As 2022 comes to a close, Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia at Fortinet shares the company’s future growth will be driven by the convergence of networking and security, the industry trend of vendor and product consolidation, the elevated threat environment, and a greater focus on offering services for existing and new customers.
Fortinet is at the forefront of networking and security convergence, empowering our customers to reduce complexity while maintaining superior performance
Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales India, SAARC and Southeast Asia at Fortinet
As a company – how Fortinet has performed in 2022 in Indian Customer Industry?
Fortinet in India according to Frost & Sullivan Network Security Market Q1 2022 report was the leading vendor in terms of Market Share by revenue and had a very high growth of 56.9 percent when compared to its market share in Q1 2021.
Globally Fortinet’s recent quarterly results for Q3 2022 saw revenue for the quarter grow by 33%, significantly outpacing the industry growth rate. Product revenue growth was very strong at 39%, extending our position as a product revenue leader in the cybersecurity industry. Our product revenue performance reflects the strong demand we’ve built over the past 18 months across our security solutions along with the successful execution of our teams in managing the supply chain. In the quarter, SD-WAN and OT bookings grew over 45% and 75%, respectively, and together accounted for over 25% of total bookings. We believe we can achieve #1 market share in SD-WAN in the next couple of years.
What are the major cyber security technologies opportunities, you have participated while coming to solving challenges in the user market?
Two key market and industry trends, convergence and consolidation, are key drivers of Fortinet’s growth. Also, our broad portfolio of security and networking solutions and our ability to run traditionally isolated technologies as a single, integrated cybersecurity platform uniquely position us to address these trends. We also continue to see large enterprises favour Fortinet’s industry-leading cost/performance advantage enabled by our SPU (ASIC innovation). In addition, we remain focused on securing our customers’ entire infrastructure from the data center to the cloud. This ensures that every transaction is secured end-to-end and empowers organizations to build the networks they need to remain competitive without concerns about performance or protection.
Traditional network and security architectures, especially rigid systems hidden behind a permanent perimeter, no longer work for today’s digital business. The explosion of edge and cloud computing, combined with the rapid transition to work-from-anywhere, requires a hybrid approach that converges networking and security. This enables the agility that today’s organizations require.
Fortinet is at the forefront of networking and security convergence, empowering our customers to reduce complexity while maintaining superior performance. Making this happen requires the consolidation of vendors and technologies. Organizations don’t just need fewer vendors to manage but also the consolidation of product functionality. The most effective approach is consolidating point products into a unified cybersecurity platform. Fortinet’s innovation strategy, led by our in-house engineering and development teams allows us to maximize this trend towards convergence and consolidation for our customers and partners. For example, the Fortinet Security Fabric mesh platform is designed to provide consistent security for organizations, delivering broad, integrated, and automated protection across multiple edges, from endpoints to data centers and across hybrid cloud environments.
Which industries have adopted your technologies?
As OT leaders increase digital connectivity between their IT and OT network infrastructures, they face an increase in potential security risks. In fact, a recent Fortinet survey showed that 93% of OT organizations experienced an intrusion in the past 12 months. That’s because OT and critical infrastructure have become key targets for cybercriminals, especially as OT networks are increasingly exposed. Several high-profile attacks targeting critical infrastructure have made headlines around the world. Similar to other sectors, ransomware attacks against OT are also increasing.
For more than a decade, Fortinet has protected OT environments in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, defense, manufacturing, food, and transportation. By designing security into complex infrastructure via the Fortinet Security Fabric, organizations have an efficient, non-disruptive way to ensure that their OT environment is protected and compliant. With full integration and shared threat intelligence, industrial organizations gain fast, automated responses to attacks in any vector. Fortinet’s Security Fabric covers the entire converged IT-OT network to close OT security gaps, deliver full visibility and provide simplified management.
How many net new customers have you added this year? Who are the major names?
The Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protections across the entire digital attack surface, securing critical devices, data, applications, and connections from the data center to the cloud to the home office. Ranking #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, more than 615,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. In India Fortinet secures leading UPI Transaction companies, Eight of top ten Public Sector and Private Banks, Eight of the top ten Pharmaceutical Companies, Seven of the top ten Information Technology companies and Five of the top ten unicorns.
Fortinet was honoured to once again be recognized with Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice 2022 award for Network Firewall. Based on peer-sourced reviews, customers of all sizes and industries have recognized Fortinet for enabling them to optimize their digital acceleration efforts by delivering on the features and performance they need to be successful – all delivered by the same FortiGate solution, running on the same FortiOS operating system, and managed through the same console. It’s why we believe that the FortiGate Network Firewall also received the Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice recognition for WAN Edge Infrastructure for the third year in a row.
What are other milestones you have achieved last year?
At Fortinet, we understand the importance of making sustainability integral to our business model. 2021 was the year for defining our strategy and planning the company’s journey for the medium- to long-term. We came out with our inaugural sustainability report this year, we aim to increase transparency on progress to date and allow our stakeholders – including customers, partners, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities – to better understand our corporate social responsibility approach, leading with ambition towards a more sustainable world and safer internet.
We recently announced the launch of FortiGate 1000F to help customers achieve their sustainability goals by requiring 83 percent fewer watts per Gbps of firewall throughput and requiring 86 percent fewer watts per Gbps of IPsec VPN throughput. FortiGate 1000F also requires less cooling than other solutions, generating only 15 percent of the BTU/h per Gbps of firewall throughput compared to competitive firewalls. Fortinet’s high-performance, low-power network firewalls mean that enterprises require fewer firewalls to accomplish their business needs, helping further reduce costs for space and cooling in the data center.
What is your road map for 2023?
Fortinet’s future growth will be driven by the convergence of networking and security, the industry trend of vendor and product consolidation, the elevated threat environment, and a greater focus on offering services for existing and new customers. In addition, customer recognition of the value provided by our high performance FortiASIC technology and integrated FortiOS operating system is driving our ability to take a big pie out of the cybersecurity market share. For example, Fortinet continues to gain Secure SD-WAN market share as our Secure SD-WAN solution delivers better security, performance and efficiencies over more traditional offerings.
We estimate the total addressable market for networking and security will increase from $54 billion today to $73 billion in 2026. Convergence accelerates digital transformation and substantially reduces operational costs by combining network modernization with dynamic security that spans every part of the network, especially now that many companies are merging SOC and NOC operations together. For years Fortinet has led strategies around the convergence of networking and security. In fact, we are leading the convergence trend with a wide range of technologies including Secure SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, and others in a single operating system which can be deployed as hardware, software, cloud, and as-a-Service.
For over 20 years, Fortinet has been a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our security solutions are the most deployed, most patented, and among the most validated in the industry. Also, our proprietary ASIC technology and our integrated FortiOS, creates a unique advantage allowing us to converge networking functionality and security capabilities as well as consolidate vendors and product functionality across the entire infrastructure.
