(upbeat introductory music) >> Presenter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE CONVERSATION. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE CONVERSATION I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios, we have a remote guest here talking about cybersecurity and all the industry trends and the recent news and announcements around Fortinet with John Madison CMO and Executive Vice President of products at Fortinet John, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you back for some commentary around what's going on in the trends and your recent news. So thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, nice to see you again. >> So you guys had earnings, congratulations again another successful results, you guys are doing well. Cyber is super important and that's the top conversation, cloud computing, cloud native, we're living in a pandemic. New things are exposed. Clearly the environment has changed in the past four months in a major, major way. So a lot of demand, a lot of needs out there from customers. So you guys had some earnings and you also have an update on your Fortinet OS67.0 platform with major updates. Let's quickly hit the news real quick. What's the hot topic? >> Yeah, well you're right. Things have accelerated in some ways in this cybersecurity world and we had the recent solar winds incident that's also made people look really, really closely at their cyber security strategy and architecture. We announced our results yesterday for Q4. For Q4 we had over 20% product growth which is the key, of course, the future growth. We also, for the full year in 2020 past 3 billion in billings for the first time for the company. And we're really proud of that. We're proud for a lot of reasons with our people and our team, but also another company that goes and makes large acquisitions to boost revenue and billings growth. We've done it predominantly organically over the last 20 years. And so we're very proud of our achievement and obviously a big thank you to our partners, our employees, and our customers. >> We also have been covering you guys for many, many years. Congratulations, well deserved good products win the long game, as we say on theCUBE, and that's a great Testament, but now more than ever I really want to get your thoughts because everyone that I talked to is really kind of sitting back saying, "Wow, look what's happened in the past three, six months in particular, a lot of sea change in both on the technical landscape, the intersection with society obviously with cyber, you mentioned solar winds that's been kind of hanging around. More data's coming out about how pervasive that was and how native it was for many months. So what's out there, we don't even know what's next. So this is causing a lot of people to take pause and reevaluate their environment. Can you share your perspective and how Fortinet sees this playing out and how that you are advising your customers? >> Yeah, well, leaving compliance and regulatory to one side for now because that's also a driver cybersecurity and focus on the two main drivers. One is the threat landscape, and I hinted a bit around that supply chain attack which affects a lot of people in solar winds incident. They got hold or got onto a device that has privileged access across a lot of servers and applications. And that's exactly what they wanted to get to. So state-sponsored ABTs, there's still volume out there. We still see now ransomware doubling every six months but that's very scary. The threat landscape around state sponsored. Now, the other driver of cybersecurity is the infrastructure. And whether that be end point. So as you know people are working from home as I am for the last eight months. So there's a on and off network, end point kind of a zero trust architecture there that people are looking towards. On the network side, we've seen these edges develop. And so whether it be the WAN edge, LANedge, Cloud Edge, data center edge even OT edge, those need protecting. So that's a big challenge for customers. And then also on the cloud side where the applications have moved to cloud, but different types of cloud, multi-cloud I've even seen building cloud recently. So that's a very adaptive area. So challenging for the customer in the terms of the threats and weaponized threats as well as the ability to cover all the different parts of the attack surface going forward. >> It's interesting, we've been living in a generation in the technology business around, you just get a tool for that. Every hammer looks for a nail, that's the expression. Now more than ever when you have this no perimeter environment, which we've been talking about for many years, that's not new. What is new is that everyone's now thinking about architectural systems approach to this and thinking systematically around the platform of what their business is. So in your announcement that you guys just released for OS67.0, there's really some meat on the bone there. You have the secure access, edge SASE and then the endpoint protection which are defined categories by the analyst. But those are the areas that are super hot. Can you translate that into the architectural equation because you and I were talking before we came on camera around how it's not just one thing there's multiple layers to this. Could you break that out for us please? >> Yeah. If you look at historically and I'm now coming up to my 20th year in cybersecurity. Before Fortinet I worked for an end point company. If you go back a while and I can, between 2000, 2010, the Endpoint Vendors were the the big cybersecurity players because Endpoint was where the data was and everything else. And then over the last 10 years the network security vendors, the next gen firewalls have been the most important vendors out there. And it's also reflected in revenues and market cap and everything else. What we're going to see over the next 10 years is the platform. And that platform can't be just an endpoint platform. It can't be just a network security platform or just the cloud platform, because you only, you're only seeing and defending and protecting a part of the overall we call digital experience. Whether it be a device in the factory, whether it be a person dialing in from somewhere or connecting from somewhere through the network and through to the applications you've got to measure that digital experience. And so that's going to be very important to be able to provide a platform that sits across all your devices users, across your whole network including new networks like 5G and across the applications and in the cloud. So the platform to us extends across all those areas. We've been building that platform on what we call our FortiOS operating system. The latest release is 7.0, which released yesterday. It obviously upgrades and extends all parts of the platform but we did major parts of the release yesterday were around SASE, which of course is the CloudEdge. So we're adding that CloudEdge to our component. We did acquire a company Opaque Networks a few months ago that's now we've integrated that technology. And then just as importantly on the access side, a zero trust network access capability for giving access per application. In fact, again, with this, I've talked a bit about in the past about all these Gartner acronyms I don't think zero trust network access is the right wording for it. It should be application access, because that's all we are going to move to. Application specific access versus just getting on the network and getting access to everything. But something that gives you context. So those are the two big things, but there's 300 plus new features across networking end point in cloud across management, inside the resource. It's a major release for us. And it gives us our customers the capability to really protect that attack surface from the end point to the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a lot of meat in there, from that release, I've got to say. but it's basically you're saying devices and users have access. That's been around. There's been tools for that. You hire people, you get some tools. Network access, it's been around. It's getting evolving. Now apps in the cloud, cloud native is a hot area. And people that I talk to, I want to get your reaction to this comment that I hear from people and customers and CXOs and developers. "Hey, we bought a tool for that. We hired a bunch of people. They mainly left, or the environment changed. We bought another tool. And then we bought a tool for that. We bought a tool for that." And then you have this kind of tool shed mentality, where they have tools that don't even have people to run them. So you have this problem there kind of tools need to be upgraded. And then you have this hot trend of observability on the app side, where now you have new data coming in on the application side, those are new tools. You got all kinds of stuff and competing for that. How do you talk to that customer? Because this is what the customer hears all this noise, all this action. They need to have it. They got to have the staff, they got to be trained up. What's going on there? What's your reaction to that? And how do you talk to customers who have this problem? Well, it's a big problem for them. Because, and by the way when I speak to a lot of customers about cloud they don't go to cloud because it's cheaper. It's not, it's actually more expensive. But they go to cloud to give them more agility because they want flexibility in the way they deploy applications as they go forward. And again, this pandemic has made a lot of companies realize they need to be more flexible in the way they deploy IT resources and faster in the way they bring up new services and applications. And so, but there's quite a few elements I say of cybersecurity and networking, which to me and to us are just features. You shouldn't be buying 40 different networking and cybersecurity vendors. You just can't staff and maintain that. And so we do see some things consolidated and converging into a single platform. We're a leader in the magic quadrant for SD WAN or a leader for network security or a visionary in WIFI. And many of the times in each of those magic quadrants, it's a different vendor or if it's the same vendor it's a different platform. For us it's the same platform in each one. And we pride ourselves in building not only best of breed capabilities, but also it's the same platform same management system, same API. And that gives the customer some capabilities in trying to manage that. What we say to customers is not a question of going from 40 vendors down to one That's no good, but go from 40 vendors down to maybe seven or eight platforms but make sure those platforms can inter-operate. They can share policy, and they can share threat intelligence. And that's why customers are looking to more of an architectural approach to cybersecurity but also they feel cybersecurity and networking are starting to converge at the same time. >> One of the biggest stories we're covering these days in 2021 besides the pandemic and how people are going to come out with a growth strategy that's secure, trusted and scalable, is the rise of the new executive in business in the enterprise where they're more tech savvy, right? You see executives like Satya and Intel. Intel, rise with the CEO of Microsoft. Andy Jassy rise up to the CEO of Amazon and you're seeing lawmakers in DC become more techie, less lawyer-oriented. So you seeing the rise of a business techie person. And I think this speaks to this holistic fabric philosophy you guys have as you talk to customers, when they look at the business impact of cybersecurity, for instance you mentioned solar winds earlier. I mean, these are deadly company killing events. This is real. So it's not just an IT problem. It's a business problem. How do you guys talk to customers, obviously that you have the security fabric and you're stitching things together? What's the conversation when you talk to customers like that? >> One interesting thing I've noticed, and I do quite a lot of customer calls each week, executive briefings and pretty early on, I noticed that both the infrastructure networking with the CIO team and the cyber security the CSO teams run on the same video call and that's got more and more as we've gone on. And I think what companies have realized is that if they want to move fast, they can't have these silos or this layering of capabilities. Then when they build something they needed to build it securely from day one and have that as a joint team. And so I don't think the teams are not merged but they're definitely working more closely. And I think the responsibility of reporting back into the board level gain is not just, it's just an IT project. Oh, by the way, we've got a security project. It's the same project. And I think that's again, points to this convergence of networking and security. >> Yeah. The silos got to be broken down. That's been a theme that's been more highlighted more than ever the benefits and the consequences of doing it or not doing it are clear to people especially at all levels of the corporation and tech. That brings up my favorite conversation. I always ask you whenever you're back on theCUBE giving me an update on what's going on with Fortinet I got to ask you how it's going with data, because data again is the consistent theme we always talk about, how we're exposing that data, how we're protecting that data, the role of data as people continue to get more data and figure out how to use machine learning how to use AI, how to democratize it all kinds of things are happening around data. What's the latest in your opinion? >> Yeah, I think there's progress, but I always say there's progress on both sides. The cyber criminals, big AI networks and machine learning just to counter what the cyber security companies are doing. I think right now we're processing hundreds of billions of events on a weekly basis. We've got the largest install base of network security out there over 500,000 customers. And so processing that event, it's going well in that we're able to determine really quickly for specific threat vectors in specific geographies that this battle good. It's about a good file. It's about a good URL. It's a vulnerability that's associated with Stevia. So we're able to kind of do use machine learning and volume against a specific application to get a good result. The key going forward for us, and I think for the whole industry is using the AI to start to discover campaigns in the wild like the solar winds ones, which is going on without anybody knowing. And that takes a lot of compute, takes a lot of threat intelligence and the AI piece needs to understand the relationship between the different elements of threat vectors, the command and controls and everything else to get you that result. I do think a couple of things. One is the cybersecurity industry, and I've said this before on this broadcast is are not walking together as they should. And sharing this threat intelligence across the industry. As soon as they find something, I actually applaud Microsoft on the solar wind side, they got information out really quickly and did well. And so we did the same. I think the industry needs to do more of that more proactively. And then I do think that, again, that I see a lot of companies cybersecurity companies claim a lot of things without any evidence that it works whatsoever. >> The world's got to call them out the consequences of not having, things work as they're advertised and or sharing them, your point about sharing. There should be some recognition for folks that are actually being fast on the sharing side. It's not like... We need our own militia against the bad guys. That's what's kind of going on here. So great stuff. I got to get your thoughts on the edge real quick. I know we talked about it briefly. You broke it down to three categories device users, network, and then apps in the cloud. The hottest topic on our recent CUBE on cloud editorial virtual event we had was the edge. And edge being industrial edge. And also, just the edge of the network with humans and users and devices. How are you seeing the current situation out there? A lot of hype, obviously the reality of that, that we're in a distributed network, the internet and the web and the cloud cloud natives coming. What's Fortinet's thoughts? What's your thoughts on how the edge is evolving and what people should pay attention to when they look at as they're architecturally planning for building out and managing and securing the edge? >> Given this a zero trust conversation on users and devices and given that people are familiar with the cloud and how they're going to use cloud. I think the network is becoming a really important very important area. And some people say, "Oh, don't worry about the network, just go to the cloud." The network is very important in providing that digital experience, but what's happening with the network is it's being stretched. It's being extended into factories. It's opening up on the winning side. You've got people now working from home. You've got that edge that used to be just the data center edge is now CloudEdge and SAS edge. And so you have to pay close attention to those edges. Now what you can't do is say, "Oh, I know we've got all those edges there. Let me overlay some security on each edge," because it's going to be different the way you deploy that in on a wifi device versus a CloudEdge. And so what you need to look towards is convergence of a capability either of the CloudEdge or the WAN edge or the LTE edge, it's got to be converged networking, and security. Otherwise it's too operationally inefficient, too complex to do. And so I think this is a really important subject and area for customers because as I said at the beginning, it provides that digital, we acquired a company called (indistinct) a few months ago, which actually focuses on the digital experience monitoring marketplace. What are users actually going through in terms of availability and quality and performance all the way from their device, all the way back into the application? I think that's very important. And the network edges have to be secured, where you can only do it through a converged solution. >> Yeah, that's a great point Architecturally, you might have a good technology or product look on paper but the complexity is the vulnerability. That's a really, really great point. John always great to have you on. Thanks for coming on, sharing the update. Before we end, I'll give you a quick minute to plug the news you had. Quickly put a plug in for the release you guys just put out around the new FortiOS 7.0 the features. What's the most important point about that release? Share, take a minute to explain. >> Yeah. FortiOS 7.0 is our big release our operating system is big news because it allows us FortiOS to sit at any edge across the network, whether it would be the one edge CloudEdge, data center edge. We've extended it into the CloudEdge with SASE in this release. We're also bringing in zero trust network access capabilities but overall it includes 300 features across the network, Endpoint in cloud. So a very important release for us and our customers and partners. >> John, great to have you on theCUBE again and get the news. You guys doing a great job, congratulations on your earnings but more importantly, congratulations on the product success and how you guys are thinking about it as a platform. That's what customers want. And you guys are continuing to do a great job there and congratulations from the news. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Jim. >> Again, John Furrier here inside theCUBE for CUBE Conversation getting the update on Fortinet and cybersecurity. Look for our cybersecurity coverage on SiliconANGLE.com. And of course, theCUBE's coverage continuing to talk to the thought leaders and the people making things happen, securing our networks and our cloud and deploying cloud native applications. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)