Zscaler, Inc. (ZS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

January 12, 2021

NASDAQ US Information Technology Software conference_presentation 41 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Brian Essex

analyst
#1

Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brian Essex, Goldman Sachs security software analyst. Thank you to everyone for joining us today for the first day of our Technology and Internet Conference. Just one quick note. If there's anyone on the webcast who has any questions or issues you'd like to ask just take those questions into the webcast portal. I can see them here. I will leave some time at the end of the session to address any. I'll do my best to get to as many as I can. With that, today, I'm excited to have Jay Chaudhry, Zscaler's CEO, Chairman and Founder; and Remo Canessa, Zscaler's CFO with us. And then we also have Bill Choi, Head of Investor Relations as well, in case anyone [indiscernible]. So gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#2

Thank you.

Remo Canessa

executive
#3

Thank you.

Brian Essex

analyst
#4

Jay, maybe it seems like I talked to you just yesterday. Maybe to kick it off for those that are not familiar with the story, I mean, you've run a number of different hardware-focused companies in your past. Give us a bit of insight around what led to Zscaler? Maybe contrast it relative to more -- of the more hardware-centric company that you've run? What do you see is the opportunity and positioning for the company going forward?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#5

When I started Zscaler, I had the good luck of funding, founding and eventually selling 4 companies, 3 of them in the security space. And this time, I have no interest in building one more and flipping. So I wanted to do something big, something lasting. Since I'm using Salesforce and NetSuite since year 2001 when they were under $10 million in revenue each, I looked at the future and say, what will be big in the next several years. I'd looked at Internet being a big source of information, SaaS becoming big. AWS was very young. iPhone was just announced in 2007. I said it's all about mobile users, information in the cloud. Let's build something in the cloud, borrowing from Salesforce.com. I said we're going to build a cloud native, multi-tenant architecture, where security is sitting in every major location in the world as a security check cost, and any user from anywhere can get access to any application anywhere. So that was a big dream. And since I was funding this company myself, I needed conviction. I didn't have to go and convince any VCs about it. And I told my team, I'll invest whatever money it takes to build the right architecture that scales. And that's how we got started.

Brian Essex

analyst
#6

Fantastic. Maybe I have to ask you the obligatory macro question. So before we get started on the company itself, I mean, just reflecting on 2020 with the pandemic in the beginning of the year and the SolarWinds breach at the end of the year, maybe I think investors still assessing the impact of each and how that might affect 2021. What -- from your perspective, what was the year like? And how did that change conversations with your customers as you kind of progress through the year?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#7

So yes, none of us expected 2020 to be what had happened to be. COVID turned everything upside down but CIOs had to make sure their employees could work from home securely. So yes, in March-April-May time frame, they had to rush through and figure out either Zscaler, ZPA, ZIA or some VPN extension to make it work. But by and large, COVID got done in a few months because if a CIO won't have securely employees working from home after 3 or 4 months, he or she should be fired. That was done. Now but the lasting change COVID did was, the CIOs felt, "Wow, we could do so much in such a short amount of time." I mean that was number one. So every CIO's expectation changed. Number two, CIOs felt that they're dependent upon the network and data center for doing business. Yes, they were still using data center applications, but you may have 50,000 employees working from home. You're not using your corporate network at all. Your network is connecting your branches to the data center. It's totally unused and business is running. Employees directly going through someone like Zscaler, doing all the work they need to do. They certainly realize that network, my own network is not needed, Internet is the new network. With some of those changes, the transformation on the networking and security side has accelerated from a mindset point of view. My biggest competition, I've often said, is inertia. And they shook off inertia and is really helping transformation because business is under pressure to do transformation to make the business more agile and more competitive. So that's the COVID part of it. [ Solar's storm ], we don't expect that something will happen. I mean everyone thinks that, assume that you're compromised. But no one expected that the whole supply chain could be compromised. That was the big thing. So I hear from CIOs and CISOs that this event was bigger shocker than Target, which was one of the biggest things, what, 6, 7 years ago. I think the biggest thing now CIOs are doing, CISOs are doing that they were not doing was realizing that this castle and moat model, where once you're on my network, you can infect everything. It's the most dangerous thing. When Maersk got hit 2 years ago with NotPetya, everyone talked about it, and this is the second and much bigger wake-up call. So more and more discussions are happening on zero trust, where every employee is untrusted, no one is on your network and they go through an exchange or a switchboard like Zscaler to access the right application or services. So we see this thing a trend to wake our businesses because if they don't wake up, there'll be more SolarWinds out there. There will be bigger and bigger issues. And in some ways, it's a good wake-up call.

Brian Essex

analyst
#8

Yes. And I think we're still seeing more victims come out by the day.

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#9

Absolutely, yes.

Brian Essex

analyst
#10

Let's see what happens there. And how is that affecting the sense of urgency that your customers might have? I mean I got the sense when the pandemic occurred or the onset of the pandemic, it was -- there was a great sense of urgency because you've had to keep the patient alive, so to speak. And you had to be able to communicate with your employees and your customers. Is this more strategic? Or is there that sense of urgency because they need to cover themselves as quickly as possible?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#11

It is visibly urgent. Let me share with you that this thing happened a few days before Christmas. And I sent a note to our top about 250 customers saying, "We care about you. We'll be glad to talk to you to help you assess what's going on, we're going on as a complementary service. And we're not trying to do the ambulance chasers." And over these holidays, in about 10 days, we got about 6 dozen-plus meetings who got scheduled with CISOs. Year before that, nobody will respond to any e-mails during those 10 days. So it is -- there's a lot of sense of urgency to drive this down. The other thing is, if this thing would have happened 3 years ago, the zero trust understanding was too naive for them to understand it. But now the notion of zero trust has become already fairly well understood. And since there's enough understanding of it, now they are asking for more and more, faster adoption of zero trust because what it is, if one thing gets infected inside, everything gets infected. And zero trust is probably one of the best things you can do to minimize it to a party that's infected but not laterally spread.

Brian Essex

analyst
#12

Got it. That's super helpful. I want to address the nature of account penetration that you have. And one of the examples I'll use is, at RSA last year, I think right as the pandemic was happening, you had a customer, a very prominent customer that you had at your event, and they had ripped out about 75% of their firewalls and deployed ZIA and ZPA throughout their network. They kept 75% of their manufacturing facilities. As investors might have digest, your platform is, I guess, a vehicle for displacing legacy firewall technology. Could you maybe walk us through the use case where you would keep your firewalls of those manufacturing facilities? And is that a different conversation now than it was a year ago?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#13

Yes. So it's natural for investors to ask about what are you replacing. That's the most common question I get asked. But honestly speaking, the kind of stuff we are doing is driven by, more so, transform -- help me transform, then we figure out what to replace. Give you a couple of examples. One, with ZIA. When AutoNation wanted to have local Internet breakouts in each of the 360 stores where they had no breakout, they came to us to do 360 local Internet breakout security. And by the way, yes, I got 2 Secure Web Gateways in my data centers, they need to be removed as well. So replacement was a secondary point. Enable me was the first point. In the same way with ZPA or workloads and all, it's more and more so I am doing this for transformation. How do you help me? A cloud workload protection we recently launched is not big of a replacement play. Look at how many workloads are being launched out there every day. There's nothing like this in the data center. The customers are struggling to build security around it with virtual firewalls. And now they have come to a realization, it really doesn't even work. So we don't expect to get tons of business by replacing virtual firewalls. We think the amount of virtual firewalls deployed in the cloud is only a small test number, so to speak. But the massive opportunity is greenfield upsell. We'll end up replacing some of those. So that's their part. Your part on manufacturing. Manufacturing always want to take things slowly. And because -- I mean they want to be sure. I mean this -- everything moves slow in IT -- sorry, OT-IoT world. At my Zenith Live Summit, I talked about IoT and OT being the next big area where our customers want to do zero trust, same kind of stuff. They learned from ZPA what can be done and how they want to take it there. So it's a focus area for us, we go over. But do I care about that I must replace those 20-or-so firewalls in a factory versus helping them in the workload area? I'm going where the customer's biggest needs are from a timing point of view, but we know our solutions are useful for OT and IoT, so we are testing, we're building them to work on ruggedized devices that need to be in the factory. It is an opportunity for us. But IoT-OT will take -- it's a little bit slower pace in general.

Brian Essex

analyst
#14

Right. Got it. And then what tends to be the shift in spending when you penetrate a customer like that? I mean do you deliver net savings? Or do you end up addressing the same amount of spend but give them more for what they've been paying historically?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#15

I think if they look at holistically, what are they spending for the ecosystem, there are big saving. If they try to do like-for-like. There's no like-for-like because the way security products used to be -- the way they will be in a few years, I don't think they'll look the same much at all. The ROI is so massive. I was talking to a media company global CIO yesterday morning. He's a customer of ZIA, and I asked him how is business. He said, "Not good. Okay. Last year was not very good. We are down quite a bit." I asked him, so what are your priorities? "I'm doing cost-cutting in many areas." And what are the areas? He said, "I'm trying to find out. Maybe 5% here, 10% here." And I asked him, "How much are you spending on your network, including your routers and firewalls and the like?" He said, "It's about $50 million." I said, "What if I could show you that in 2 years, you could actually eliminate half of it?" He actually paused. He said, "You mean $25 million?" I said, "Yes. Actually, you could go further down." And he looked at me. He said, "Of course, I'll be interested." So we have a dialogue. And now we have a follow-on call with his architects and other teams in a week's time to be able to do full breakout and all that stuff because when Internet is becoming your network, you don't need to spend much money on the Internet -- on the network. If you don't spend money on the network going to your data center, you're no longer spending money on routers and switches and firewalls that you are spending 20%, 30% every year. All that goes away, the ROI with Zscaler solution becomes massive.

Brian Essex

analyst
#16

And how often is -- kind of on that example, I would imagine that there's quite a bit of maintenance and technical debt. How often is the relief of that burden part of the conversation from a digital transformation perspective? In other words, are they coming to you for digital transformation? Or do you just happen to have a conversation and then the light bulb goes off and, "Hey, I didn't realize that this is a resource, and this could actually be a catalyst when you transform my business."

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#17

Yes. A year ago, 18 months ago, we had to proactively bring it. Now it's becoming more and more common. The word is spreading out there. CIOs are talking to other CIOs, and it's becoming easier. The other thing that has pushed CIOs in that direction is pressure on cost savings. The CIOs and CFOs are saying, "I need to transform, but I also need to save money." So now they are basically saying, "What else can you take out to simplify and consolidate costs?" So it is becoming a bigger discussion. That is why we're seeing that we are getting bigger penetration of transformation bundle and the like. And I think it's exciting. I talked to this global CIO of a large manufacturing company about a couple of weeks ago. Actually she was on a keynote for [indiscernible]. And she said, "Jay, I'm so happy with the service. Our users are really raving about it." And I thanked her, then she said, "You know, what makes me excited is when I go to these private sessions with CIOs and they are raving about Zscaler, it's wonderful because, generally, CIOs don't rave about vendors, especially networking and security vendors. They only talk about them when something goes wrong. Otherwise, they take it for granted." I thought that I was a great comment she made.

Brian Essex

analyst
#18

That's fantastic. Maybe I'll hit Remo with a question, give him a chance to address the question. So Remo, I mean both you and Jay, I think, have talked about the market shifting and "coming to you" and Jay has consistently kind of made that reference. As a result, you've obviously increased levels of spending with regard to growth to gaining market share, which is certainly the right thing to do, increasing head count over 60% last year. Maybe could you help us understand how you measure the efficacy of that spending, the primary metrics that you look at when you determine how much to spend, how fast do you lean into that growth.

Remo Canessa

executive
#19

Yes. I mean it's a great question. Certainly, top line growth is number one. New business and upsell business is what I look at. And really, I look at sales productivity. That's the #1 metric that I look at. And value sales productivity for the total field quota carrying sales organization but sales productivity for ramp sales reps. And when you're seeing the types of things that we're seeing and the market coming to us, we continue to invest. Bottom line profitability, 14% last quarter. We talked about that we were going to put growth over profitability, but we've hired over 260 net employees in Q1 and still had 14% operating profitability. The SaaS model is a great model. And I remember coming onboard at Zscaler 4 years ago and I said, "Man, I've never seen so many levers you can pull, different directions you can take the company." And when you take a look at -- when you have a company that's got 80% gross margin, growing at the growth rates that we're growing, it doesn't take much time to basically turn it to significant profitability. So as long as we see the market coming to us, we talked about the large SAM that we've got, $72 billion, we're the market leader, we feel that we have a real opportunity to really capture this market, we're going to keep our foot on the gas. And so just all those things I'm looking at, but it's a -- right now, it's all positive.

Brian Essex

analyst
#20

Yes. And you certainly did lay out a big SAM, and there's lot to digest, to unpack with all the data that you guys kind of gave us with that presentation. And when you think about -- just to kind of use a number that you threw out there, like a 31% CAGR ballpark expectation of growth, I mean, what's the math to get there? Is it more customer growth as you go down market? Or is it more increasing attach rates? I mean how do you think about the saturation that you have right now into your installed base? And how much of that might be incremental customer growth versus increased penetration of your installed base?

Remo Canessa

executive
#21

Yes. I mean what we plan for is between 50% and 60% new ACV. So I would try to keep to those levels going forward. But because we have so much to sell to our existing customers, that might change. But from a planning perspective, what I -- from internal, I want to keep to like a 60-40, 50-50 type new ACV to upsell.

Brian Essex

analyst
#22

Got it. And then you also talked that it's really helpful to see kind of the stratification of how you look at customers versus the majors, large enterprise and then down to, like, the enterprise level. As you kind of go down market, do you -- I mean do you have any visibility right now around the types of competition that you see down market? Are you -- is the profile of that market changing significantly? Or is it the kind of same constituents you typically see?

Remo Canessa

executive
#23

I'll start, and I'll let Jay come in. The power of the Zscaler platform allows us to go down market at the same level efficiency that we have with the biggest companies. You could be a company of 10 employees and still have the same level of security as the largest companies in the world. That's a huge advantage. The -- but our focus, though, is companies of greater than 20,000 employees or, sorry, companies with greater than 2,000 employees, which is they're about 20,000. So from my perspective, we do have the ability to go downstream. That downstream is basically serviced by traditional companies that are selling to the practitioners. But we are seeing the market coming to us. So I'll turn it over to Jay.

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#24

Yes. So on the high end, large enterprises, majors and all, we literally have no competition because they are savvy security folks, they understand it and it's all figured out. It's a matter of expanding our go-to-market engine to make it happen where we feel very comfortable. We have been seeing more and more inbound calls coming from the next level market as you go down because there's no clean boundaries between a versus b. So that's why after having lots of debates, we kind of said we should go and proactively invest in, let's call, the next segment, 6,000 to 2,000 employees. And that's the down market. We clearly spelled out yesterday, that's the next segment we're going to go focus on. You look at the third -- the lowest segment, under 2,000 employees, people often call it SMB or commercial, we get about 10% of business from that. So we don't call it a focus area, but a lot of those leads come in. And we are experimenting. We're learning, we're exploring. It's not about the technology at all. It works. It works beautifully. It'll be more of figuring our optimized channel, some distribution and the like. And we're learning, figuring out to see what all do we need to do. In my view, I don't need to go down there to deliver massive growth. Look at sales -- look at ServiceNow. Where are they? $4.5 billion, $5 billion revenues, and they must have just about 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 customers. They're doing extremely well. But I think I do want to go down to make sure the open space available can be -- if they can be easily taken over by us, it's a good thing, unlike ServiceNow, which requires customization to make it work. So for small companies, it's a lot of work. Zscaler deployment is relatively simple. So we are well positioned to go there. And the competition on the low end ends up being less sophisticated customers and less sophisticated sellers. If I can get to a level that's not showing, I think we can do very well there. And quite often, folks like in Cisco, open DNS kind of people show up on the lower end. But it's an opportunity for us.

Brian Essex

analyst
#25

Got it. That's super helpful. And then maybe if you can talk about -- I think in the beginning of the year, with the onset of the pandemic, you saw a nice acceleration in ZPA attack. How do you think about the profile of the business maybe in the back half of the year as we go into 2021 as you have ZDX, Z B2B? You just rolled out ZCP. How much momentum does ZPA have? I think you mentioned yesterday, you don't need ZPA to pursue workload protection, but is it just natural? And are you still getting that momentum with Attack? Or is it moving in the other direction where you're selling more outside of ZPA?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#26

I tell my product managers, you guys got a lot of competition. Your products are competing [ from markets there ], okay? It's a good thing. I think if you look at the 2 big growth engines for us for the short term are ZIA and ZPA. Both are doing extremely well. I mean ZPA had to grow much faster than ZIA to really take any market share away from it, while in one particular quarter right after COVID, we saw a big spike, but we have been doing quite well, even Q4, Q1, we were in the, whatever, 28%, 30% range of the new business, but not bad at all. So we think these 2 will be the biggest piece. As Remo had said before, emerging new products, ZDX and some of the cloud offerings we have done, we're looking at in the -- Remo, what did you say?

Remo Canessa

executive
#27

Yes, mid-single-digit new and upsell for the year.

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#28

Yes. First year. I mean the -- no matter how good your products are, it does take a little bit of time to get the word out, to get them as a part of the sales process pipeline and all. But we are seeing tremendous interest, especially in ZDX Digital Experience because CIOs want to know if there's an issue, where is the issue. And then the cloud workload which is not one product, it's 3 separate products that make a complete pillar, and they are in different stages of the journey. And -- but we think we are rightly positioned at the right time to go after the early stage market that's still forming out there.

Brian Essex

analyst
#29

And do you think that the ZPA growth trajectory from inception to now is indicative of what to expect for things like ZCP? Or is that kind of like on the radar front? Is it a proxy for that growth curve?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#30

Remo has a better future-looking eyes.

Remo Canessa

executive
#31

Yes. I don't want to really go there and make predictions about where it's going to go, but it is a big market opportunity. I think we're well positioned, and we're expecting good things. Let's just -- I'd rather just keep it at that rather than making future projections on it at this point.

Brian Essex

analyst
#32

Okay. Any initial feedback from customers? I mean traction that you're getting with it? Is it just that you're getting maybe some proof of concepts right now, and that might yield some fruit next year? Or how should we think about the launch of that platform?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#33

I'll give you overall directional color of these among several new products, CASB, API, we launched last year. It's doing extremely well. It's a well-known market. I expect almost all of Zscaler ZIA customer will eventually kick out the point products they have because CASB gets viewed as essentially a feature. So we expect good growth from it. DLP. We have had DLP for a while. We had to build it to make it really richer to replace Symantec Vontu, which was a very rich product. Now we have some very large banks who are actually taking out Symantec Vontu with Zscaler DLP, which is the ultimate test of the richness of your product. So it's doing well. We expect DLP to be a bigger share of our revenues over time. And then ZDX is a brand-new product, okay, but the need for it is so massive. It's unbelievable, but it's getting -- we are closing deals. We are seeing good momentum. We are pretty bullish about it. And that leaves the fourth area, cloud protection. To give you a little bit of color, CSPN is security posture, okay? And that's understood. That's basic 101. You must check security posture of the configuration of the workloads. We think we'll do quite well there. But the most exciting and highly differentiated solution for us is workload segmentation, which we dug into in detail yesterday because it's so disruptive. It's just like ZIA or ZPA. You don't do network security. You don't create a network between AWS region east to west. You just go over the Internet through our switchboard. So though we haven't sold any workload segment -- workload communication yet, there are about 4 dozen customers who are working with us in beta and various pricing discussions with us. So the feedback is very exciting. So we think there's a pent-up demand and that needs to be taken care off with this. So I like this area. And then I call segmentation, micro segmentation as probably only the sophisticated customers are pursuing at this stage. So that's how I put the CSPN communication and segmentation from stage point of view.

Brian Essex

analyst
#34

Right. Got it. I have a few others, but I want to get to some that we've had from across the portal first. So we'll do that now because I think we've got about 10 minutes left. So first one, I guess these are 2 questions. With Zscaler solutions proliferating, how do we see firewall vendors evolving and responding, particularly as it relates to vendors like Palo Alto and [ Fortinet ]?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#35

You are seeing them trying to respond out there and they make a lot of noise, right? I mean the noise has calmed down a little bit, about 18 to 24 months ago, there's a lot of noise. Every vendor tries to take what they have to see how they can apply it to the new problem. That's the natural thing they do, and that's an actual thing they can practically do. And when there are incremental small changes in the market, their approach works. But when there are big shifts, users on anywhere applications on anywhere, building this moat no longer works. Cloud has no walls. So where are you going to put your firewalls? So we think only zero trust purpose-built technology like Zscaler is going to work there. It's like when electric vehicle got invented, what will traditional car guys do, try to put in electric motor on the car, right, on the current car, yes? Makes it more complex, right? It adds more cost to it. Does it kind of work and compete? Yes. Is it a real solution? Not really. That's how I look at the traditional network security vendors.

Brian Essex

analyst
#36

Got it. And then I guess the second part of this question is what about Check Point transitioning to the cloud? Do you see it helping them kind of curb the share loss to Zscaler that they're seeing?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#37

I'm not sure I can comment much on them. I don't see them a whole lot. And I don't try to pay attention to competition. I pay attention to customers and winning and just pursuing things with real focus. I don't think I can add much to that. Don't really see them much.

Brian Essex

analyst
#38

Okay. Next one is lots of other vendors in different sectors who recently announced workload protection platforms, CrowdStrike, Datadog who see developer-focused solutions, even Palo had some efforts there. Can you talk about why it makes sense for Zscaler to secure workloads rather than some of those other approaches?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#39

The different vendors are coming from different sites, and time will tell who wins, okay? And I think we are making bets in the areas where we think it will make sense. So somebody from the development side is trying to figure out how do I build security as they build applications. Somebody is trying to look at the monitoring. They're coming from performance and say, "I need to see if I can figure out the security part of it." I think we are going in where we think it makes the most sense. And I think we have a very, very good shot at becoming primarily the most important vendor, just like we have become with ZIA and ZPA. I mean think of this, before Zscaler which security vendors did CIO try to talk to care about? Not really. Even CISOs didn't talk much to security vendors. It was left with the techies. I think they elevated the discussion to a level as the enabler of transformation. And I think we'll -- we expect to do the same thing in the public cloud market.

Brian Essex

analyst
#40

Okay. And then we have -- one just point of clarification for Remo, I think you said mid-single digits on ZDX to ZCP contribution to new and upsell. Is that revenue or billings?

Remo Canessa

executive
#41

That is new and upsell new ACV.

Brian Essex

analyst
#42

ACV. Okay. Got it. And then kind of to move on to some others that I had. Jay...

Remo Canessa

executive
#43

And that is all new emerging products, not just workload protection, includes ZDX and others, yes.

Brian Essex

analyst
#44

Right. Okay. Thank you for pointing that out. So Jay, I think given the visibility that you've got across the industry, as I think we're seeing Zscaler migrating from a best-of-breed vendor to a best-of-platform vendor, if you think about -- I mean there's a whole graveyard of companies that have made mistakes as they try to make the migration to a platform historically. What are you focused on as you point your ship in that direction? And what lessons might you be able to draw on, I guess, based on what we've seen in the past?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#45

Right. I think you have to intentionally build a platform when you start a company. You can't really start as a point product and shift to a platform. If you started as a CASB company, you won't be able to become a successful platform company. But I think I happened to be at a stage of my life when I started Zscaler that I was ready to build a platform. So with that platform, we have been easily able to add things, for ZIA to add on cloud firewall, cloud sandboxing, browser isolation was a relatively easy thing to do. For us adding ZDX was easy because of the platform. I've given the example that if I were to build an independent start-up to do Zscaler Digital Experience, if it would have taken 100 units of work, we really spent only 20. 80 units of work got taken care of because of the platform. That means I could build and introduce some more product out there faster. So I think we had the right thing to build a platform I think the next level is how do you sell platform out there because no matter how good your products are, if you go-to-market is not good, you won't succeed or you won't succeed very well, you may be okay. I think that's the next phase we have gone through with Dali's arrival and the changes we are making. And we also realize that no one buys platform. They buy a use case to solve a problem. And if the problem is sold on a proper platform that's extensible and they like it. And I think we have been figuring that out. We feel pretty good that we can sell all the pieces on the platform we have here, and we're still mastering the process in that area. But my mantra for success is very simple. Number one, keeping your customers happy and ecstatic is number one because when those customers are buying more and they are happy about it, NPS score of 76 makes us very happy. And don't become complacent. Don't let success go to your head. Remain paranoid. Keep on innovating, and keep on driving your go to marketing. Plain and simple, no magic bullets.

Brian Essex

analyst
#46

Okay. And on that point of innovation, either for you, Jay, or for you, Remo, I mean you've got a few acquisitions in 2020. What's your take on acquisitions going forward? Is there an inorganic strategy here to be had for penetrating adjacent markets within security, particularly as you look at across the landscape, there are so many vendors out there in the security space? I mean how -- what is the pipeline like? And what is your view on organic versus inorganic?

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#47

So we're very open to M&A. We've done 4 small acquisition tuck-ins, and they all actually had been integrated. They actually come together very well. So I kind of rate it a success, well done stuff. But I think we look at acquisition differently. When my BD guy came to me, he showed me all these market segments, all these players. And I said, "Throw this away." I don't want to buy a vendor in an existing segment. I want to buy something that disrupts a given segment and eliminates the need. Think of Zscaler Private Access. We didn't say we're going to do DDOS. ZPA subsumes the functionality of DDOS, but we are not a DDOS vendor, but we are taking dollars away from DDOS. In the same way, we're looking for disruptions. And there are not too many companies out there. If we find one, we go after one. Edgewise was a good example of it. We love the way they implement zero trust type of approach with creating identity for workloads. We will keep on going after M&As. But since there are no big M&As, so we won't be looking for revenue. We'll be looking for technologies that can compress our time to go to market by 9, 12 or 18 months, and there's a desire to do that.

Brian Essex

analyst
#48

Got it. Got it. With that, I think we're out of time. We're up to the limit. So Jay, thank you so much for joining us. Remo, thank you as well. I hope you guys have a great -- I hope you guys both have a great rest of your day. And to those on the webcast, thank you, too, for joining us today.

Jay Chaudhry;Co-Founder, President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

executive
#49

Brian, thank you for the opportunity.

Brian Essex

analyst
#50

All right. Absolutely. Anytime. Have a great day, guys.

Remo Canessa

executive
#51

Take care, Brian. Bye.

Brian Essex

analyst
#52

Take care.

This call discussed

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