"Conventional security systems aren't doing an adequate job of addressing content security threats"Â

Vishak Raman wants to educate corporates and awaken them to content-based
threats. He wants to create a partner ecosystem of few partners at local and
national, rather than keeping adding to Fortinet's channel network. The idea
is to work with those partners who share the company's philosophy that
customers needs solid security without compromising on performance.

What are your plans for the Indian market?

The strategy is to create a highly selective partner ecosystem of the best
and most capable security resellers at a local, national, and in future,
regional basis throughout the region. The program will be managed at a local
level by our channel management personnel, with the support of our regional and
global channel marketing and channel development resources.

Fortinet is virtually unknown in the Indian market? How are you going to
address the problem of brand awareness?

Fortinet is not virtually unknown in the India market. We have 250 existing
customers in India and a lot of system administrators know about us. To increase
our profile in the market, we are planning a series of seminars, customer reward
announcements, events and advertisements in trade publications this year for
India.

Which verticals are your targeting with your products?

Fortinet addresses several key unmet needs that are common to SMBs, large
enterprises and service providers. These specifically deal with content-based
threats such as viruses, worms, spam and inappropriate Web content that are
missed by conventional firewalls.

Vishak Raman

In today's competitive environment, companies of all sizes and across all
industries lack the time and resources necessary to manage an always- changing,
complex security infrastructure. In addition, the demands of 'real-time
business' make it necessary to deliver solid security without compromising on
performance.

Our growth has been quite dramatic and we are confident that once companies
have installed and used our products, our brand will be well recognized by our
customers and potential customers.

What kind of channel strategy will you adopt for the country?

The FPP-R program in the APac region is a formalization of our engagement
with second-tier reseller partners in the region. As a company with a 100%
channel sales model, we have been working with top-tier resellers and solution
provider partners in the region since we launched operations in the region in
2002.

You have Tech Pacific as your national distributor. Do you plan to have
more distys on board?

We constantly evaluate our distribution mix to ensure that we are
effectively serving the market. We are extremely pleased with Tech Pac and look
forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

What exactly is content security?

Content-based security as understood by a lot of organizations and
technology professionals is just packet filtering or packet inspection. Both are
rather coarse methods of protection, in that they look at the source and
destination addresses and individual packets, but neither method scans the
entire message. Given that most viruses and worms are propagated by attachments
which are sent from spoofed reputable addresses, even people you and I know,
this is a major vulnerability. Anti-virus protection is implemented haphazardly
for most companies, with AV software installed on every laptop, desktop and
server in the organization. Maintaining virus signature files can be a serious
headache for system administrators and take them away from other tasks.

What new products are in the pipeline?

Fortinet offers complete protection at the gateway to the network, and we see
this as a unique value proposition. We still advise companies to continue using
their anti-virus software, but with our solution, that software is not the
first, last and only line of defense against viruses and spam.

We also offer automated push updates for virus definition files for the
FortiGate range of boxes. We are currently rolling out new features for
FortiClient, our personal firewall, VPN-client product, which will have
anti-virus features soon. FortiReporter collects and consolidates firewall data
from different firewalls.

VINITA BHATIA