Fortinet claims growth success is due to VARs
Security vendor appoints new directors amid record shipments and thanks its channel for support
Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendor Fortinet has attributed its recent growth success to its channel.
The firm announced ‘record shipments’ of its appliances in September. It is planning to invest even more marketing collateral in its indirect strategy, the firm told CRN last week.
As a result of the increase in business Fortinet has taken on two senior executives – Marc de Jong Luneau as EMEA marketing director, and Arie de Groot as EMEA operations director, to raise both end-user and channel awareness.
Jonathan Mepstead, regional director at Fortinet, said: “Europe has been a great region for Fortinet, and in the UK we have strong relationships with our distributors; Fresh Egg, Noxs and Unipalm. We are trying to maintain high profitability and penetrate the high-end marketplace, where our products are sold as pure endpoint solutions. The fact that our products are not licensed against the number of users, but the appliance itself, helps our partners maximise margin.”
Mepstead added the firm is “100 per cent indirect” and intends to continue helping its channel develop their managed services offerings.
“Everything we do is fulfilled through the channel. We are developing new products aimed at the mobile operating space such as GPRS and Smartphones,” he said.
Graham Fox, managing director at Fresh Egg, said, like most vendors: “Fortinet has its own way of doing things and its forward thinking has become far more progressive over the last couple of years. It knows what partners want and how to help us achieve it,” he said.
Dave Ellis, director of e-security at Unipalm, added: “Fortinet is in a strong market and UTM is a fast growing offering. According to analyst predictions it is set to accelerate. We have seen some good project wins and we are happy with how things are going.”