>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Accelerate19. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2019 live from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris. Peter, it's great to be with you our third year co-hosting Accelerate together. >> Indeed, Lisa. >> So we moved from, they've moved from Vegas to Orlando, hence we did so we had a little bit of a longer flight to get here. Just came from the Keynote session. We were talkin' about the loud music kind of getting the energy going. I appreciated that as part of my caffeination (laughs) energy this morning but a lot of numbers shared from Fortinet Accelerate. 4,000 or so attendees here today from 40 different countries. They gave a lot of information about how strong their revenue has been, $1.8 billion, up 20% year on year. Lots of customers added. What were some of the takeaways from you from this morning's keynote session? >> I think it's, I got three things, I think, Lisa. Number one is that you've heard the expression, skating to where the puck's going to go. Fortinet is one of those companies that has succeeded in skating to where the puck is going to go. Clearly cloud is not a architectural or strategy for centralizing computing. It's a strategy for, in a controlled coherent way, greater distribution of computing including all the way out to the edge. There's going to be a magnificent number of new kinds of architectures created but the central feature of all of them is going to be high performance, highly flexible software-defined networking that has to have security built into it and Fortinet's at the vanguard of that. The second thing I'd say is that we talk a lot about software defined wide-area networking and software-defined networking and software-defined infrastructure and that's great but it ultimately has to run on some type of hardware if it's going to work. And one of the advantages of introducing advanced ACICS is that you can boost up the amount of performance that your stuff can run in and I find it interesting that there's a clear relationship between Fortinet's ability to bring out more powerful hardware and its ability to add additional functionality within its own stack but also grow the size of its ecosystem. And I think it's going to be very interesting over the next few years to discover where that tension is going to go between having access to more hardware because you've designed it and the whole concept of scale. My guess is that Fortinet's growth and Fortinet's footprint is going to be more than big enough to sustain its hardware so that it can continue to drive that kind of advantage. And the last thing that I'd say is that the prevalence and centrality of networking within cloud computing ultimately means that there's going to be a broad class of audiences going to be paying close attention to it. And in the Keynotes this morning we heard a lot of great talk that was really hitting the network professional and the people that serve that network professional and the security professional. But Fortinet's going to have to expand its conversation to business people and explain why digital business is inherently a deeply networked structure and also to application developers. Fortinet is talking about how the network and security are going to come together which has a lot of institutional and other implications but ultimately that combination of resources is going to be very attractive to developers in the long run who don't necessarily like security and therefore security's always been a bull time. So if Fortinet can start attracting developers into that vision and into that fold so the network, the combined network security platform, becomes more developer-friendly we may see some fascinating new classes of applications emerge as a consequence of Fortinet's hardware, market and innovation leadership. >> One of the things that they talked about this morning was some of the tenets that were discussed at Davos 2019 just 10 weeks ago. They talked about education, ecosystem and technology, and then showed a slide. Patrice Perche, the executive senior vice president of sales said, hey we were talking about this last year. They talked about education and what they're doing to not only address the major skills gap in cybersecurity, what they're doing even to help veterans, but from an education perspective, rather from an ecosystem perspective, this open ecosystem. They talked about this massive expansion of fabric-ready partners and technology connector partners as well as of course the technology in which Ken Xie, CEO and founder of Fortinet, was the speaker at Davos. So they really talked about sort of, hey, last year here we were talking about these three pillars of cybersecurity at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution and look where we are now. So they sort of set themselves up as being, I wouldn't say predictors of what's happening, but certainly at the leading edge, and then as you were talking about a minute ago, from a competitive perspective, talked a lot this morning about where they are positioned in the market against their competitors, even down from the number of patents that they have to the number of say Gartner Magic Quadrants that they've participated in so they clearly are positioning themselves as a leader and from the vibe that I got was a lot of confidence in that competitive positioning. >> Yeah and I think it's well deserved. So you mentioned the skills gap. They mentioned, Fortinet mentioned that there's three and a half million more open positions for cybersecurity experts than there are people to fulfill it and they're talking about how they're training NSEs at the rate of about, or they're going to, you know, have trained 300,000 by the end of the year. So they're clearly taking, putting their money where their mouth is on that front. It's interesting that people, all of us, tend to talk about AI as a foregone conclusion, without recognizing the deep interrelationship between people and technology and how people ultimately will gate the adoption of technology, and that's really what's innovation's about is how fast you embed it in a business, in a community, so that they change their behaviors. And so the need for greater cybersecurity, numbers of cybersecurity people, is a going to be a major barrier, it's going to be a major constraint on how fast a lot of new technologies get introduced. And you know, Fortinet clearly has recognized that, as have other network players, who are seeing that their total addressable market is going to be shaped strongly in the future by how fast security becomes embedded within the core infrastructure so that more applications, more complex processes, more institutions of businesses, can be built in that network. You know there is one thing I think that we're going to, that I think we need to listen to today because well Fortinet has been at the vanguard of a lot of these trends, you know, having that hardware that opens up additional footprint that they can put more software and software function into, there still is a lot of new technology coming in the cloud. When you start talking about containers and Kubernetes, those are not just going to be technologies that operate at the cluster level. They're also going to be embedded down into system software as well so to bring that kind of cloud operating model so that you have, you can just install the software that you need, and it's going to be interesting to see how Fortinet over the next few years, I don't want to say skinnies up, but targets some of its core software functionality so that it becomes more cloud-like in how it's managed, its implementations, how it's updated, how fast patches and fixes are handled. That's going to be a major source of pressure and a major source of tension in the entire software-defined marketplace but especially in the software-defined networking marketplace. >> One of the things Ken Xie talked about cloud versus edge and actually said, kind of, edge will eat the cloud. We have, we live, every business lives in this hybrid multi-cloud world with millions of IoT devices and mobile and operational technology that's taking advantage of being connected over IP. From your perspective, kind of dig into what Ken Xie was talking about with edge eating cloud and companies having to push security out, not just, I shouldn't say push it out to the edge, but as you were saying earlier and they say, it needs to be embedded everywhere. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well I think I would say I had some disagreements with him on some of that but I also think he extended the conversation greatly. And the disagreements are mainly kind of nit-picky things. So let me explain what I mean by that. There's some analyst somewhere, some venture capitalist somewhere that coined the term that the edge is going to eat the cloud, and, you know, that's one of those false dichotomies. I mean, it's a ridiculous statement. There's no reason to say that kind of stuff. The edge is going to reshape the cloud. The cloud is going to move to the edge. The notion of fog computing is ridiculous because you need clarity, incredible clarity at the edge. And I think that's what Ken was trying to get to, the idea that the edge has to be more clear, that the same concepts of security, the same notions of security, discovery, visibility, has to be absolutely clear at the edge. There can be no fog, it must be clear. And the cloud is going to move there, the cloud operating model's going to move there and networking is absolutely going to be a central feature of how that happens. Now one of the things that I'm not sure if it was Ken or if was the Head of Products who said it, but the notion of the edge becoming defined in part by different zones of trust is, I think, very, very interesting. We think at Wikibon, we think that there will be this notion of what we call a data zone where we will have edge computing defined by what data needs to be proximate to whatever action is being supported at the edge and it is an action that is the central feature of that but related to that is what trust is required for that action to be competent? And by that I mean, you know, not only worrying about what resources have access to it but can we actually say that is a competent action, that is a trustworthy action, that agency, that sense of agency is acceptable to the business? So this notion of trust as being one of the defining characteristics that differentiates different classes of edge I think is very interesting and very smart and is going to become one of the key issues that businesses have to think about when they think about their overall edge architectures. But to come back to your core point, we can call it, we can say that the edge is going to eat the cloud if we want to. I mean, who cares? I'd rather say that if software's going to eat the world it's going to eat it at the edge and where we put software we need to put trust and we need to put networking that can handle that level of trust and with high performance security in place. And I think that's very consistent with what we heard this morning. >> So you brought up AI a minute ago and one of the things that, now the Keynote is still going on. I think there's a panel that's happening right now with their CISO. AI is something that we talk about at every event. There are many angles to look at AI, the good, the bad, the ugly, the in between. I wanted to get your perspective on, and we talked about the skills gap a minute ago, how do you think that companies like Fortinet and that their customers in every industry can leverage AI to help mitigate some of the concerns with, you mentioned, the 3.5 million open positions. >> Well there's an enormous number of use cases of AI obviously. There is AI machine learning being used to identify patterns of behavior that then can feed a system that has a very, very simple monitor, action, response kind of an interaction, kind of a feedback loop. So that's definitely going to be an important element of how the edge evolves in the future, having greater, the ability to model more complex environmental issues, more complex, you know, intrinsic issues so that you get the right action from some of these devices, from some of these censors, from some of these actuators. So that's going to be important and even there we still need to make sure that we are, appropriately, as we talked about, defining that trust zone and recognizing that we can't have disconnected security capabilities if we have connected resources and devices. The second thing is the whole notion of augmented AI which is the AI being used to limit the number of options that a human being faces as they make a decision. So that instead of thinking about AI taking action we instead think of AI, taking action and that's it, we think of AI as taking an action on limiting the number of options that a person or a group of people face to try to streamline the rate at which the decision and subsequent action can get taken. And there, too, the ability to understand access controls, who has visibility into it, how we sustain that, how we sustain the data, how we are able to audit things over time, is going to be crucially important. Now will that find itself into how networking works? Absolutely because in many network operating centers, at least, say, five, six years ago, you'd have a room full of people sitting at computer terminals looking at these enormous screens and watching these events go by and the effort to correlate when there was a problem often took hours. And now we can start to see AI being increasingly embedded with the machine learning and other types of algorithms level to try to limit the complexity that a person faces so you can the better response, more accurate response and more auditable response to potential problems. And Fortinet is clearly taking advantage of that. Now, the whole Fortiguard Labs and their ability to have, you know, they've put a lot of devices out there. Those devices run very fast, they have a little bit of additional performance, so they can monitor things a little bit more richly, send it back and then do phenomenal analysis on how their customer base is being engaged by good and bad traffic. And that leads to Fortinet becoming an active participant, not just at an AI level but also at a human being level to help their customers, to help shape their customer responses to challenges that are network-based. >> And that's the key there, the human interaction, 'cause as we know, humans are the biggest security breach, starting from basic passwords being 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Well, Peter-- >> Oh, we shouldn't do that? >> (laughs) You know, put an exclamation point at the end, you'll be fine. Peter and I have a great day coming ahead. We've got guests from Fortinet. We've got their CEO Ken Xie, their CISO Phil Quade is going to be on, Derek Manky with Fortiguard Labs talking about the 100 billion events that they're analyzing and helping their customers to use that data. We've got customers from Siemens and some of their partners including one of their newest alliance partners, Symantec. So stick around. Peter and I will be covering Fortinet Accelerate19 all day here from Orlando, Florida. For Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)