Palo Alto Networks reported strong fourth-quarter earnings for the fiscal year 2022 despite macro-economic and supply chain impacts. Executives touted the vendor's competitive advantage in secure access service edge (SASE) and multicloud security strategy as major growth drivers.

The company saw “significant momentum” in its customer traction on SASE for the fiscal year, Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich said during the earnings call. 

In the fourth quarter, it introduced next-generation zero-trust network access (ZTNA) — which the vendor calls ZTNA 2.0, delivered via its Prisma Access platform. That launch along with other updates helped its overall active SASE customer base grow by 51% and its $1 million SASE deals increased 83% in the quarter with more than 50 $1 million deals, according to Klarich.

Chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora echoed this accelerated growth. “If you look at it historically, until about three years ago, we didn't have a SASE, we could actually go head-to-head with the industry leader,” he said during the call. “What has happened in the last 1.5 years or two? We've become a force to reckon with.”

He noted right now, Palo Alto Networks only faces one competitor head-to-head for the largest enterprise deals. Arora didn’t name the other SASE vendor, adding that “very rarely do we see a third. This doesn't take a lot to guess who the second vendor is.”

“Two years ago, [we were] getting one or two deals out of 10. Now we think we're in five to six out of 10 deals and our aspiration is next year to be 10 out of 10 deals,” Arora said.

In addition to a technical edge on SASE, he touted the company made an early decision to deploy SASE on the public cloud.

“We actually are the only company that can deliver your SASE solution on the public cloud with redundancy,” Arora said. “So GCP goes down, we auto-hot switch to AWS. As AWS goes down, we switch to GCP, so we give you the highest level SLA in the SASE business in the market today.”

Overall, the company’s billing growth reached a four-year record of 44% in the quarter, and its revenue grew 27% year over year to $1.6 billion. 

On top of this growth, Arora also sees potential ahead in the cloud security market. 

“You may soon see a day where there will be $1 trillion in public cloud consumed,” he said. “Our observation thus far in this early market is that companies allocate 2% to 5% of the cloud budget to security, creating a significant Prisma cloud opportunity.”

Arora also noted most of Palo Alto Networks’ large customers are in multiple clouds. 

“We ourselves are in GCP and AWS instances and delivered Azure,” he said. “So we're seeing ourselves in a multicloud scenario.”