Okta, Inc. (OKTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody. It's Keith Bachman here from BMO. We're continuing on our virtual software conference. Thrilled to have Okta and Brett. And we're just going to go ahead and launch into it, normal format. [Operator Instructions]

Let's just jump into it, Brett. Thanks very much for joining us today. Let's start out broad and then go do some product questions. But as you think about the next 12 to 18 months in totality, what are you most excited about? What are the potential to drive attention to the upside and corresponding, where would the concerns be?

Yes. First of all, thanks for having me, Keith. I appreciate you hosting us today. There's 4 things that we've talked about and just for the last few quarters. One is becoming one of the world's most secure companies. The other one is new product introduction. Third one is partners in terms of penetrating the partner ecosystem and getting leverage there. And then the fourth one is around go-to-market specialization and further specializing our field. From my perspective, all of them are important. But the one I'm probably the most excited for in the next 12 to 18 months is likely go-to-market specialization and further specialized in the field. And it's a little bit of a cheer answer in the sense that one ties to the other. From a go-to-market specialization perspective, the reason why we're further specialized in the field is that we know focus works. We look at U.S. public sector, we've done really well over the years there. That's a specialized sales force. If you look at U.S. SMB, we specialized it last year. And they had a really good Q4, a solid Q1. And so you could see it takes time for these things to take effect, right? We're not just expecting these changes to be all overnight, everything goes perfectly. It takes time. There is a cost of change. And so when you think about specialization, we know that, that focus works. And so that's why I'm most excited about it. And when we think about diving down like why does focus work and why do we do this now? If you look at the product portfolios on both sides of the business, the Okta side and the Auth0 side, they are very deep. And it is very hard for one individual to be able to sell all of it. And so we felt further specializing by product in a lot of our geos and segments was the right thing to do. And that goes back to #2 that I mentioned a second ago, which is new product introduction. We believe that eventual focus, that eventual knowledge of your specific area will make it so that we can sell more of those newer products, which we are really excited about. So although go-to-market specialization is my #1, I think it ties in nicely with new products as well. I'm excited about all 4 by the way. I think they all have the potential to help us grow in the medium and long term. But if you're going to force me into one answer, go-to-market specialization.

Perfect. Perfect. It's certainly been an interesting journey for Okta over the last number of years on sort of go-to-market, but it does seem like you've hit your rhythm or much better rhythm. Maybe as you think about 2 things. One, just remind us on your FedEE exposure this year and how you've made that construct within your guidance?

Yes. So you heard me just talk about it. We've done quite well there. But we've talked about it in the past, it's less than 10 -- the U.S. public sector is less than 10% of the entire business. And then federal is a subset of that business. We're being thoughtful about federal primarily because I think we all read the news just like everyone else. There are levels of uncertainty in the U.S. federal government that are probably elevated relative to other areas of the economy. And so when we think about it, we're being thoughtful about it. Like I said, it's still a small percentage of the business. But as you know, Keith, federal contracts are 1-year deals. And so we have to renew that portion of the business every year. And so given the level of uncertainty, the heightened level of uncertainty that we see there, we're being thoughtful about that. And if you think about my macro comments that I said a couple of weeks ago, DOGE and U.S. federal was a subset underneath that macro umbrella because we do see the level of uncertainty there growing over the last couple of months. And so we're being thoughtful about that in the guidance that we gave out a couple of weeks ago. So we're excited about it in the long run. We think short-term turbulence because there's uncertainty right now. But long run, if you think about what we're doing, what are the 3 major things that we do? Security, modernization and efficiency. What are the 3 things the U.S. federal government have said that they want? Security, modernization and efficiency. So we feel like we're lined up well for the long run, just maybe a little bit turbulent between -- in the short term.

Yes. Fair enough. Okay. Before we go into products, I want to ask one more bigger picture question. You've been pretty clear in your comments that the -- for lack of a better word, the guidance or the upside relative to previous guidance that that's not how you're framing this year. And that there's less upside to guidance is the way investors should think about it. But I'm trying to understand why the different philosophical approach as you gave guidance for this year?

Yes. I think it's right time, right place, right? If you look at our growth rates this year relative to maybe our growth rates 2, 3 years ago, if we were to continue to be those levels of conservatism, it just wouldn't quite make sense to do that. And frankly, we're a much larger company. We should be able to get closer to the pin. So I think that those are the 2 main reasons is just size of the company and the growth rate that we're growing at, we feel like we can do better than what we have in the past.

So you're trying to reduce the variability because you got more -- I mean, portfolio, you're a broader company, so you reduce the variability or the variances associated with that.

Variability, there's a difference in, hey, if you're growing 9% to 10% of revenue growth like we just guided versus growing 30%, maybe your approach changes a little bit. And we feel like as we mature as a company, it was the right thing to do and really want to be able to get closer to the pin.

Okay. Well, it's not something I'm familiar with is getting closer to the pin. But if you think about -- we're also pretty clear that I think investors were sort of asking a question on is there more conservatism this year as you approach guidance, particularly with the Fed uncertainty and maybe the macro deteriorating, but just try to square that peg in terms of how that -- how your answer to that comment fits into the -- you're trying to introduce less variability in the guidance.

Yes. I think if you look at the guidance, there's 2 factors that are in there right now. One is the go-to-market -- further specializing the go-to-market organization, which is the same level of conservatism that we've talked about for the last couple of quarters. We talked about that starting in Q3 of FY '25, talked about our Q4 of FY '25 and then reiterated it this last quarter. So that has remained the same. So we still have the same amount of conservatism, which is less. Now we did add in a small amount for macro. But if you sum the 2 up, it's still not nearly the level of conservatism that we've had in the past. So we just want to make sure everybody understood we're thinking about macro, just like I think many others are, given the level of uncertainty out there in the business environment.

Okay. Let's do some product-related questions, and we'll try to have more questions that we could possibly fit in, in the time allotted, but I'll try to be reasonably responsible in asking the question. But let's start with lack of a better word is core. And we think about core as both the customer and the employee side. And what are the drivers you think on the employee side, specifically? And how do you think about the context of new logos? I think what investors worry about is, is the market saturated and there's really new logo growth? How much opportunity do you have there in terms of -- in particular, with new logos on the employee side?

Yes. We think there's still a lot of opportunity out there. I mean, there's a tremendous need out there in the business environment for a solution for identity, and we feel like we've got the best one in the market. And a lot of the things that we're working on that -- the 4 I just mentioned, security, NPI, go-to-market specialization and partners will help us penetrate the market from a new logo perspective. We actually had a nice quarter in Q1 from a new logo perspective and a new business, actually just looking at the dollars, we had a nice quarter. And I mentioned that a couple of weeks ago. And I think that goes back to us continuing to focus the organization, whether it be the hunter-farmer specialization we use at the very bottom end of the market, very small and medium-sized businesses, whether it's the focus from a product specialization, we think that, that level of focus helps us land new logos in the long run. Look, we're not expecting it to turn around tomorrow. This is a long-term strategic investment that we're making. And so yes, we definitely think there's a lot of opportunity out there from a logo perspective. And when I say logos, I don't just mean number of logos. We want quality of logos, too. You've heard us talk about the greater than $100,000 number. You've heard us talk about -- and that's over 80% of the ACV for the business. If you look at the greater than $1 million, right, that's over $1 billion in ACV. So we're not just talking quantity, we're talking about quality as well because there is a lot of opportunity for us from a new logo perspective. And even once they get into Okta, even a lot of those customers that are greater than $1 million in ACV, there's a lot of upside inside those accounts. There -- I can't think of an account that's wall-to-wall everywhere on everything, every license possible. So there's a lot of runway despite the fact that we do have a lot of those million dollar accounts. So yes, new logos are definitely something that's on our mind, and we will continue to focus on them as we go forward.

And if you had to sort of break down, I'm going to stay on the employee side, like the greater drivers, logos versus seat versus price. How do you think about -- is there any ordering of what would drive that side of the business?

In terms of just like overall ACV growth, is that what the -- like in terms of...

For the employee side access [indiscernible].

Got you. So I mean it's really any vector. I mean we've been growing it significantly, mainly via upsells lately, which has been hampered by the seat headwinds we've been facing over the last 1 to 2 years that we've talked about a bunch. So really, cross-sell is a big opportunity for us, new logos. I mean, Keith, I can't say that there's like one that's going to be huge and the other ones are small because if you look at the penetration of the market, it's -- we're still very -- we're like we're a rounding error in a lot of ways in terms of the penetration on the market in a lot of places. And so we feel like there's a lot of opportunity everywhere. And I think it's up to us to execute to go get that market.

Okay. And then how about a big picture question. But if you think about workforce identity versus customer identity, over the next 2 to 3 years, which is the larger, you think, driver of net new?

Net new in terms of -- well, I mean, net new, let's just say with total growth. Historically, customer identity has been growing faster. I mean our goal is to get both of them to grow faster -- I mean, like we're not happy with the growth rates as they are today. We think workforce has got a lot of opportunity out there. I mean a lot of the newer products that we've been talking about, governance, PAM, device access, threat protection, all these things are on ISPM, we could just keep going down the line, are on the workforce side. But then you look at the Auth0 side and the customer identity side, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity there to add to the growth, not just via new product, but also just new logos. So I think both can theoretically, from our perspective, grow faster than what we're doing today. So I don't have -- I'm not going to say -- I can't pick my favorite child, Keith. Like they're both near and dear to me, and I think they've both got a lot of opportunity in the future.

All right. Well, let's do the competitive dynamics in each of those categories, customer and employee. And I think one time you said to me, this is probably last year that in terms of competitive dynamics, Microsoft is really the only one matters. But how would you characterize any change in the competitive dynamics and any change in your win rates on both the employee and customer side?

Yes. I mean the competitive dynamics -- and when I answered that question, I think I was answering really around the workforce side of things. Microsoft is with -- a thousand pound gorilla, if you will, the biggest competitor we have in the market. They've been around the entire time our company has existed, and we have thrived in that entire -- in that time frame. So they continue to run the same play that they have run for years, which is bundle it with E3 or E5 license and give it away for free. And we've gotten to this place despite that. And I think we have a better product. And we have just a broader product, if you look at it, right, access management, governance, PAMs coming along. So that dynamic has not changed. Their competitive approach has remained the same. On the customer identity side, it's really the build versus buy, right? When the developers all over, make sure that they know that using our product can help them be more efficient, build a more scalable product, build a more secure product. We think that there's a lot of opportunity, obviously, on that side as well. And so we've got to continue to evangelize in the market that you really need to use the Okta products or Auth0 products to be able to help yourself here. So we feel like there's no change in the environment there. We just...

Do you think there's anything different on Ping and ForgeRock since they've gone private?

I can't say that I've seen any changes or heard a significant change there. They're in a lot of ways, they tend to run a -- I don't want to say a similar play to Microsoft, but something along the lines of you want to compete on price and not on functionality. But that's been the case. for years. I don't think that's different. It seems fairly similar from our perspective.

Okay. Okay. Let's continue on to governance. Governance, which is I think is a really exciting area. We've been doing a lot of work on it, including at RSA a few months back. You've commented that you had -- you have 1,300 customers out of 20,000-something customers. And so a relatively small penetration rate. But where do you think that could go in 3 years?

In 3 years, it should be significantly higher. I mean that's one of the reasons to do the go-to-market specialization so we can have the focus for folks to sell into that. We think that is clearly the best upsell we've got on the workforce side. From a size perspective at this point. Now granted, there's a couple of others that we're looking at that in the long run may be really healthy as well and are excited about like the PAMs of the world and Threat Protection and ISPM, all those things. But yes, they definitely should be higher, and that's our goal. I don't have an exact percentage for you, Keith, but that is something we are focusing on.

What is the common -- is there a histogram of wins? What I mean by that is there a common use case or industry or company size? I've always thought, a, winning in OIG with your installed base and then b, probably more mid-market companies, but you sort of pushed back on that line of reasoning, I think, after the last earnings call. But I just want to hear a little bit more about where are you winning? And why do you think you're winning in those 1,300 accounts?

Yes. It is mainly an upsell game at this point, Keith, to be very clear. And really where we win, let's start with -- they're kind of like is it greenfield versus rip and replace. There's a mixture of greenfield and the second one is also side-by-side with a legacy provider. So imagine a company using a legacy provider and they have a more modern workflow or flow they want to put under the umbrella of governance and they go to a company like us and say, hey, you can do the new one, but we'll keep the old one. So it's like a side-by-side implementation. So that's one -- those are probably 2 major things to think about. In terms of size of company, you got to remember what is our heritage here in terms of how to access the market. What we did with access management, we start with middle market and lower enterprise and then kind of go both directions, go actually down and actually up. Our goal is to do the same thing with governance, and I'm sure we'll talk about PAM at some point. The goal with PAM is the same thing. Start in these areas where the legacy providers have not necessarily been able to provide a product to that segment of the market because maybe it's too expensive, maybe it takes too long to implement or you don't have the time, all that good stuff. So we're running the same play from a governance perspective. And we've had actually even like early success in enterprise and above in strat kind of actually a little bit to our surprise, frankly, because we expect it to be more in that middle market and lower enterprise. And that was with the product a year ago that was good, but it wasn't what we thought was -- we didn't -- we weren't totally sure it was good enough for that upper end. Now if you look at what all the product improvements we've made, and we'll continue to make more product improvements to be very clear, we still think there's more room to run. The latest ones of segregation of duties, latest one of on-prem connectors. So Okta, although not an on-prem product, can actually connect to on-prem applications via our governance tool. And so we think the continuous innovation by the Okta team, which has done a really good job over the last couple of years of innovating on the governance side, we think that we can spread up toward that higher end of the market. Now are we going to sit here and say we can do a highly complex on-prem deployment? No, because we're still a cloud provider with on-prem connectors. But we do believe that we can really penetrate that higher end of the market and that old [ tape ] of Okta has a light IGA tool. I don't think you can say anymore. Okta has a legitimate IGA tool at this point. And so we're excited about it. And so I think that -- to your question, where are we going to win? Well, in theory, it should allow us to win further up the stack in terms of segmentation.

And how does that work with -- you mentioned part is greenfield, part is side-by-side. How does it work on the side by side? Is it so BMO might have a division that segregate our wealth management might go and the rest of the business might stay with sale or something?

Yes. Or you've implemented some -- let's say, you have multiple HR systems or multiple insert any system here. And one is an older legacy tool and you've got, oh, okay, well, you want to connect to Workday now, right? Or you want to connect to Salesforce or insert whatever major systems that are cloud oriented and you had the older version somewhere else. But yes, that's -- I mean, your business unit idea is also an area that, that happens in. That's actually the play we've run for years and continue to run in access management, which is you get in there, prove your value. And that's -- I mean that's the overall -- I mean, it's the land and expand and its finest, right? You go in small project, make sure they're successful and then you earn the right to future, right? It's not about that first one. It's about the possibility of building off that initial implementation and showing your value and showing a really high ROI for the organization that you're trying to help.

And any thoughts on how the market unfolds, and I'm still on governance in terms of -- do you think -- we tend to standardize at BMO on one. I won't say who it is. But do you see that more as companies are going to use multiple governance tools. And the reason I asked the question is you highlighted your thought more of a cloud-centric model. You have on-premise connectors, but do you think you're better oriented towards more cloud workloads in at Workday or Salesforce or what have you?

Yes. I mean I think right now, yes, we're definitely more oriented toward the cloud because we think that's where the market is going. And your question is, would you use one provider versus multiple providers? Well, right now, we're seeing people use multiple providers for the reasons we just discussed. I ultimately believe in the long run, there will be more of a platform that will do all this for you. So access management, governance, PAM, and that's what we're -- that's our strategic bet. I mean we think it's better to be able to use one tool as opposed to multiple tools. And it will become ease of use, it will become an ROI conversation. It will become a security conversation, all those things, things that we're all pretty good at. So we think we want to. If you look at the customers who have built -- bought and built the entire product suite on the workforce side, that's what -- that's their strategic bet as well. It is like, look, we want it from one provider, not multiple. But I think that's going to take time. As you know, Keith, you're very well educated in this area in the sense there's a lot of technology sprawl out there. And it's hard to bring everything under one umbrella right out of the gate because of the technology that's just out there, and there's a lot going on.

Yes. Okay. We're going to come back to that at the end kind of consolidation theme. But how important is price when you think about governance...

Like winning deals and whatnot?

Yes. I mean because part of your value proposition, candidly, is you're -- in my opinion, is you're a lower-cost solution, easier to deploy, easier to get up and running. But how important is that overall price/TCO in your win rates?

Well, I think that's -- any cloud software is going to typically build a good case around TCO and the ROI associated with that. So I don't think we're any different from that. We feel good about our pricing and where it is today and feel like we're getting really good value. So we're going to continue to push the program as it is today.

Okay. And the last one, I think, here on governance because we're going to run out of time. And is -- you mentioned when we talked about the win rates, how often are you going against sale or? And what -- how are your win rates changing as your product matures, as you alluded to?

Yes. We don't have -- I think there's probably more of the case of like, are you in the right place at the right time? Right? I mean, like I'll go back to what I just said is like, if you're going against a highly customized on-prem, we're not going to win that often. But as you -- as we've now discovered the market really likes our opportunity and our offering and thinks it's quite good. Our win rates, just in general, for governance, we feel solid about, and we feel like we can improve from here, primarily because of the specialization effort that I just -- I've been talking about on this call a few times. So yes, we look forward to penetrating that market as much as possible. We feel like there's a real big opportunity.

Okay. Life cycle management, we'll do quickly, which is not fair. But any context you can give us about growth rates and where you are in penetration rates? Does that essentially get pulled along with governance? Or is that a separate cadence that work life cycle management moves along?

Well, think about it as life cycle management is actually a subset of governance, right? It's just -- it's workflows. That's all it is. And if you think about workflows as a component of governance, you could actually think of the life cycle management piece as a place to graduate from to governance. So a lot of our upsell motion is actually with customers that start with SSO, MFA, UD, right, UD is Universal Directory. And then they start to dabble in life cycle management or workflows. And then they're like, oh, wow, life cycle management and workflows, okay, maybe I should add governance. And that's a natural kind of like upsell flow that we've been running for years. And I think that's one of the reasons why governance has been so good over the years is because we already had that natural upsell and the aptitude to sell. So yes, I would actually wouldn't say like life cycle management gets dragged along. I would actually say quite maybe the opposite is the way to governance. Now that's changing a little bit as we've gotten the product and governance to be, like you heard me say a second ago, really good. You're seeing actually some more just governance straight buys as opposed to stopping along the way at life cycle management. And so it's a big part of that number that we talked about the other day. We talked about $100 million of governance, another $300 million of life cycle management and workflows for a total business on governance size of $400 million. So I'm feeling pretty good about that. But like we talked about earlier that it's only 1,300 customers on the governance side, we need to improve that and make that a lot bigger.

And when your sales reps are out there selling life cycle management, who are they competing against? What is it competing against, sorry?

What is it competing against?

Yes.

It's a good question. There's not many out there. I mean I'm sure on the Microsoft side, you're having to deal with something there, but it's -- I mean, it's a workflow technology. It's not -- it's identity workflow technology. So it's not like it's -- there's some like specific provider that's only providing that piece of technology. So you're really -- you're likely once again going against the Microsofts of the world in that situation.

Okay. Let's switch to PAM. One of my big surprises coming back from RSA is we candidly been a little dubious on the ability of Okta to grow PAM because it's a very sophisticated solution, but I was pleasantly surprised that some of the VARs we talked to at RSA said that PAM is actually getting a little bit of traction for Okta. Now it wasn't really talked about on your most recent earnings call, but maybe help us -- give us a little context on where do you think you are in your capabilities? Where are you, which is nascent to your penetration, but how can this unfold over the next 12 to 18 months?

Yes. That's nice to say that, by the way, and we appreciate the compliment. But look, I think PAM is not nearly as far along in terms of technology features and whatnot relative to governance. We've got a lot of work to do there. But if you look at what we've done with governance, we feel confident over the coming quarters and years that we're going to be able to develop a really solid product there. I think from my perspective, it might take a little bit longer because I think, as you know, Keith, the PAM market is a little bit more fragmented than the governance market. And so we feel good about the effort we're putting in, and we feel like we want to continue to drive forward there because it goes back to the theme we were talking about earlier, which is there should be a cohesive platform or product suite that addresses all of these workforce use cases, and we feel the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces. And so we are excited about the PAM market, but we are not suggesting at this point that we can go head-to-head with a legacy provider. We feel like we can go head-to-head with legacy providers in the governance market and obviously, access management. But at this point, we still feel we're making progress there. So...

Right. If we think about like, a, is there key features that still need to be added? And b, could PAM contribute in calendar '26?

Calendar. Yes. I think that's our -- I mean, obviously, we want to grow all the new products and governance is the biggest one in that group. But PAM has the chance to be one that could make some real difference. I can't say '26 versus '27, but I think we're getting there in terms of the product. And like I said, there's still a lot of work to do, but we have a lot of positive intention in that market. I think we can make a difference.

Okay. Let's switch to nonhuman, which I always find a curious name. There's a lot of feedback on why different vendors in the identity space may win not all of it, but a portion of the nonhuman market. And each vendor has sort of a different story. And so the broader question is, a, what needs to happen for the market to emerge because it's virtually nothing right now. And then b, why does Okta win in the nonhuman market or will be a winner in the nonhuman market?

Yes. I'm going to answer them in reverse order. Primarily, I think why Okta can win in this market is nonhuman identities AI, they all have the same problem that humans do, something we've been doing for years, which is who has access to what [indiscernible] that's all identity is. It's pretty simple. We may try to make it sound more complicated than that, but that's really all it is. And so if you think about what I just said, which is the nonhuman identities have the same problem, like think about a service account, right? A service account is supposed to access something and do it securely and have access to the right stuff. And if you look at the new products that we've been designing here like ISPM, which is designed for service accounts to find the holes, remediate them immediately, and then we can implement PAM right? PAM will sit in behind it, which will then automate that service account. So you put MFA on it. You create a password for it, first of all, create a password for it, go ahead and have MFA on it, rotate that secret, vault that secret, give it just-in-time credentials, do the reporting on it, all that good stuff. So we think we've got a product that -- and then if you want to have a human access to that AHI, that's when you have the governance tool. So everything we've been doing for years ties in nicely to this nonhuman identity concept on the workforce side. And we feel like there's a lot of upside for us in the long run. Now from a technology perspective, is everyone there yet from a technical perspective? No, they are not. But I think if you look at the stats out there, the market is acknowledging that they have a problem. It's just -- they're not sure how to solve it. And that's why if you look at product showcase back in early April, that was the main portion of it on the workforce side was all about nonhuman identities, how to secure them, how to rotate those secrets, how to do -- how to federate the identity, make sure everything is working correctly. So we feel really strongly that this is a really big opportunity for us from a nonhuman identity perspective on the workforce side. And if you look at agentic AI on the Auth0 side, on the customer side, we think that's a really big opportunity, too, because it's the exact same problem. It does the agent have the access to the right things at the right time. And so we feel like we're very well positioned. Obviously, like you said, Keith, we're early on in this market trend. So we're not expecting anything from it in the near term, but in the long term, we think this is a really good opportunity.

When do you think it will matter for -- if I take the market segment, which is CyberArk and SailPoint and Okta, when do you think it will matter for the industry in terms of contributing to aggregate growth? Is it next year? I'll use calendar years to make it easy.

Yes. No, it's a good question. I think you -- I think it depends which side because like nonhuman identities and agentic AI are 2 different beasts. Yes. I mean I think it's going to start to matter probably next year, a couple of years from now. I think it takes time. But we -- I mean, -- we could see it earlier than that. Let's see once again, this is about us convincing the market they need to find a solution from us. Just like we're talking about with the developer market earlier, we need to do a better job of evangelizing that we've got some really cool tools and some really interesting stuff that can help to help our customers.

Some of the VARs have commented to us that governance is going to be important for nonhuman identities, particularly agents because once you get access to it, they want -- organizations want to limit what those agents can do and governance would be part of it. And so if that's true, it sort of speaks to the importance of having a broader portfolio. So a, would you agree with that thesis that you need to bring several capabilities to bear to nonhuman identities?

Yes, absolutely. And that's what I was just talking about in terms of we're actually doing that via our PAM tool. Because if you think about a lot of the concept of a governance tool and a PAM tool, they actually kind of overlap a little bit, right? Giving access to the right stuff, making sure it's just in time, reporting on that, certifying it. Those are all governance concepts. They're also PAM concepts as well. So we see those markets blending over time, and that's why the example I just gave around having those NHIs in PAM, doing all those factors that I just mentioned about MFA, token vaulting, rotating the secret, certifying it, all this stuff, we think that we're going to -- we want to do that via PAM for the actual NHI itself. Now if you look at what we want to do from a governance perspective, it's the human accessing the NHI at that point. So there's the NHI having access to the right stuff and then there's having the human access the NHI. So first one is PAM, second one is governance. So we think that, that's -- like I said, we think this is a big opportunity for us in the long run.

And Brett, how would you -- we only got time for 1 or 2 more questions, we'll say 2. But a lot of investors, if I did a poll and said, which identity organization is best suited to capture the emergence of NHIs, I think 7 out of 10 would say CyberArk. How would you respond to that?

I think that's a reasonable approach. I mean they did a big acquisition in Venafi. And we only really came out with all this really interesting technology in early April. So I think that's a reasonable approach and a reasonable opinion, but I think we're going to change that opinion over the next couple of years.

And I would also argue it's pretty darn early to make a declarative statements on winners might be a little bit premature.

I might be a little...

Yes, I think it is. So I think there's going to be lots of opportunities. It sort of reminds me a years ago, people would ask us who's going to win Azure, AWS. And our answer was probably both. So if we think about the last question then in the interest of time, the July quarter cRPO guide was a little bit weaker than I think investors had gone into the quarter with expectation. It's basically an implied decrease round numbers of $20 million or something along those lines. Maybe just revisit on why there was such a delta or what factors were really contemplated in that guide?

Yes. I mean we're just taking into account all the things that we've talked about around go-to-market specialization and also the potential headwinds from an uncertain macro perspective. I think when we came into FY '26, we took a very methodical approach to further specializing the field. And so that's what you see reflected in the guidance that we gave last time, the guidance we gave this time, the guidance will likely give the time in the future because we know that it takes time and there's a cost of change to further specializing the field. But we know in the long run, it's the right thing to do and are confident that will be accretive to growth in the long run. So we feel like we're on track and yes, I feel good with where we are at this point from an execution perspective. Obviously, we got 3 quarters to go. Q1 is Q1. Let's not get overly excited one way or the other.

Well, you've mentioned a number of times during this conversation, the maturity of the field. At some point, that field will be mature. And therefore, the guidance presumably will not give a handicap because of that. When do you think that point is?

I hope it's sooner rather than later. I don't have an exact date for you, but we are taking a measured approach to our expectations at this point. Now we do feel good about the tenure of the field. The average tenure of the field is at multiyear highs. But we have been asking them to do different roles, and they are excited about it, at least that's what they tell us. And so we believe the proof will be in the pudding and the numbers in the quarters and years to come.

Okay. Perfect. Let's leave it there. We're 2 minutes over. Brett, in 2 days on the background. We appreciate your time on behalf of Bank of Montreal. Thanks very much for participating, and we wish you the best of luck. Many thanks.

Thanks, Keith. Appreciate the time.