Security Interaction - Rajesh Maurya, VP, India & SAARC, Fortinet

DQ Channels made a survey of the security business growth in India in 2021. Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet told us about the security company’s perspective of the organisation he works for.

What has been the business growth graph of Fortinet in 2021?

Financial Highlights for the Second Quarter of 2021 (Global Revenues)

• Revenue: Total revenue was $801.1 million for the second quarter of 2021, an increase of 29.7% compared to $617.6 million for the same quarter of 2020.
• Product Revenue: Product revenue was $298.3 million for the second quarter of 2021, an increase of 40.8% compared to $211.9 million for the same quarter of 2020.
• Service Revenue: Service revenue was $502.8 million for the second quarter of 2021, an increase of 23.9% compared to $405.7 million for the same quarter of 2020.
• Billings: Total billings were $960.9 million for the second quarter of 2021, an increase of 35.1% compared to $711.5 million for the same quarter of 2020.

What % of this growth has been due to resellers partners of Fortinet? 

Fortinet has over 3300 registered partners in India and we are a 100% channel business driven company. The Fortinet Engage Partner Program helps partners develop the expertise needed to deliver digital transformation through customizable programs with business opportunity as well as the programs and infrastructure in place to accelerate their growth. Partners are also provided flexibility to engage on three business levels: Integrator, MSSP, or Cloud, which provide multiple opportunities to grow different segments of their business, as well as multiple ways to differentiate their offerings with specialisations.

Fortinet introduced four specializations last year for partners, including Secure SD-WAN, Data Center, Adaptive Cloud Security, and LAN Edge and SD-Branch. We are now adding three more specializations based on areas driving customer demand. The introduction of these new specializations is representative of the rapidly growing market areas that customers are searching for expertise on. Fortinet’s new specializations are focused on high growth areas with additions including: Zero Trust Access, Operational Technology and Security Operations. They will further enable partners to differentiate their skillsets and knowledge in these fast-growing areas and help customers to rely on them as trusted advisors.

Fortinet’s Security-driven networking strategy enables partners to offer customers greater levels of protection while growing their own businesses. Helping customers establish a security-driven networking strategy also gives partners a way to demonstrate value by providing guidance when addressing hybrid IT challenges.

To what causes do you attribute these figures? 

Fortinet delivered its highest quarterly billings growth in Q2 2021 over five years, while continuing to invest across our product portfolio. Fortinet’s customers are seeing the value in our holistic platform approach, which delivers integrated and automated security across a company’s on-premise network, endpoints, and cloud edges. We are pleased with our strong business momentum heading into the second half of the year.

Much of this is due to our commitment to advanced innovation, evidenced by our over 700 patents—the most of any security vendor. This includes our being the only vendor in the industry to have had the foresight to develop advanced security processors, or SPUs. These SPUs have paved the way for full support of the new hyper performance applications and networks being introduced by 5G and beyond. And Fortinet’s advanced security solutions extend that performance and functionality to every network edge, including the newly expanded remote workforce and adaptive cloud environments that require data and compute resources to reside as close to the end user as possible.

In the first quarter of 2021, we released FortiOS 7.0, which is the foundation of our cybersecurity platform. It is the industry’s first OS-level solution to tightly integrate broad security and network functions into a unified solution. Because of this, we have been able to build SASE, SD-WAN, ZTNA, SWG, CASB, and 5G capabilities into a single security platform, the Fortinet Security Fabric, so organizations can deploy the advanced security and connectivity solutions required by today’s digital markets.

And this quarter, we added FortiGate 3500F to offer high performance and integrated networking and security at hyperscale for hybrid data centers. With the FortiGate 3500F, Fortinet is the only vendor that natively integrates access proxy capabilities in its NGFWs to turn on zero trust network access. Additionally, FortiGate 3500F further enables organisations to protect against evolving threats and rising ransomware attacks, delivering the industry’s highest security compute rating of 6x for performance compared to competitors - including TLS1.3 - to deliver consistent end-to-end security.