“Our journey in India has been a productive and satisfying”

How has Fortinet's journey been in India so far?
Fortinet is a worldwide provider of network security appliances and a market leader in unified threat management (UTM). Founded in 2000 by Ken Xie, Fortinet is led by a strong and seasoned management team with deep experience in networking and security. Fortinet's market position has been validated by widespread recognition by industry analysts, business organizations, and media.

Fortinet generated $433.6 mn revenue and 34% year-over-year growth in 2011 and has been cash flow positive for more than six years. In 11 years, Fortinet has become a leading provider of network security appliances. We are a 100% security focused vendor and we continue to make very large investments in R&D (our cumulative investment was $273 mn at the end of 2011) to provide a complete portfolio of products and services to enable organizations with end-to-end IT security (beyond network security, to include data security, wireless security, application security, etc.). Our ultimate objective is to be organizations' best partner for IT security. In 2009, we generated an annual revenue of $252.1 mn, followed by $324.7 mn in 2010 and $433.6 mn in 2011, thus showing our continued growth and development. Our journey in India has been a productive and satisfying tour and we undertake to facilitate and satisfy our customers even more in the coming years.

Tell us about the latest developments in Fortinet?
Last year, we also announced our partnership with Sify Technologies, a leader in enterprise network and data center services, to enable the latter to roll out an on-demand security solution to their cloud computing customers and its Clean Connect service. The services are designed to guarantee secure bandwidth and clean connectivity to their enterprise customers. Fortinet's end-to-end virtualization functionality, available on the FortiGate integrated multi-threat security platforms, enables Sify to provision security resources, on-demand, from a shared appliance while providing an unmatched range of security services quickly and easily to its customers.

What are the channel strategies that you follow, specially pertaining to the India market?
Fortinet sells through a tier-2 channel composed of distributors and resellers. The company has a partner program, called FortiPartner Program, which is based on three tiers, namely gold, silver and bronze. This program aims at driving value and commitment for Fortinet's distributors and resellers by focusing on channel profitability, technology leadership and a strong certification program, through the recruitment of Authorized Training Centers in each country.

Fortinet is expanding its channel ecosystem in India aggressively. We now have more than 200 partners in the India and Saarc region and are on track to hit 300 partners by end of this year. These partners established security players in their geographical areas of operations will help Fortinet increase its geographical outreach, especially in India. Partners already on board include nationally recognized names like Dimension Data, HP, Sify and Wipro.

Fortinet also continued rewarding existing partners who performed outstandingly and completed the required technical certification criteria as per the Fortinet Partner Program. Such partners were also given key benefits such as round-the-clock access to Fortinet's Technical Support. All these helped Fortinet significantly build new business by winning large projects, while growing SMB business particularly in the smaller markets.

We will continue to look for ways to improve and streamline our go-to-market approach - from recruiting partners to developing and packaging the best possible solution for our resellers and end-users. On the market level, we will continue to drive wider security awareness, increase solution acceptability among newer customer segments and leverage existing customer successes.

How was Fortinet's performance in the last fiscal and what are your expectations in this financial year?
Fortinet has maintained its #1 position in the UTM vendor space for last 4 years and the #4 position in the overall security appliance market for 2011, according to IDC. Fortinet registered the highest growth rate (56%) in India. One stand-out deal in India last year was a win with a government division that provides IT solutions and communication infrastructure to all local government organizations. Numerous Fortinet high-end and mid-range FortiGate appliances were purchased in this UTM deployment. We won the deal due to the performance and breadth of functionality of our FortiGate UTM solution.

In FY 2011-12, we have also built up two strong vertical practices-telco and government-following the adoption of a vertical sales strategy approach, which included the hiring of two senior industry specialists. Digvijaysinh Chudasama was appointed as sales director in charge of the Government and Defence verticals. Saurabh Chopra was made sales director in charge of the Telecom vertical. These two verticals represent strong business opportunity with the increased pressure on regulations on one hand and the advent of 3G and Wimax technologies on the other.

Technology-wise, our strategy is to continue to invest in R&D in solutions that help secure the extended network - from endpoints and mobile devices, to the perimeter and the core, including databases, messaging and Web applications. We will also continue to push innovation barriers at the performance levels to allow our customers to keep up with their bandwidth demand and the sophistication of threats.

In parallel, business-wise, we will pursue the efforts initiated last year in expanding our channel ecosystem across India. The objective is to have, by end of this year, 300 partners - established security players in their geographical areas of operations - to represent Fortinet in the various regions of India, and in priority the top five cities.

What is your future plans for the India market and globally?
In general, our business in India is fueled by the continuation of three key security trends:

The increased adoption of consolidated UTM appliances. As a pioneer and the market leader, Fortinet is benefiting well from this trend and winning business across all segments.

The need for performance, which continue to drive security deployments in the enterprise and service provider environments, with customers requiring multi-gig security solutions to handle increased security speeds and secure more bandwidth intensive applications. Our custom built FortiASIC chips in our appliances set us apart from competitors and remain one of the key factors why we win.

The shift towards delivering security as a managed service. We have gone down well in this space. Service providers are using Fortinet's solutions as the platform to deliver cloud and customer-based major security services.

We will continue to seek out and capitalize on opportunities around these three areas.

Ranjeeta Bhattacharjee
ranjeetab@cybermedia.co.in