Fortinet geared up for Its Partners’ Success

Vishak Raman
Senior Regional Director, India & SAARC
Fortinet

Fortinet was created with the vision of integrated security as the way to increase protection and control, while optimizing performance, simplifying management and reducing costs. Fortinet’s solutions are developed to provide comprehensive security to corporate networks through a single platform to offer simplicity, streamlined installation and management, with the ability to update all the security functions concurrently. 

Fortinet has been pursuing that vision for the last 12 years by continuing to innovate on its FortiGate platform and enriching its solution portfolio with products that provide protection at and around the gateway. Today, Fortinet provides broad, integrated and high-performance protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT security infrastructure for enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide and in India.

Acquiring More Customer Base

“Our marketing and channel strategies have played key roles in helping us grow our customer database. One of the key aspects of our successful marketing strategies was the focus on a solution-based approach rather than focussing on the product. This enabled us to both gain mindshare with new customers and upsell our solutions to existing customers,” says Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, India & SAARC, Fortinet. 

Fortinet’s two-pronged marketing approach that focusses on both partners and end-users has been highly successful. “To partners, we provide webinars to educate them on our new solutions or on a specific industry issue; we send out a monthly newsletter on Fortinet's latest news relevant to the channel; we organize local and regional partner conferences, etc. On the end-user side, we have run a corporate advertising campaign at airports and online IT publications; we develop integrated marketing campaigns focussing on a specific vertical or security issue (like low-latency security for trading firms or a PCI campaign targeting the retail and banking sectors), which combine a mix of telemarketing, emailing, collateral, event participation, etc. We also organize dedicated end-user events at the regional level, like VIP Forums to get end-users’ feedback and provide them with insights on our vision and strategy,” points out Vishak.

Fortinet also engages partners in various training programmes which included both sales and technical aspects. These non-certification training has enabled the company to equip partners with the right tools to address and grow the market.

“Channel strategy-wise, we embarked on an aggressive channel expansion programme last year. We now have more than 380 partners in India. These partners − established security players in their geographical areas of operations – will help Fortinet increase its geographical reach. Partners already on board include nationally recognized names like Dimension Data, HP, Sify, HCL, Infosys and Wipro,” asserts Vishak. 

The channel expansion programme is a cornerstone of Fortinet's broader plan to capture a larger share of the fast-growing Indian network security market.  Fortinet has also expanded its sales and pre-sales teams across regions to provide adequate support in line with channel expansion. In particular, Fortinet has invested in dedicated skilled resources for Ahmadabad, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Kochi.

In Aug 2012, Fortinet appointed Redington to distribute its entire range of network security solutions in the country. This appointment augurs Fortinet's next phase of growth in the market by driving expansion of its channel ecosystem and its penetration into tier-II and tier-III cities. 

More broadly on a corporate level, Fortinet has  in the last couple of years  diversified from its core FortiGate UTM solutions to related products so that it can become an end-to-end IT security vendor, offering enterprises security that extends from the client to databases, to Web applications, to the overall network.

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Nitin Patil
Managing Director
Logix Infrastructure

“Logix Infrastructure has been associated with Fortinet since its inception in India around 9 years back. Having partnered with Fortinet, it gave us a foothold in the SMB segment and we could garner a good customer base by selling and supporting Fortinet’s business. We have also got into enterprise accounts by showcasing the products and impress on the customers with our technical skills. This has an annual subscription component so we can have a predictable business on the customer retention. Our association with Fortinet has given us good visibility in the market as one of the premier partners for Fortinet in India. Our journey with Fortinet has been overall satisfying. In terms of incentive programmes, we believe that incentive schemes are always lucrative and are welcome. We believe in a very focussed approach for Fortinet, but recently the call resolution latency has increased due to certain enhancement on the product features. Therefore, it is often difficult for the support team to keep track on the same. We believe this is a good business model as it is widely accepted in the SMB / enterprise segment and now this has become a Pull product. Our core strength is our focussed approach to do business for Fortinet."

Muneer Ahmed
Managing Director
Digital Track

“Digital Track has been associated with Fortinet since 2006. We have striven to become Regional Distributor for the Fortinet’s products in the market and having partnered with Fortinet, we have received immense customer satisfaction for the service rendered to them. Our journey with Fortinet has been good and productive, but we still anticipate the incentive programmes to be more lucrative and which can work on our behalf. We would like to say here that the product line of Fortinet is superior and has a high-performance productivity and efficiency in terms of their varied range of products. This has helped them in creating a niche category of markets for them in the industry and with satisfied customers. We believe we motivate, enable and encourage the partner community. Therefore, the business of Fortinet should grow steadily.”

Venkat Murthy
Prime Mover
22by7 Solutions

“We, at 22by7 Solutions, have been associated with Fortinet for the past seven years. As a security partner, we have been able to gain a strong foothold in the industry ha ving partnered with Fortinet. We are considered as one of the premium partners of Fortinet in the market today in terms of proactiveness, professionalism and account management shown. Our journey with Fortinet has been productive since they use superior and high-performance technology in the market. We have got a foothold into enterprise accounts by showcasing the products and impress on the customer with our technical skills. We have been awarded with “Outstanding Performance – Technical Support” South Regional Award from Fortinet Inc. for the year. We have also been awarded the “Partner of the Year” for 2012–2013. 

In terms of incentive programmes, we believe that incentive schemes are always lucrative and better schemes motivate us and help us perform better. We would like to say here that the product line of Fortinet is superior and has a high-performance productivity and efficiency in terms of their varied range of products and the solutions they offer for each category. This helps us position Fortinet solutions in a much better way."

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Key Target Verticals...

Fortinet's solutions address the security needs of all verticals. It has been focussing on the Telcos, wherein Fortinet's value proposition is ideally suited for Telco operators who require high-performance protection of their data centers or want to offer managed security services as part of their value-added services to business users. Another target vertical is the financial services where Fortinet has been investing heavily on technology and marketing to accelerate penetration into this critical sector. Fortinet's solutions have a strength in meeting the needs of this sector because they are low latency; offer more effective automated compliance protocols to help enterprises lower their risk exposure without increasing costs. It also focusses on the Government vertical. “Fortinet has historically been very strong in this sector due to its core value proposition. Network security has been one of the top agendas to be handled by CIOs in 2012 − mainly due to the need to comply with government regulations − and we expect this trend to continue into 2013,” says Vishak.

Solution Offerings...

Fortinet has launched many innovative solutions in the past 12 months and some of the solutions that seem to have impacted end-users are, FortiOS5.0 – This new release of the operating system underpinning the FortiGate integrated security platforms provides more security, intelligence and control to better safeguard enterprises against today’s advanced threats and enables more secure BYOD environments. Second-generation FortiASIC-SoC2 chip – This chip provides more than double the general processing capacity of its predecessor, the FortiASIC-SoC, which Fortinet introduced in the FortiGate and FortiWiFi product family in 2010. Four new wireless access points and three new two-factor authentication products that support enterprises' rapid adoption of BYOD initiatives – The FortiAP-320B, FortiAP-223B, FortiAP-112B and FortiAP-11C. FortiGate-3240C are designed from the ground up as a next-generation firewall that tightly integrates application control technologies with an intrusion prevention system, the FortiGate-3240C exerts granular control over more than 1,900 discrete applications and provides real-time protection against current and emerging Advanced Persistent Threats. FortiGate-800C is targeted at mid-sized businesses and large enterprise branch offices, and the FortiGate-800C comes with 20 Gbps firewall throughput and a wide range of configuration options. FortiDNS-400C and FortiDNS-1000C − These two new DNS caching appliances are the first of a planned product family of security-focussed DNS, DHCP and IPAM solutions that will enable organizations to prevent malicious attacks against their DNS infrastructure. 

The FortiCamera product line marks Fortinet's entry into the video security market. The first components in the product line are the FortiCam-200D Network Video Recorder (NVR) and the FortiCam-20A network video camera. An appliance-based, turnkey video security solution, FortiCamera eliminates the need for software installation, patches or per-user licensing fees. 

The Distribution Network... 

“In general, Fortinet's integrated approach on security helps us position the complete suite as great value for customers from the total cost of ownership perspective. Our single window of support also helps us to be the preferred security partner to customers and partners. In India in particular, SMBs have been very price conscious and our typical low-end products are well suited in Indian pricing conditions,” opines Vishak.

In terms of human resources, Fortinet has been hiring sales personnel heavily, adding major account managers in many APAC countries, including India. This strategy is the key to increasing direct contact and penetration to its most important customers and prospects. Fortinet will continue to invest in sales, marketing and R&D talent to drive growth this year. 

Major Partners... 

Fortinet is continuing to drive business with partners and has remained focussed on partner’s growth and profitability. It added more than 135 partners in CY 2012. Besides appointing Redington as its distributor, it has brought partners on board such as Targus, JST IT, PC Solutions, Team Computers, Valuepoint Techsol, Quadra Systems, Jainam Technologies, Computer Technologies and Proactive Data.

Fortinet made a conscious effort to appoint partners across India by hand-picking them from cities such as Coimbatore, Nashik, Tirupur, Vadodara, Chandigarh, Jamshedpur, Nagpur, Kochi, Rajkot, Indore, Nashik, Surat, Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar. With these moves, Fortinet has clearly expanded its market reach geographically to ensure a well-balanced channel structure. 

moumita@varindia.com