Xie believes the current AI-driven security spending cycle is bigger than the post-COVID cycle, with no demand slowdown seen.
I do feel these times are bigger than like 5, 6 years ago. And also now times more kind of work from -- remotely from home drive to some kind of supply chain, but now it's kind of AI built a lot of infrastructure kind of things there. But it's -- on the other side, AI also drive up the demand because now most recently, the AI security become a bigger concern
Ken Xie argues network security is the critical foundation of AI security, with firewalls acting as the centralized inline enforcement point.
We believe that network security is the most critical foundation of AI security with the firewall serving as a centralized point of in-line enforcement across enterprise, operation technology and hybrid cloud environment.
Xie claims Fortinet's unified FortiOS architecture is a unique competitive advantage, making it the fastest-growing SASE firewall vendor.
we are the only vendor in the industry to build all the key SASE Firewall and AI Security components into a single and unified operation system, FortiOS.
Xie says on-premise sovereign SASE gives Fortinet an addressable market 2-3x larger than cloud-only rivals.
We are also the only vendor offering an easily deployable on-premise sovereign SASE solution alongside cloud SASE, which we believe give us an addressable market 2 to 3x larger than the cloud-only competitors.
Xie says component-driven price increases have stabilized but remain hard to forecast, with longer lead times.
I'd say the price probably stabilized, but not improved yet. I think the price increase kind of slowed down compared to the first -- Q1, Q2, Q3 kind of stabilized, but kind of not improving yet, still kind of slowly increase, but it's difficult to forecast going forward.
Xie commits to maintaining constant product gross margin by passing cost changes through to prices.
Our policy -- our strategy always we want to keep in the same gross margin. And if our costs go higher, will increase accordingly. If our costs get lower, we also will decrease accordingly.