Fortinet Wins Top Honors from Frost & Sullivan for its Innovation-backed Growth in the Managed Security Services Market

Fortinet ensures that its MSSPs obtain optimum value from its platforms by offering expert consultative and service creation support

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 8, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the managed security services platform (MSSP) market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Fortinet with the 2017 Global Frost & Sullivan Company of the Year Award. Fortinet made a strong bid to be a top player in the MSSP market, posting impressive financial results, rolling out technology innovations that supported end-customers' IT and security needs, and ensuring high customer retention. Its accelerated growth in the market coincided with MSSPs' new drive to establish a foothold in the emerging MSS segments of risk compliance and threat intelligence.

Fortinet's Security Fabric-based platform is ideal for supporting MSSPs in all the segments of MSS, from the largest and most traditional security asset management and monitoring (SAMM) segment to the growth segments of threat intelligence, incident remediation (TIIR) and risk and compliance management (RCM). More importantly, Fortinet is well prepared to support the following three key trends:

• Influx of market entrants with a network-based MSS proposition and/or threat intelligence MSS approach, which is disrupting the MSSP landscape.
• Greater awareness of risk and breaches among enterprise of all sizes.
• Maturity of technologies such as cloud, Internet of Things, enterprise mobility, and always-on availability, along with the certainty of an Europe-wide General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

"Fortinet's Security Fabric, introduced in 2016, promotes a newer way of addressing security threats and is suitable for enterprises across the size spectrum," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst, Yiru Zhong. "Fortinet believes that small- and medium-sized enterprises can implement this solution more quickly to achieve 100% network coverage, while larger customers can scale up based on business priorities or their network and security stacks."

The Fortinet Security Fabric overcomes the current challenges in the market by:

• Ensuring that all elements in the network are security-aware, automated and integrated with a single, centralized security policy.
• Delivering high-performance security appliances that incorporate custom security processors and are validated by independent, third-party testing.  
• Reflecting the reality of an enterprise's multi-vendor security landscape through integration with a broad range of technology and alliance partner solutions through their Fabric Ready partner program.
• Providing a broad and flexible approach that suits different sizes of enterprise customers.

Significantly, Fortinet makes sure that its MSSPs are profitable to its partners by presenting expert consultative and service creation support, including monthly billing and return-on-investment models. Fortinet has also set up a Veterans employment and their Network Security Academy program to help MSSPs recruit and train cybersecurity talent and the company offers free training to MSSPs to support newer organizations entering the service provider market. Fortinet encourages continuous learning with scholarships and indirect incentives for certification and education.

Fortinet remained a market leader for the third consecutive year with the deployment of FortiGate enterprise firewall appliances. Overall, Fortinet supported more than 2.8 million devices globally in 2016, compared to a little more than 1 million in 2012. Its enterprise market share is vital to determine the margins of MSSPs because the more platforms MSSPs support, the more multi-skilled the MSSPs' engineers have to be or MSSPs must retain highly specialized security engineers in-house. In a sector already beset by skills shortage, the cost of talent is one of the largest components that must be managed.

"Fortinet's revenue in 2016 touched $1.28 billion, almost a 200% leap from $433.6 million in 2011. From 2011 to 2016, its compound annual growth rate reached 24.2%, which exceeded the combined MSS market average of 16.9% for North America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)," noted Zhong. "Fortinet's mix of devices in the field and its reach among MSSPs globally has provided it with the foundation for sustainable revenue streams in coming years."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in terms of growth strategy and implementation. The award recognizes a high degree of innovation with products and technologies and the resulting leadership in terms of customer value and market penetration.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

"The challenges of today's increasingly hostile and complex threat landscape are driving many organizations to seek out security service providers that have the expertise and advanced security capabilities to secure their unique enterprise environments," said Stephan Tallent, senior director, managed security service providers at Fortinet. "Being honored as Frost & Sullivan's top MSSP platform provider reinforces our ongoing investments and continued dedication to the success of our MSSP partners and the security of their customers."

About Fortinet

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers its customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network - today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud, or mobile environments. Fortinet ranks #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide and more than 300,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. Learn more at https://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Chiara Carella
P: +44 (0) 207.343.8314
F: 210.348.1003
E: chiara.carella@frost.com

Fortinet:

Dan Mellinger
P: +1-415-572-0216
E: dmellinger@fortinet.com

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