Fortinet cashes in on finance success

City success: Fortinet claims to have won five finance deals in quick succession

Fortinet has earmarked the City as a key battleground for UK partners after winning several bake offs at finance firms.

UK and Ireland director Paul Judd said Fortinet had seen a big spike in finance sales over the past 12 months, working with specialist partners such as BT-owned Net2s and Lato Networks.

He held up recent wins with two stock exchanges and three investment banks as proof of the network security vendor’s progress.

Critical to Fortinet’s success is the low latency of its FortiGate technology versus the competition, Judd claimed.

“Our closest competitor offers a round-trip latency of about 30 milliseconds and we are sub-six,” he said.

“Over the past two-three years there has been a move from manual to algorithmic-based trading, which is done electronically, so latency in the transaction has become a very important topic. If you lose a millisecond per transaction it is worth about $100m (£69m) a year to a big investment bank.”

Judd claimed Fortinet’s use of silicon gave it the edge over competitors.

“We are on our fourth generation of silicon – or fifth if you include the generation at NetScreen. Whereas, Juniper [which bought NetScreen] is moving in the other direction. It doesn’t put silicon in its firewall and the same is true of Check Point and Cisco.”

Judd said Fortinet's UK operation was growing faster than the 25 per cent growth seen at a company-wide level in the first quarter. Finance, along with service providers, are the two biggest growth hotspots, he said.

Judd said Fortinet had assembled a four-strong finance-focused team to help resellers attack opportunities in the sector.

“Some partners are very well informed about the finance marketplace, not just from a technology perspective, but also from a business perspective so they are able to get to the right people,” he said.