Fortinet pokes FireEye as it hails Q1 sales
Security vendor claims UK business was exceptional in the first quarter
Security vendor Fortinet has said winning a number of important deals against rivals such as Cisco and FireEye helped drive its growth in Q1, along with "exceptional" performance in the UK and Germany.
For the three months to 31 March, net profit at the firm slumped a whopping 81.4 per cent annually to $1.56m (£1.04m) on revenue which over the same period jumped 26 per cent to $212.9m.
During the first three months of the year, the company claims to have added 8,000 new customers to its 200,000-strong global client base.
Fortinet's founder Ken Xie said a number of these new customer wins were secured after going up against direct rivals.
"During Q1 we won several APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] deals against FireEye and others including a global Fortune 50 automaker, a leading European telecommunication provider and the large US retailer," he said on a conference call transcribed by Seeking Alpha. "Additionally, we closed seven-figure upsell deals with a Fortune 50 technology company and with another large US federal agency.
"We won these deals over FireEye, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks due to our superior performance and our infrastructure integration abilities with FortiSandbox for ATP and FortiMail for email security," he said.
Overall in Q1, billings grew 36 per cent year over year to $254.3m. In the Americas region, billings were up 33 per cent and in EMEA and Asia-Pacific respectively, the figures were up 47 per cent and 23 per cent over the same period.
"As noted earlier in the Americas we saw continued strength in the US enterprise segment which grew 70 per cent year over year, driven by many large deals with leading enterprise brands," said Andrew Del Matto, Fortinet's chief financial officer.
"In EMEA, our growth rate was the highest we've achieved in seven years despite the foreign exchange headwind from the weaker currency and difficult comparison to last Q1. However performance was the result of exceptional execution across the region especially in the UK, Germany and northern Europe."