Fortinet pours resource into enterprise sector
UTM vendor aligns more UK resource with its enterprise channel as it heads off takeover speculation
Patrice Perche: We want to support those that are really selling: the SIs
Fortinet is throwing more direct-touch resources behind its top partners as it prepares for battle with Cisco, Juniper and Check Point in the enterprise space.
Patrice Perche, senior vice president of international sales and support at Fortinet, said the unified threat management vendor’s 35 per cent UK growth this year was driven by strong enterprise and service provider sales.
Perche said a different approach to the channel is now needed as it moves beyond its heritage as an SMB player.
“Now that we want to gain in the enterprise sector, our main focus is direct touch,” he said. “We want to support those that are really selling: the SIs.”
To this end, Fortinet has added four heads to its UK team to help top VARs win business in the financial services, cloud-service provider, legal and media verticals respectively.
Perche said Fortinet is also tightening up marketing spend allocation through distribution, to ensure it is spent with resellers rather than general brand awareness. Top partners, which include SCC, NTT, Integralis and Didata in the UK, will also benefit from strategic account mapping, he added.
He said Fortinet now draws 65 per cent of UK sales from deals involving its Fortigate 600 technology or above.
He maintained the vendor is not scared of the enterprise firewall market’s three dominant players: Cisco, Juniper and Check Point.
“Eighty per cent of Fortinet’s business is replacement so clearly we are up against them for market share,” he said.
“We have been gaining against Check Point in the finance sector. In service provider and telco we see mainly Juniper, but it is having significant problems migrating to its new platform. We do not see too much of Cisco as it is pure routing.”
The push comes as Fortinet this morning denied a Bloomberg report that it was in talks to be bought by IBM and requested Bloomberg retract the story.
In a statement, it said: "Fortinet's policy is not to comment on rumours, and Fortinet declined to respond to rumors on this subject.
"Nevertheless, Fortinet believes that investors need to be aware of the error and today announced that it is focused on building a strong independent company and is not in acquisition discussions with IBM. Fortinet had requested that Bloomberg retract or correct the story."