant improvement in our pipeline and the qualified opportunities in Q4, and we do expect to see a return to growth in product revenues in the fourth quarter. When we are looking at the subscription revenues, they continued to accelerate to 12% growth this quarter, driven by the strong demand for Emerging Technologies, as email security and CTEM are continuing to have strong demand. When we are looking at the third quarter, we do expect slight deceleration in our subscription revenues as a result of large appliance deals that were pushed from Q3 to Q4 and have an impact on our subscription line item.
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 revenue growth in the second quarter. If we are looking at email security, CTEM, and AI security combined, they exceeded 40% growth in ARR year over year, while the calculated billings from these products grew by 35% year over year. Looking at our revenues by geographies, our revenues from EMEA and Americas were 44% each for the second quarter, while the remaining 12% came from Asia Pacific—similar to what we had last year.
Reviewing our P&L for this quarter: our gross profit increased from $585 million to $588 million, representing a gross margin of 87%. The slight decrease in 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 benefit from R&D grants to be received from the Israeli government.
Looking at 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 the result of increases in our workforce, resulting in continued investment in AI security and in our sales and marketing. Looking at operating income, it continues to be strong at $260 million, or a 39% operating margin. Our non-GAAP net income increased by 1% and reached $264 million, while our GAAP net income reached $194 million and decreased by 4% year over year.
Our non-GAAP EPS grew by 8% and reached $2.55—8% growth year over year—while our GAAP 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 position: our cash balance at the end of the quarter was $4.2 billion—cash, marketable securities, and deposits.
Our adjusted free cash flow reached $161 million, as planned and in line with our projections. We also continued our buyback program and purchased approximately 2.5 million shares for $325 million this quarter at an average price of $131 per share. During the quarter, the company also announced a $2 billion expansion of the company's share repurchase program, so we're going to continue to do this buyback. To summarize: on one hand, definitely continued 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 a similar trend to continue also in Q3, but we see significant improvement in the appliances business in Q4, and we do expect to be back to growth in Q4 in product revenues. We're going to move to the guidance—the Business Outlook. First, regarding the full year, we're not touching the full-year guidance. We are maintaining the same guidance as we gave you back in May in the last call.
Looking at the Q3 outlook: total revenue range is between $655 million to $685 million; subscription revenue between $332 million to $343 million; non-GAAP EPS between $2.43 to $2.53, while GAAP EPS is $0.70 less; and our adjusted free cash flow is expected to be between $235 million to $265 million. It is important to note, as I mentioned earlier, that we do see significant deferred opportunities and deals that are expected to be pushed from Q3 to Q4, and therefore they have a negative impact mainly on the appliances revenues.
If I'm comparing what we've seen in the pipeline for Q4 in May and now, we see an even stronger pipeline for Q4. It's definitely a more back-end-loaded deal flow. It's also a reflection of the go-to-market disruption that we've done. But we do see positive signs—first, of course, with the Emerging product that continues to have strong demand, and also with the appliances and the firewall. We see positive signs that we are seeing the end in Q3 in terms of the decline and going back to growth in Q4.
Thank you. And we are moving to Q&A.
OPERATOR
The floor is yours. We can't hear you. Might be good. Probably most people appreciate that. As 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.
Joseph Gallo, Analyst at Jefferies
Hey guys, thanks for the question. It was great to hear about the investment in 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.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks, Joe. The latter.
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
So the impact to sales is expected in Q1 and Q2 of 20. So the guidance and what we're expecting for Q3 and Q4 does not take into consideration the ramp-up. The ramp-up obviously has its momentum, but it's going to take some time. However, it is very significant for us. Hiring hundreds of new frontline sellers is a major move. I don't know if you've seen it. I hope you have. We've started an aggressive campaign. So it's not just the number, it's also the people that we're hiring and the invigorating of our sales force across the globe.
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.
OPERATOR
Thank you. All right, next up, Patrick Colville, followed by John DiFucci.
Patrick Colville, Analyst
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-à-vis Check Point Software 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 Check Point Software? Is it the non-attached subs, and any changes to sales cycles?
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
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 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. 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 do not necessarily withstand the change that's coming from the attackers. That leads us, in a Kuhnian way, to really a world between two paradigms.
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.
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 realize 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 CTEM, 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, the new. 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. 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.
That's what we're doing today. But as we move forward, we need to change that paradigm. 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.
OPERATOR
All right, next up is John DiFucci, followed by Brian Essex.
John DiFucci, Analyst
Thanks, Kip. Nadav, I sort of have a high-level question, I think. I mean, Check Point Software has 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 Software. 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?
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
No, I think it goes beyond that. Not enough feet on the street is one thing, and that's why we started this campaign now, 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, the reorg that we announced. I think, second, it's marketing. 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 grow very, very fast. In fact, some of the hiring that we're doing across the globe is because we just can't get to enough customers fast enough with the high demand that we have, because this is a specialized field where you need specialists that can come in and do all the more technical stuff for our customers.
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. An open platform means that we acknowledge the fact that, number one, the approach should not be a monolithic approach, especially at the enterprise level. That's not going to lead to resilience. Number two, whether we like it or not, a lot of our customers are going to be multivendor, and we need to appreciate that and have their security front and center in our policy.
And so with our unified management, 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're 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 start with a new paradigm of autonomous remediation.
John DiFucci, Analyst
By the way, that makes a ton of sense, and it's truly unique — that open platform to work with others — and it's in the customer's best interest. I think you got to have Roei loosen up the marketing budget a little more and go out there really loud. Have Kip run the marketing, because he's pretty loud.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, no, 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.
John DiFucci, Analyst
Thank you.
OPERATOR
All right, thank you, John. Next up is Brian Essex with J.P. Morgan.
Brian Essex, Analyst at J.P. Morgan
Great. Thanks, Kip, and thanks for taking the question. Nadav, I wanted to follow up on some of that commentary, particularly with regard to platform and 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 what is your vision in terms of how you see the AI firewall technology stacking up against what seems to be an emerging, you know, 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 CISOs 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 as a consolidated, broader observability and security platform.
But would love to know what your focus is going forward.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. So 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 the bread and butter that all of us have already, it's the employee usage of AI moving into independent agents that in the beginning take over some of the human, more redundant, mundane, day-to-day tasks, but over time becoming more and more independent and autonomous. And that's where the game changes, not only from the attacker's perspective, but also from the attack surface. Having said all that, our mission remains the secure AI, 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 on the second, but from a different perspective, they can do it with security in mind. Now 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.
OPERATOR
Next up is Todd Weller, followed by Adam Tindall.
Todd Weller, Analyst
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 center. And then there's an angle around potentially increasing traffic volumes, inspection 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?
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
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. 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 tailwind for the industry and for Check Point Software specifically. With thinking about that, it's not just about securing, it's also about managing. So our AI-driven unified management, 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 AI factories. 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.
OPERATOR
All right, thanks, Todd. Next up is Adam Tindall, followed by Shauli Al. Okay, thanks.
Adam Tindall, Analyst
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, 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, you know, we kind of lost track. We were thinking 6 to 7% for the year entering the year. We've got this, you know, 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.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
Roei, you want to start and then I'll start.
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. So definitely. All right. In terms of your calculation for Q4, it's around 6 and a half percent 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 revenue, is coming from the product revenues which declined this quarter for 14%. 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 there. 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 deals, I'm not talking about now a 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 being pushed from Q3 to Q4. That again is expected to be pushed because there might be some that will be placed in Q3. But you know Q3 is more tricky because of the summer. So we took a more conservative approach that some of this significant deal 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 billings. So you're right. When we started—I'm not giving any guidance for billings—but I was asked about billings for the year. When we started there it was our midpoint, mid-single digit. We talked about 5, 6%. When we came back on May we told 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 billings in Q4 in terms of growth.
Q3, you are right that the comparables are tougher. So Q3 might be more challenging with billings. But Q4 definitely we are expecting—again if we are looking on the front end on large deals—and definitely we expect to be a strong billings quarter.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
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.
It's the second phase 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. 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. So you know, and for us hiring hundreds of new sellers is obviously a great investment and we're investing in our future. So, you know, 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.
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
Just one more comment about billing, Adam, I think it's important to say it here. I understand that you are following billing, it's important for cash flow and stuff. But it's not the only metric that we... okay. We are looking on new business. We're 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 because I thought that it's not... I probably would be asked about it—but again the billing this quarter affected, for example, from large deal, large deal that was renewed.
It's not only renewal, it's renewal and new business that last year we billed annually and this year we billed quarterly. This alone has an effect of two points on our billing this quarter. Just the 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. We approved, I approved the quarterly billing on that aspect.
But again if we would bill it annually, probably our billing would 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.
OPERATOR
All right, guys. Thank you, Adam. Next up is Shauli Al, and that'll be followed by Srinik Katharis from Bear.
Shauli Al, Analyst
Thank you. Hi, good afternoon, guys.
UNKNOWN Analyst
Maybe, Roei or Nadav, still double-clicking on this headcount — when we're saying hundreds of new, what is it, 200, 300, and how do you think about it geographically from that perspective?
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so I'll start. You can chime in. When we say hundreds, yes, we're talking about by the end of the year we need to hire approximately, for our go-to-market, a headcount of about 300 more individuals. When you look at it from a percentage perspective, it's a meaningful percentage at our size. When you think about it geographically, honestly it's pretty globally spread, so I wouldn't say that it's just one area. America, Western Europe a little bit more, but it's across the globe — you know, 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 that very, very fast. Obviously, just getting the heads is not enough. We need to get the right people on board that are also ready for this future generation of buyers and the new paradigm that's emerging.
And so it's an opportunity not just to get more headcount, but also to revitalize and get new blood into the system, and that's exactly what we're doing. It's a company-wide effort. Again, we launched the campaign and we hope to be able to get to the right people that want to join us for this ride.
UNKNOWN Analyst
Thank you.
OPERATOR
All right, next up is Srinik, followed by Joshua Tilton.
Srinik Katharis, Analyst
Great, thanks for taking the 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 product growth. 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 reevaluating the scopes and the architecture in the AI era as well?
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
Where you want to start, or you want me to start? So, I think it's a combination. I think it's a combination of, first, internal disruption that affected our execution — again, our execution in Q2, I mean we've seen the numbers, was not what we wanted. But I would say it's a combination of internal disruption and definitely also behavior of customers. Some of them, you know, are looking at the memory cost — it's something that I'm spending a significant part of my time on to find a way to make sure that we have enough inventory, not only for appliances, it's also for internal uses.
So again, probably it's a combination. I don't think there's a clear answer for that. But definitely, when I'm looking at our business, I think it's mainly internal — mainly internal — because I'm looking at the funnel, I'm looking at deals, I'm looking that our go-to-market is being stabilized, and I'm seeing that we now have very interesting qualified opportunities located in the second half, mainly in Q4. That makes us feel more positive that it's more internal and less, and less, external.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
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 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 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.
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, and at the same time combining that with our Workspace, our CTEM, 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.
Srinik Katharis, Analyst
Thanks, appreciate.
OPERATOR
All right, next up is Joshua Tilton followed by Junaid Sui.
Joshua Tilton, Analyst
Hey guys, can you hear me?
OPERATOR
Yep. Yeah.
Joshua Tilton, Analyst
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 I'm trying to understand: 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 a follow-up — and 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 current 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?
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
So I'll start, and then you can take it. Regarding the guidance, when we gave the guidance in May, actually we did expect slight improvement in the third quarter in terms of appliances. I mentioned during my presentation that we do expect more deals that will be pushed from Q3 to Q4, mainly on appliances — that affects not just appliances revenues but also support and subscription revenues because they have an attached bundling and they have attached revenue of subscription and support to every client.
So I would say that the expectation back in May was that Q4 will be slightly better — slightly better, not significantly better — in Q4. But because of the deals being pushed from Q3 to Q4, that's how we are projecting now.
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
You know, 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. 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.
I think that the hit that we took will position us for a better outlook going forward. Obviously, we're not giving guidance now for 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.
OPERATOR
All right, next up is Junaid, followed by Saket Kalia.
Junaid Sui, Analyst
Great, thanks. Skip. 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?
Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks for that, Junaid. So, yeah, SASE is an integral part of our hybrid mesh proposition and part of the platform. We are 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, and as part of the hiring that we're doing, it's 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 — 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.
OPERATOR
All right. Thanks, Junaid. Next up is Saket Kalia, followed by Eric Keith, who will most likely be our last caller today.
Saket Kalia, Analyst
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. 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 for a 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?
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
I would say that, first of all, the impact will be less for this year because the hiring is going to be made for next year. But I would say for next year's margin, I would wait for the next calls, because next week we kick off our planning for next year — for 2027 — and I don't want now to give you anything because it's still in very early stages. I would say for the next quarter.
Saket Kalia, Analyst
Totally get it. Thank you, man.
OPERATOR
All right, next up is Eric Keith.
Eric Keith, Analyst
Thanks, Kip. Roei, Nadav, maybe just to come back one more time to the 3Q/4Q seasonality. Can you put a finer point on 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 changed in the last 90 days? Thanks.
Roei Golan, Chief Financial Officer
It's less customer. The other thing is, 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 prudent 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 on vacations, holidays, and are back to work only in September.
So, taking a more prudent approach. But definitely I think we do see improvement and more stabilization. I'll go to market, and therefore I think we are going to this hiring campaign that we feel confident with, extending our go to market now after being stabilized after the disruption that we had in the first, in the first half of the 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 briefly said, that's what we're starting to plan for now.
OPERATOR
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.
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