저자: JimCramer/주출연자:NikeshArora · 외국인
요약 보기
사이버보안 주식은 AI가 산업을 대체하지 않는다는 인식으로 수개월간 상승해 왔고, 팔로알토는 4월 저점 대비 두 배 이상 올랐다가 실적 발표 전 조정. 실적은 대부분 핵심 지표에서 예상치를 크게 상회하고 당분기·연간 전망도 강함. 아로라는 4분기 신규 플랫폼 도입 220건(직전 분기 110건)을 언급하며 AI 공격 대응을 위한 1조 달러 규모 보안 인프라 현대화 수요를 주장. 정부·기업 2,000곳과 대화 중이며 Mythos 공인 파트너라고 밝힘. 장기 성장률과 사이버보안 산업 전체의 지속성 개선을 강조하나 단기 매출 기여는 다음 분기에 모두 나타나지 않을 것이라고 함.
다듬은 글
Cybersecurity stocks have been steadily rising for months now, as Wall Street has realized that artificial intelligence will not make the industry obsolete. Take Palo Alto Networks—an asset I've held in my investment fund for a long time . These stocks have more than doubled from their April lows to their peak a few weeks ago.
That's why they've been rolling back a bit lately. This is happening on the eve of the earnings report. When Palo Alto released its report after the close of trading, the results were significantly better than expected on almost every key metric. In addition, their forecast for both the current quarter and the full year turned out to be very strong.
Is this enough to make the stock rise further? Let's dig deeper with Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks . Just got back from my conference. Mr. Arora, welcome back to Mad Money. Nice to see you again, Jim. Yes, I missed you , Nikesh. You had a great quarter. I was just reviewing some facts.
Here are the stats: about 220 new platform implementations in the fourth quarter, which is double the 110 last quarter— not year-over-year, but last quarter. What is happening? It's the fourth quarter, Jim, time to celebrate . Listen, you know, 9 months ago I said that we were supposedly doomed to extinction because artificial intelligence would eat our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It seems that this is not the case. Looks like we'll have to celebrate with him. You know, this tipping point was a new beginning for the cybersecurity industry, as the world realized that we had to pay attention to cyber defense because attackers would use AI as a weapon, and they would need big players to help them defend themselves.
I think that's exactly what we're observing. We are seeing the first signs that customers want to switch to platforms. We are seeing the first signs that customers want to stay ahead of the curve, given that AI is getting better at carrying out cyberattacks . Well, you talk about the need to accelerate the modernization of outdated security systems worth $1 trillion.
It simply means security that can be broken. For the amount of one trillion dollars. Well, think for yourself. If the average lifespan is 7 years and you spend $200 billion a year, then you have a trillion dollar security infrastructure. Nothing that was deployed 7 or 10 years ago is ready to run at the speed of artificial intelligence.
Therefore, you must make sure that you rethink your cyber architecture. You need to make sure you are prepared for what the attackers are up to. This is where the need for one trillion dollars and the need for modernization comes from. Let's not forget that on top of that, you'll see $5 trillion in capital spending over the next 5 years as people build AI data centers and launch tons of agents.
To do this, you will also have to build a completely new security stack. Nish, how worried are you? I mean, too many companies are not protected, and if there are so many companies and so many agents working around, how can we stop them, what is Palo Alto doing to stop them? Well, good news, Jim. You know, we've been very consistent in our approach to making sure we're building a product where AI is at the forefront.
You and I have been talking about this for the last few years; we created a completely new product called XIM. We bought Chronosphere, a company focused on AI-based observability. We focus on the area of security operations and IT operations using AI. We've always had the idea that AI would become something big.
And that's what I brought with me from Google when I worked there 10 years ago -- that AI is going to be big. I wasn't entirely sure when or how much, but that's the philosophy at Palo Alto—we have to build something that can run at machine speed and resolve security incidents at machine speed. We were able to achieve a one- minute solution time.
We believe we can bring this to our clients as well. The good news is that not all clients are unprepared. Many of our customers have taken this bet and worked with us to implement XIM as an opportunity. Many clients have meaningful conversations. And finally, I'll tell you, Jim, I spent 8 years trying to explain to clients that they weren't ready.
And Dario did it in one event, just by launching Mythos. He made every CEO understand that AI has capabilities we hadn't even thought about. And it's become an incredible tailwind when executives want to connect and discuss how they can modernize their infrastructure. How can they prepare for what is expected in terms of vulnerability detection?
It was wonderful. Are governments ready, Niche? Well, governments have a phenomenal feature, because many of them are not cloud-oriented, because they are very picky about air-gapped systems and sovereign systems. To be fair , they actually did a lot better, you know? Few people know, but governments spend 78% of their IT budgets on cybersecurity.
Enterprises spend 4 to 5% of their IT budgets on this . So I must say that many governments are well- prepared and have very highly qualified specialists, like our NSA or similar structures around the world. They have significant capabilities in terms of knowledge about security and attacks, and they have seen the worst attacks or attempted attacks in the world.
Therefore, I believe that they are aware of the situation, they are prepared, and where they are not, they are doing everything to prepare. So, what companies are reaching out to you about the AI-powered critical infrastructure protection program that you announced, Jim? We have already had conversations with approximately 2,000 companies.
Thanks to our friends in the field of advanced large language models, we have become the first certified commercial partner of Mythos. So we can bring MythOS together with our specialists and test customers to see how vulnerable they are. And not only with Mythos, we can also do this with the 5.6 cyber model from OpenAI.
We come up with several models, test clients, develop a plan to fix the problems found, and also plan to upgrade their infrastructure in the future. So that's 2,000 conversations. It's not all going to happen next quarter, but I'm saying that this is changing the long-term growth rate and the longevity of cybersecurity, not just for Palo Alto, but for the entire industry, because people suddenly realized that you can't successfully implement AI without cybersecurity.
For some time, questions about platformization have been raised by some critical analysts. I think, looking back, it's probably the best thing Palo Alto did. Three years ago, we received a lot of criticism for choosing the path of platformization, but if you think about it, this is a historical process: it happened with CRM from our friend Mark, with Workday, with ERP—it should happen in cybersecurity too.
This is the only correct answer. When systems are fragmented, they cannot communicate with each other at machine speed. Systems must communicate with each other. They should be united. They must be integrated. And I think AI will only make it more important for us to get things right. How many companies are willing to use a kill switch to stop agents?
I believe that the field of agent security is going to be a completely new and amazing direction. Jim, I think there's a lot of innovation happening in artificial intelligence right now. Every few months we see completely new innovations. We had an open source moment, a “myth” moment; We are now in a moment of open scales in AI.
I think this will continue to evolve , but customers aren't quite ready to use the " off button" yet. We all read about cases where AI models get out of control or break Hugging Face; This scares our customers who say, "I don't want to have uncontrolled agents in my infrastructure." "I want to be sure that these agents can be identified, monitored and, if necessary, stopped at any time." So, even if you don't have a " kill button," you definitely need the ability to intercept agents and stop their activities.
And this is exactly what we are currently working on with our clients. And how will Console help your service package? You know, Jim, in addition to creating security for our customers around AI, we also need to become an AI-native business. Our products should be AI-centric from the start. Console is a phenomenal team working on AI-driven capabilities in security and IT operations.
So all the work we do with big data for our clients needs to become AI-adaptive. This team will help us achieve that. This team will work primarily in the IT space, but will also help us optimize our entire security operations space. I'm really excited about this team. Good. So, after that moment of "myth, " what has your life been like since then?
My life was wonderful. You know, it's much better when clients call you themselves, rather than when you have to chase them down. So sometimes it's nice to be on the other side of a phone call instead of constantly begging for attention from a cybersecurity perspective. But I think it has fundamentally changed the level of awareness of boards of directors, the level of awareness of company executives, the overall level of understanding.
Also, it's combined with the desire, you know, CEOs are paranoid now; They don't want to lose in this AI race. Remember 1999 , the "Internet race," when many companies were left behind because the Internet created entire new categories of business? I think this time we are all determined not to become “yesterday,” and this encourages leaders to be more persistent, to study AI, to implement it, and to think about it right now.
The first thing we are interested in is: “Well, how do I deal with this ? Will it be safe? since there's so much uncertainty around this, it was great. Okay, my trust is a happy shareholder because we have new funds, because it was an incredible quarter. I want to thank Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, who was with us all this time and understood that this could happen.
Thank you very much, Nikesh. Thank you, Jim, thank you again. Great, Jim, thank you. Actually, we'll be back after the break. Immediately after the landmark quarter, Cramer will speak with Dell's CFO to see if the company can continue to grow. at .
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