>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 19. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Orlando, Florida for Fortinet Accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host for the day Peter Burroughs. Peter and I are pleased to welcome back to theCUBE Patrice Perche, the senior executive vice president of world wide sales and support from Fortinet. Patrice, it's a pleasure to have you, fresh from the Keynote Stage, here on theCUBE program. >> Yeah, well thank you for inviting me here. It's a great opportunity. >> So lots of people this morning and an energy infused keynote starting from all this loud music that I loved and helped wake me up, so thanks to your events team for that. About 4000 attendees, >> Patrice: Yeah. >> From 40 countries. You have a ton of partners here. You can hear a lot of the noise behind us. I'd like you to share with our audience the connection that you made in your keynote about what you guys shared last Accelerate 2018 and the connection to the world economic forum from just a few months ago. >> Okay well, the last year we definitely in fact exposed our strategy in term of the product, in term of the go to market and of course how we can increase in fact the value proposition to our customer, it was all about the fabric and the eco-system that we build around the fabric. So we have been of course since now 12 months working hard on expanding and growing what I call the Phase two of the fabric and when Cain went to Davos which the World Economic Forum is held early in January. And when we got all this, I would say a vision from Klaus Schwab which is the Chairman and Founder of the World Economic Forum. Explaining that the false revolution that we are all going through. The Cyber Security its a massive, I would say problem for them and it will be a key point for the future because they will enable, in fact, most of those take technology and use it that we will go for this revolution, so >> Peter: It's intrinsic. >> It's intrinsic, they call it guardian. So it really is something that if we can't, fix this problem, it's all about digital trust. So none of the user, you, myself we will not trust maybe voting system, or you cannot trust. We know that everything is going digital. And they expressed the need for of course the education, because you need to educate and you need to, increase the skilled people especially with cyber-security as we have a huge shortfall about 1.5million, some say even two million for next year. They need also need to work as an eco-system. So, for them the eco-system is really to see public, private collaboration but also Government, technologies, companies like us. And that's in fact the purpose of Davos. To bring all this different, in fact groups and be able to talk and share and define some line for the future. And for us of-course, the concept of the eco-system is all about building around in fact this major problem that we are facing, has all the traits. In fact, a collective approach where everybody can add value. We as a vendor we build technology, we build a lot of value but we can't be with each of the customers. So and we want to build a partnership not only with the partner but also with the customer because cyber security is a real time problem. So when something happen, you need to jump, and you need to make sure that all the line is set and then everybody can work together to fix the problem. So this eco-system really resonates value well for us after we was talking last year at the Accelerate. And the last I will say pillar for the Economic Forum is about of course Education and clearly I was mentioning one of the Engineers from the SERP which is nuclear agency in Europe Januity she said that 3D, of course the problem is that with these robots we will have a lot of jobs that will be omitted. So they talk about 800 million. So it's a massive number but it sees more than an opportunity to up-skill people. So the education is really helping of course especially the young generation to go and to up-skill it and especially on the cyber security. Because, as everything is going digital, we have to secure everything so it's really, these pieces will grow much beyond that what we think today. Those three pillars are the Education, the Eco-system and of course the Technology. And the good news is that Ken was representing in fact cyber security at the Davos, so it was also a great moment for us to see in fact pushing 14 at that stage of level of discussion so. Those three pillars: Education, Technology and Eco-system of course fit very well with our strategy that we build and that's why I decided to share a bit this morning. It's not everybody going to such a place. And what really resonate well in term of the strategy and the vision we are in fact pursuing so that's what we are doing. >> So I want to build on something that you said to do so I want to paraphrase. Peter who is much smarter than I am, Peter Drucker who observed many years ago there's a difference in strategies between what he called: value in exchange was his presumption that what I am selling is valuable. And value in utility which is a presumption that the value stems from how the something is used. And that notion of partnership that Fortinet has put in place with its customers so they can get value in utility is so crucially important. And you talked a bit this morning about you know the different levels of customization, and how you are going to allow customers to engage you and apply technology to suit their business. Could you take a bit about that especially based on your experience in the field? >> Yeah so as I mention I think we, it has been also our sales strategy from day one. So we always consider that in order to succeed, we need to work through the partners and through the people that are very close to our customer. And as technology evolves of course it's a real challenge to keep them at the level. Even for us, internally, we used to understand and be always at the top level about the new technology that we are putting in place. We imagine that, just for the employees, it's a challenge so we do a lot of training. But then for the partner it's another challenge. So, I think we have been always trying to help them to of course evolving on this expertise, but we don't see that the cloud of course there is a certain I will say a trend about Okay lets go Direct because we don't. The cloud can allow to sell direct to the customer so you don't need those channels. So there's no value for them. We don't see that in the cyber security because it's a much more complex environment and I think that is why we have been successful. We even see some of our competitor, they tempted to go on this direction. I think it's maybe one of the challenges we'll face in the future. So for us they key message I was trying to give this morning to the partner is really that we count on them, it's a partnership, it's very important and of course when we adapt our partner program we want to learn from them to make sure that the three pillars of this program will fit well with their, in fact, view because of course we are from a vendor in certain perspective, they have of course a different perspective on their side. What I was mentioning the goal to market because we see that some are very specialized on the cloud, some are specialized on the premise. We have to define what is the go to market here. What kind of expertise there are in fact having because as you can see we have very broad product of frame cover, you know from almost everything, so from OT, IT, even imbedded. So, we are working with partners that are, as an example, on the connected car. That's for maybe the next two years where we will secure those car. They are not the typical or traditional partner that you see on the networking business so, we try to adapt in fact our engagement with them and make sure that in fact we build a value proposition that can fit in fact for the customer requirement. So it's really about be very close and try to have a bit of a-la-carte kind of approach. And not try to enforce a very historical view that we had in fact, to be honest. But okay, you have like three tiers, depending of level of business and then you sign. So it's really moving away from that. >> I want to stay in this notion of partners because I think it's so crucially important. You talked about the skills that they have the capabilities that they have, but your partners in general are amongst the companies that have to learn the most about cyber security. Because they are the ones that are trying to match technology to the outcomes the customers have. That leads to a question about your education programs. I got to believe that there is, that even as you're trying to educate your enterprise customers, you're also really investing in your enterprise, in upgrading and up scaling your partnership. Talk a bit about the relationship of education and Eco-system from a very practical standpoint. >> Yeah so it's a very good point because of course we need to help them to evolve and as an example we have seen traditional IT partner, interested to evolve on this OT security but they didn't have too much skill so it was new for them. So we see the purpose of building this NSC training vocation course which we have eight level, which started in 2015 and we have about now almost 200 000 certified engineers. A very large portion of those Engineers come from partners. So, on this program, in fact the origin of the program, depending on where you want to play. If it's cloud, you will have to go for NSC4. If you want to go beyond a OT, it can be NSC5. We build in fact this expertise and we ask them also to of course follow those course so the engagement with us, the requirement will be also that they have the right certified Engineer. Depending on level of engagement they want to work with us. So we build this course which is a lot of work and we have a lot of, a big team to make this happen. We have to refresh constantly because it's evolving almost every day. But as for this, the great value, you may have seen it pass on the networking sites. Cisco made a bit similar approach, which was very successful. I think we went like three years ago on thinking about this and that's what we are achieving right now and we are in fact the most I will say advanced in such a report and I think it's all NSC certification is becoming a bit stand out in the market. Both from end-user but the partner. And even going as we was mentioning, we are also working with the Academics to build in fact and train in fact new Engineers that will come in the market in the next two to three years. So we help them on, it's not pure about product, it's really about cyber security expertise that we have and of course we help them on understanding a bit how the Fortinet value can deploy on the customer, so that aspect and we try to target of course young I will say people going for university but also veterans who we had program to bring those veterans because they're also looking we are talking about up skilling. That's a perfect example on bringing a change to them. And I think it's high level, maybe it's a bit, you know think that we have a high potential. But we want of course to help on resolving the overall challenge to be unemployed. I can tell you that if you invest time and you get a certification on cyber security you will never have any problems with a job. So that's a bit the overall idea we have behind this education and certification. And truly the partner, I will say, evolution in terms of their expertise, it's based about this NSC. >> Alright Patrice as we kind of get towards the end here, let's talk about outcomes. Peter mentioned that word, I know that when I was looking at my notes here that in Q4 of 2018, service providers, and managed security service providers represented 11 of the top 25 deals. You guys also closed a massive seven figure deal in Europe. Let's talk about outcomes that Fortinet and your partner eco-system are helping businesses achieve at the business level. Not just in terms of obviously improving security but are you helping businesses generate new revenue streams, skip to new products on market faster, identify attacks and become pro active? What is one of those really key outcomes that you are proud of? >> I think the, and I was part of the presentation last year. We all, I would say on this digital transformation journey. Whole company, even us. We're evolving with much more tools, much automation. So I think every sector, whether it's public or private company, has to go for this evolution. The biggest challenge is all about digital so again the blocking point is about security. So last year we explained about how we can help with positioning our platform in the security fabric to run to this obstacle and that was the purpose of the security transformation that we was talking last year. And I know it's some, even complete as relayed a message, it was interesting that it was part of all. So I think it was really trying to unlock this digital transformation that add business benefit because at the end this whole, those company will evolve in the future, generate more profit, be more efficient, leverage, I would say, the data that they are collecting from almost everywhere. From customer but also the sensor, and transform this to a more business intelligence and then I will say generate in fact future revenue and future dollars from that. That has been a bit the idea behind. So we definitely help on evolving and going through this digital transformation journey. I think we had few example of course as one of our customers, they deploying world wide on their gas-station. A better customer journey. Typically of course you calm, you try to make your gas and you want to be connected. And they try to increase of course by upselling a lot of things. So of course you have your go for the coffee machine, you can even buy many goods. We have been deploying you know, with secure access so they have secure access they go for the internet so that's where we play with segmentation. But our wireless which is fully connected also to the Fortigate and the analytic tools allow them to do business intelligence in term of where people are moving inside you know the shops. And then, you know, redesign and rethink about okay, how they move here. So that's, that allow them to accelerate even more business or decide that maybe this spot doesn't work well, so they push that to the side and they evolve. That's depicted the value of all this intelligence and we can grasp from the data that we collect to transform to a business value. >> So I want to make one comment before we close here and that is that I don't know the degree to which people really understand the relationship between secure networking and digital business. Data is an interesting asset. It could be shared, it could be copied, it could be easily corrupted. In many respects over the next five years we believe that people will recognize that network security is the basis for privatizing data. It is what you do to turn data into an asset. I don't think people have made that connection, to the degree that they need to. >> No I agree, I agree because maybe the mindset they think about network, they think about wired. In fact we are talking about 5G, we are talking about Wireless so the data is that what we want to protect because we don't want that people stole your personal information or even company. >> It's more than protect. You want to create the asset. >> Yes, we integrate the asset. And then of course when we talk about network it's no longer wires, of course it's much more virtual I would say networks. And that's the misinterpretation and why they feel okay the network is moving away. No, it's even more in the future. And as Cain mentioned early this morning: I think the edge will become much more important in future because the compute power that we are having now on every device and even. That will in fact allow to of course generate much more data. Yeah and you need to protect. You notice when you need to go and to consolidate this into the cloud. So it's really, the age will become a very important aspect. But this will be a hybrid and that's what we feel as Fortinet we've been building in fact the very comprehensive offer and to the partner and to our customer. We just want, in fact to give them the time to move at their pace. But they have everything ready for today. That's a bit the concept. >> Well if only we had more time Patrice, we could keep going and going. Thank you so much for sharing some time on the program today talking about your GTM, what you are doing to educate partners and customers and this tremendous potential that Fortinet is attacking. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it too. >> We want to thank you for watching for Peter Burroughs, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube, covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here are your hosts, Lisa Martin and Peter Burris. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship show, where we go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. Today we are in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, joined by my co-host, Peter Burris. We are with Fortinet at their Accelerate 2017 event, and we're very excited to be joined by one of the keynotes today, Patriche Perche. You are the Senior Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Support. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> You've got a very interesting background. You've got over 20 years of experience in the IT security industry. You manage Fortinet's global sales and support organizations. As the leader of this, you've talked about it this morning in the keynote, where 700 partners are here, and users here as well, Fortinet is in 93 countries. The theme of the event: No Limits. What does that mean to you, what does that mean to your partner, and your channel community? >> Well, definitely this event is critical for us, and for our partners. You can see in the background, there's a lot of people. We have a strong representation across the world. The theme of this event is about the new challenge that we're all facing, due to the digital economy, the rise of the IoT, the rise of the virtualization, the Cloud, whether it is public or private, all those new premise for the digital economy need to be secure, so security becomes a big enabler for the future of the digital economy. Which means, for our partners, and also for customers, security needs to be embraced at a very high level, to be able to evolve their business, so that's really a critical point. We see that the overall network security came, and the cybersecurity, came to an affliction point, where, during the last 15 years, they'd been built by adding, in fact, point solutions, reacting to threats, which led to a very complex environment. We have also another major challenge, which is the skills shortage worldwide, so they cannot choose faith about this new technical challenge, so they have to find a solution where we can automate the protection and the defense, and also build more collaboration between the communities. That's all about the team of No Limits, and also the launch of Security Fabric, which provides strong coverage, so it's very broad, we can cover all aspects, whether it's IoT, virtualization, and, of course network security. It's also fed by cybersecurity regions, because you need to have those information pulled back to the device, to be able to react on time to new threats. This information, it's also very valuable for the business, because they can return on business value, and we know that digital age will be all about data value. I think it's really a very exciting moment for our partners, and we have seen that they're growing from last year. I think we added about, roughly, 16,000 partners worldwide, so we have a big, big number now. I think it's really the time to reduce the complexity, automate, elevate, of course, the knowledge, due to the skills shortage we have, that partners has as well, and be able to enable the next age of the digital economy. >> You had a panel on the General Sessions stage this morning, of CSOs from AT&T, Lazard, and Levi's, and one of the things that that panel was talking about, what you talked about, reducing complexity, is, really, we need to talk about the complexity, right? This is really critical to protect these critical infrastructures. So, from a complexity perspective, Peter, I'd love to get your thoughts on what you've heard today so far, and what Fortinet is doing with the Security Fabric to address that complexity. >> Well, there's a couple of things that I think we need to focus on, relative to complexity, and that is that the business is complex, but then, the individual elements that are intended to make business possible, are themselves, individually, complex. And I think one of the things that Fortinet's trying to do, is say, let's reduce the complexity of the security, so that that does not become a problem or barrier to the business. Because today we have data complexity, and application complexity, and security complexity, and organizational complexity, and financial complexity, and we need to find strategic and targeted ways to reduce the complexity of individual elements of that, so that we can focus more on the complexity of servicing the customer. And I think that that's a key message Fortinet's trying to bring, is, what can we do to reduce security complexity, or networking security complexity, and data security complexity, so that we can liberate more talent to focus on the business opportunities? Is that accurate? >> Yeah, that's definitely the case. We see that, as soon as we were able to reduce this complexity, we will add value to the business. If you look from any large organization on the IT, of course, the responsibility towards cybersecurity is becoming very important on that side, at C-level. And often they try to go down to the people inside, but you cannot blame the people at the level, or whatever, they click to an email where there's an attachment, because they have to do, in fact, anyway. So the complexity and the pressure that are being putting inside the organization, has to be reduced, and that's the purpose of building a system with people, knowledge, data, that can react on real-time. That's really the value of the Security Fabric we develop. >> So, it used to be that, as an ex IT guy, it used to be that the security team was the Office of No. No, you can't do that; no, we won't let you do that. And there used to be this strong trade-off between was the initiative going to be secure, and how long did it take to actually execute? I hear you saying, and I want to just confirm this, is that, now we're working on how we can collapse the time between opportunity and execution, by making security go away as a barrier. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, exactly. I think the behavior of the some of the people in charge of security in the last 10 years was... They have to face new problems, new threats, and then, typically they have both the simple solution, and then... We landed with almost 35 different vendors into the security environment, and they are not talking all together. In fact, that's just increase the complexity. They land into situation where they recognize those don't work anymore, and that's, in fact, increase, potentially, the risk, because there is so much hold on the system. The fact that the knowledge that they had, in fact, is becoming more spread across the entire organization, is also a big evolution in terms of the mentality. >> Let's build on that, Patrice, because today, most of the threats take a long to develop, they're very sophisticated. So, someone will access, or will acquire access, to a particular system, that may not be very valuable, but they'll use that to get access to another system, and they'll use that to get access to another system, and if the business doesn't have a fabric, as you say, that's cognizant, or aware, of how all of these different elements play together, then you are facilitating someone being able to move through... Not detect, as they try to move, and that increases the likelihood that a company has a problem. So, it sounds as though it's increasingly important that you think in terms of a fabric, that is capable of observing how people are getting in here, trying to get in there, and has awareness of how the different security infrastructures actually work together. >> Yeah, definitely, I think one of the critical points about security is knowing. So, you have to know whatever the people, you have to know whatever of kind device, where they are, because we know today that it's not limited to a country. Cybersecurity is about world attack, so we see a lot of attack coming from foreign countries. You have to build a system that can collect those information, react on time, and, I think, the different components, they are working together, because often the threats can come from email attachments. It can be a different approach, or a IPS attack, or DDOS attack. But because those threats are always combined in the system, so you cannot detect at the email, so potentially they will be going through the system, and result in a system that communicates all together, and you don't know that this IP address has been already flagged as potential problems, while the email is going through. It's all about having the system, they are automated, and be able to have this global view. I think this is a very important aspect, because it's not just US-centric attack, and be able to quickly provide the value to the decision maker, because we have also less people on the Security Operations Center, due to the lack of skill, the skills shortage. The information has to go to these people in a very efficient way, and already highlight the importance of the attacks, whatever they are. That's how we can really reduce the time to detect, and reduce the time to act. >> You both mentioned a skills shortage, and that was actually mentioned in the keynote of the general session this morning. Is it the expectation, of Fortinet and your partners, that it has to be technology that's going to solve for that skills shortage? >> Yeah, I think we participate also, to try to resolve part of the skill shortage. We have launched, what we call, the NSE program, which is a certification that we launched, and we had about 60,000, right now, certified engineers in the world. In fact, just last year, we had about 34,000, so it has been growing fast. But we see there is a big requirement about acquiring this knowledge, which is becoming very complex, because every month, you have a new system you attack, so you have to be trained almost ongoing. And the level of the expertise is very high, so it's not like 20 years ago, where a firewall just blocking a system, so, easy to understand, easy for an engineer to understand, like people doing networking management. Security is much more complex. That requires ongoing training and knowledge transfer, to keep the people at the highest level. >> So one of the things, Peter, you and I were talking about, is that the security conversation is a board-level, boardroom conversation. From a partner community perspective, are you seeing, within the partner and the customer base, that there is now an expectation that, we're already compromised, we've got to now limit damage? Is that a broad expectation that most companies and industries have today? >> Yeah, definitely, I think the people... The company recognize that, anyway, they are being attacked, there is an issue. The role of the CSO inside a company is becoming very important. It's a kind of business enabler. It's not just a compliance answer, where before, they was there just to check the box on SOX compliance, or SCADA. So now they have to help the other business unit managers to run the company, and to transform the company to the digital age. >> Yeah, let me build on a couple of points that are being made here very quickly. First off, going back to the question of, is technology crucial? The digital business means that there will be greater demands on the security capabilities of the business. We cannot expect most business people to become smart about security, because this is very technical, hard stuff. We have to, therefore, make that capability more productive, and the only way to do it, is through technology. And that has become... The board is now aware of that, that the board recognizes, most boards recognize, that security in a digital world is a strategic business capability. It's tied to your brand, it's tied to your products, it's tied to the promises you're making to the marketplace. And, to your point, Lisa, they also recognize that they are constantly under attack, that there are intrusions, and the need is to limit those intrusions, by taking a system approach to it. And so, this notion of a platform is really, really crucial to delivering on what the board needs: a set of realistic, strategic security capabilities, that the business can count on. >> Yeah, definitely, and I think, you may have learned this morning, one of our customers, a big financial bank in the US, which implemented, in fact, the fabric, in fact, and it has been able to measure the reduction of internal threats, which was, one of the auditors said, "What's happened? Your system's networking?" In fact, it was the benefit of implementing the fabric. So, definitely, they recognized there is an ongoing problem inside the network, because, as we also say last year, it's no longer just the... You have to protect the perimeter. The threats come from inside, can be from employees. We also, with the fabric, we are able to create, what we call, internal segmentation, so, try to protect the data where they are, as the closest, and then also look about who is accessing to the data, and then flag to the relevant people if there is anomaly, and normal activity around those access of the data. Because as this evolution, the value is all about the data, so we have to protect the data, and that's the challenge of the system, so it's complex. That's also require collaboration. We do collaborate with cert companies, so we exchange. We're also the alliance founder for the cyber threats community. And we also expand our fabric, because we feel that the Security Fabric will be at the heart of the security strategy. And then, because security has to talk about application, about networks, you go inside all the system. So we build this fabric-ready program, and onboard a lot of other vendors, and that's the value for our customers as well, because then we can automate it, the security, and potentially the rules that need to be implemented after an attack, going to, potentially, the network device. So, it's just a team effort. I don't think that, Fortinet by themself, we can resolve the problem. It's combination of knowledge, people, other peers in the industry, and then we can really try to go against the threats that we know. Your life's always a chase. >> So, here we are, last word, giving, Patrice, to you, at Accelerate 2017. Great buzz here, you can hear and see it behind us. 700 partners here, end users. The announcement that came out today, what excites you most about this new year, this 2017, for Fortinet, and being able to help customers truly transform to a digital business, and trust their data? What's most exciting to you? >> Well, I think it's definitely, we all... There is a lot of feedback where we feel that, what we built in the last 16 years, in terms of technology, came through a very strong value proposition today. That's moving so fast, and there is only few vendor, in fact, on this standards, that they can do it; in fact, we feel that we are the only one on the security space. That's the echo I got from both the end user, but as well, the partner, you can see they are growing fast. So, yes, good promise for '17, and as you say as leader, of course we are expecting a great result. >> Excellent, Patrice Perche, thank you so much for joining. Peter, and thank you for joining as well. We thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at Fortinet's Accelerate 2017, and we'll be right back. (electronic music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering accelerate nineteen brought to you by important welcome back to the cubes continuing coverage of forty net accelerate 2019 live from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with Peter verse and we're pleased to welcome back to the key one of our alumni John Madison the executive vice president of products and solutions from forty met John it's great to have you back on the cube it's great to be here again lots of momentum that forty minutes coming into 2019 with I can't believe we're in April already lots of growth in revenue product revenue was up you guys talked about the expansion of the partner network we've had some of your fabric ready partners on already today yeah you talked about this third generation and security how fourteen it is is uniquely delivering that for our viewers who were didn't have the opportunity to attend your keynote kind of talk to us about that in this hybrid world how is putting that delivering this third generation what makes you guys different yeah so we talk about the third generation now everyone has different generations that's fine we call it what we are the security driven networking and it's really the genesis of 14f for a long time in bringing together networking and security into one place I think these days or in the past people have built out the networks with a network layer then they try and connect users and applications I think oh wait a minute and this put some security over here and a bit over here and over there in our minds start with both start with a security driven networking concept make sure it works end to end and that will be the most sophisticated most secure application and network you can have and what enables porting that to deliver this uniquely because a number of times today and Ken's keynote I think patrice as well and i can't recall if yours competition came up where the audience was shown the strength in numbers that 14 that has so what makes you guys unique and what you're delivering what are key differentiators from the start has been making sure we can run routing stacks sometimes today referred to as st wayne stacks also security stacks in a very small footprint and to do you need to spend a lot of money what we call security processes which go inside our appliances to make sure that runs very fast but having said that I definitely think customers are gonna be in a high weight world forever for a long time at least anyway we're not only appliances but also personal machines an API security and we also talk about this fabric concept they're able to cover the complete digital attack surface so there's a very important point and we're finding a lot of customers now agree that they want to consolidate they want to make it simpler they need to move faster to this digital world and the only way you have to do that is through a consolidated approach so let's build on this they want to consolidate they want to make it simpler more common and how they in policies and management now along comes the edge what's the dynamic there what's happening is all people refer to the perimeter disappearing okay that's happening to a certain extent because data is moving into cloud you've got different one implementations but what's happening when you do that is you're creating new edges a really good example is sd1 which used to be very closed off the wound used to be something that connects branch offices back to the data center but nobody got involved in that well now you're opening up that when two different types of transport mechanism you're creating an edge I always refer to these edges as being created by different trust levels there is a may be a secure trust level here less trust here it creates an edge and you absolutely need to protect all those edges but give us an example of that so for example when you say differentiated trust levels my edge might be at a customer location is that kind of what versus my edge might be at a branch office is that what you mean by a different trust level push that concept force you know it's more for example if I got a branch office and I've got one connectivity going back to my data center that's encrypted and secure but I've also opened up connectivity to the internet the trust level between that encrypted link and my connection to the to the internet is very different the Internet's open anyone can see there so that trust level between those two is very different and that's what creates the edge and so therefore that becomes a key feature in how we design diff edge implementations it is it's also a key requirement on what type of deployment mode you use we have appliances we have virtual machines we have clouds containers API is going forward I'm finding that customers are still very reluctant to put software implementations of firewalls against the Internet appliances are harden they run faster having said that inside the cloud obviously inside software-defined data centers virtuals fine what are some of those customer concerns that you're hearing well I think what happens is you know if you putting a piece of software against the internet it's open to all sorts of attack it's the same as giving IP addresses to anything it's like a factory that creates an edge as well and you need to harm that edge against that phone how can st when helped why is this such a crucial component of digital transformation you know sometimes markets are overhyped I remember that the Cosby marketplace a few years ago it just was a feature to be honest I think sd1 is extremely important the reason it's important is the SD one controller that controller eventually tells users and devices how to get to the applications and so I tell customers that investment for you is extremely important you need to own it you need to make sure it's flexible you need to make sure it's secure and so I think the SD web marketplace or one edge is the kind of larger term for it is extremely important investment for customers do you anticipate that I mean you guys invested you guys put forward a lot of products we made a number of different announcements again going back to that notion of simplicity that notion of consolidation what is the breaking point for your typical IT group in terms of the complexity of that they can accommodate and absorb when we start adding additional function within the overall network especially from a security standpoint well I think it's a bit broken already they're really struggling to keep up from one perspective no today we announced our forty OS 6.2 is our major operating system and what we try and do is consolidate functionality as much as possible inside our fabric through a single console so there were single operations capability so it's easier for the operations people for the security people to implement things and we're also implementing automated mechanisms like security ratings which do a background run of best practices for example that make it gain easier for those cut those teams to run a full analysis of what's going on so was it about three hundred features roughly laughs I counted them individually okay good yeah well do a recount of a tremendous amount of feature addition to forty OS announced today what are some of the things business outcomes Peter and I we're talking about outcomes with several of our guests earlier business outcomes new revenue streams new products going to market faster the also being able to become less reactive maybe more proactive in terms of security cuts can you walk us through some of the outcomes that 14 that customers can expect to achieve from some of the OS announcements and enhancements yeah I already talked about one which was the consolidation which means they can do multiple things with the single platform that's an important one for them also some of those some of the cost savings around that some of the operational cost savings I think also for our partners for example they like the fact that we're keep that we keep adding services on top of that fabric they can take those services then apply them to their customers and make sure they can add value inside there as well so there's two angles to it the one is making sure our customers are better protected they can consolidate save money invest better training and then to our partners so that they can provide more value to their customers so one of the things we were talking to Ken about is the fact that you have invested in a six and security processing units and content processing units etc that are capable of accelerating the rate of which these crucial security algorithms run that opens up that creates additional capacity to add more function both for you as well as your partners are you starting to see some of your ecosystem grow faster as they better exploit that inherent power and performance that you have within your appliances and devices definitely I think we're seeing new partners come from new areas it also fragments a bit and that's why we announced this new partner initiative going forward which is a bit more customizable but I you know I do think that going forward both our customers and our partners are looking for more of an architecture approach you know again if you go back five years here's a box and off you go and there's install it and we're good and again when you saw those security threats yes we produce a point solution to fix it normal we keep moving on there now looking at architectures over the next five years a known only just cyber security architectures but networking architecture storage architectures and all coming together so we definitely need to train our partners I think here we had over fifty of our what we call networks a network security expert eight it's the highest level of architecture and half and the partners but going forward we see much more partner involvement in an architecture approach and our customers want that because they don't want to have a point solution that's out-of-date in a year's time or a new threat comes along and makes it redundant so how are you you mentioned you mentioned network security and storage what other things are starting to inform that architectural approach that you're taking it's everything now so we know the factories now are completely automated all the different utilities have IP addresses are running almost all the way down to the end point just everything has more flexibility and is more open and so definitely all of that informations bouncing around inside IOT devices inside the wires like data centers and all that data needs protecting that's the key of protecting the data and to do that again we keep saying you need to have an integrated approach to networking and security how does the customer work with 40 net and your partner ecosystem to achieve that integrated approach assuming that there's a you know an enterprise out there that's got a spectrum of hybrid multi cloud environment with a spectrum of security Point solutions pointed it you know different components of an infrastructure how do you help them on that journey of taking the many disparate security solutions and leveraging the power of cortina and your partners to get that integrated truly integrated consolidate consolidated view it's a couple of steps maybe maybe many steps the first one is customers don't want to throw everything else straight away and so what they want to do is be able to integrate and connect and so we have some of our partners here for example of fabric ready partners we have connectors we build into their platforms and orchestration systems and that's their first step once they get there they start looking across to see what they can consolidate so can they take a specific solution from this and I'm bringing inside and then eventually they start to look at the long-term architecture if they're moving apps to the cloud or they want to open up their where or they want to provide kind of SD functionality inside their branch but so it's definitely a phase approached I don't see many customers some customers would take an application and create from scratch inside the cloud they can't do that with their infrastructure they can't just completely wipe it clean start again it's definitely more of a phased approach so as you think about the phase approach and you talked we heard from we heard from the sales port side the notion that the SPS the service providers want greater customization the enterprise wants a different level of access to the core technologies so that they can do not customization not exactly I remember exactly what the term was but what degree will customers retain control over how that architecture gets implemented versus what degree is it going to get baked into the stack itself a bit of both I think you know for most customers they're running towards a digital platform and they need to own that digital platform if they give up complete control you know how do they control that their destiny going forward so they want to own the digital platform but they haven't got the resources to do everything so they'll outsource some to service providers and carriers some of the partners for example but again I keep coming back to this they want to get to a point in five years time where they've got a digital footprint it's very flexible but they also want to make sure it's very secure because as you open up that digital footprint you're opening up all these different edges inside the network and it's coherent which is the architected approach yes because if they don't have a coherent approach to doing it they don't know what the interfaces are or are not competent and that includes interfaces with partners yeah they have to look forward and say I'm gonna implement X amount in the cloud I'm now gonna have some edge compute going on here I want to shape make sure my branches have the best quality of service for these certain applications that go back to this so they look at all those parameters and then architect something from there so I know that security network security app security info security cloud security is in our imperatives for every industry but I didn't notice that the breakouts today feature I think there's a couple of vertical features healthcare financial services retail I'm just curious are those just great use cases that show the potential and the power of 14x technologies or are those industries that are either early adopters or maybe more leading-edge because they have such a tremendous amount of data that needs to be secured as their ecosystem does this yeah so the industry verticals I think I think for the very large ones they're very similar all of them have IOT that's expanding or don't want to have a flexible wand system all them I've got something some compute power and the cloud and the edge going forward so I know there's differences in industries for the very large enterprises it's the problem seems the same these huge organizations and they have all of these things going on in each trying corner I'd you come down to mid enterprise I think there's more reason to consolidate but then you see more differences in the way they approach things like a healthcare they're really focused on that healthcare kind of security of devices inside the hospitals etc education oh they need to connect in these big data banks and transfer the research information so big organizations I say pretty much the same problem midsize organizations become more relevant to a specific industry well John thank you so much for carving out some time speak with Peter and me today we appreciate that and it's exciting to see and feel the momentum that 49 is bringing into 2019 wealth I'm say inviting me our pleasure we want to thank you for your time as well for Peter Burris I am Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE... covering Accelerate '19. (electronic music) Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are at Fortinet Accelerate 2019 in Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris. We've been here all day talking with Fortinet executives, with partners, really understanding the evolution of cybersecurity and how they are helping customers to combat those challenges to be successful. We're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE alumni John Bove, the VP of North America's channel for Fortinet. John welcome back to the program. >> Thanks for having me, great to see you both again. >> Likewise, so, so much going on today, some news coming out. The keynote this morning started with a lot of electricity around Fortinet's industry leadership, product leadership, there was a lot of growth numbers shared >> John: Yup >> There's also a lot of people here about close to four thousand. >> John: Close to four thousand people, yup. >> And you saying that a good percentage of that is partners, forty countries represented. What are some of the things from your perspective, that you've observed today, in terms of the reaction from the channel to all of this news coming out. >> Yeah so first off, the heritage of this event really was a partner conference going back to its infancy and you know as Fortinet continues to grow and our customer profile continues to you know, move up market, we've now invited customers. So it's really great the synergy that we have. We've got a number of partners with their customers coming to meetings and meeting with executives, and so it's just really fantastic. You know relative to the announcements about the partner program, we've seen really positive feedback. I think the program was introduced about a decade ago and it really was time for a refresh, and so, what we've done is, we want to bring a program to our partner community that, allows them to engage with us in how they see fit, and then we want to build the go to market that's a little bit more in tune with the market that exists here, as we're moving into the year 2020 and beyond. So we're really assimilating a reseller, MMSP and Cloud as types of partner go to markets, and organizing that all underneath the Fortinet partner program umbrella. We'll also be introducing a consultancy track because we want to insure that the assets within the network security expert program are available to those consultants that are working with customers on their journey to the Cloud, for instance, or through this digital transformation. And then finally we're introducing what we're calling a competency focus. So as Fortinet continues to grow as a company there's a number of competencies that we feel if we enable partners appropriately they're going to be able to benefit from. They're going to build a stronger business around the Fortinet Security Fabric. So, we're going to focus on SD-WAN, we're going to focus on Fabric, we're going to focus on Data Center, operational technologies and then S.A.C., because we do think, you know, S.A.C. operations, is an area, that cybersecurity and the number of tool sets are introduced, it's an area that we need to grow into as a company as well. >> Lots going on. >> Lot's going on, yes. >> So as you consider some of the challenges that your partners face, we talked a little bit about this with Patrice, partners, throughout the industry are hurting as they try to transition from a more traditional hardware to whatever's going to be the steady state, >> John: That's right >> with the Cloud and the Edge having such an impact. Education is crucial. You not just get your customers educated about how cybersecurity works, but your partners need to be increasingly educated so they can find those opportunities, niches, stay in business, help you engage, how's that playing out? >> My number one initiative as the channel leader is to drive partner competency and preference. And so, going back to competency, if we can build partner competencies, they're going to build a healthier, more margin rich business around the Security Fabric, which then, selfishly, is going to lead them to delivering more preference around Fortinet. But there's no doubt, it's a changing dynamics. Business models are changing on the fly. We're seeing evolution of VAR to MSP, and MSP to MSSP, and we are laser focused on capitalizing that. Our FortiSIEM technology for instance is, I really view as a Beachhead technology for us to go capitalize that MSP market in the mid-market. I think that the evolution of consumption to more of a consumption model away from a transactional acquisition, also lends itself to new and innovative programs that need to be delivered. In fact with our North American distributors, in the past six months, we've introduced hardware as a service, to reduce, you know, to position things as an operational expense, which may be more in tune with how customers are purchasing today, and we've introduced FortiSIEM for MSSP. The evolution of VAR to a service provider can be very capital intensive, and so one of the things that we've done with our hardware as a service and FortiSIEM for MSSP, we've really tried to reduce the cost of the entry point, and drive more day one margin opportunity for those partners. >> Let me build on that if I may Lisa, so Ken and Mike have done a pretty phenomenal job of steering Fortinet into the future and anticipating some of the big changes that have occurred. You guys have therefore pretty decent visibility into how things are going to play out, and are now large enough that your actually participating in making the future that >> Right >> Everybody else is thinking about. When you introduce a product, I mean, it takes a period of time for your partners to get educated, to up-skill, to really set themselves up to succeed in this dynamic world. Are you introducing educational regimens, competency tests, providing advice and council about the new competencies they're going to need, in anticipation to some of these, some of the roadmap of the, to the future that you see? >> Yeah, so two things I'll touch on there is you know, the NSC program has been wildly successful program for ... >> Peter: No what does NSE stand for? >> Network Security Expert so it's a training course where for a partner and you've got new team members coming on board, the NSE113 really enables them of how to position, you know, Fortinet, and what the challenges are in a network in a cybersecurity environment today. With the elements four through eight being more technical. We've seen over 200,000 certifications being adopted globally, so, I think, part of the visionary capabilities that Michael and Ken have, is they've incorporated the education piece of it, and so carrying that along, and so as we do introduce new products, it's built into the NSE modules. I'll point to one of the most successful things we did in 2018 was called Fast Tracks, and so we've basically taken the NSE content and put it into consumable two hour, hands on, technical labs for our partners and customers. We had a goal in 2018 to hit about a thousand people going through the Fast Track program, we hit over eight thousand people. So, we know that there is a thirst for knowledge out there and the company's done a really good job, through the NSE program, the Network Security Expert Program, through out Network Security Academy Program, and through our Fast Tracks to drive that necessary enablement. >> Peter: That's very exciting. >> Yeah I know absolutely, I mean, it's a fantastic time to be at Fortinet, its a fantastic time to be a Fortinet partner, and I think with the announcements that we made today, we're really trying to set our partners up for success, and help them build a all encompassing business around the Security Fabric. It's a very noisy industry out there. There's a lot of point based solutions that, that lack the integration and really you need an integrated set of solutions in this, you know, expanding digital footprint that customers are faced with. >> So when we talk about education and I'm glad that you guys brought that up, that was a big topic, it was a pillar that Ken talked about, that Patrice talked about as well, it was one of the core pillars that was talked about at the World Economic Forum that was just a couple of months ago. So as we talk about education and educating your partners, I'd like to kind of flip that and ask how are your partners educating you on, these are the trends and concerns and the issues that we're seeing in the market today, to help influence the direction of Fortinet's technology? >> Yup, you know it's funny that you say that, I've been in partner meetings all day today, and it's great I get to spend, I don't think I've ever been this popular and definitely not in high school or college, but in spending time with partners and understanding their challenges it's good to see that our focus on the competency and preference and providing consumption modeling, fits to exactly the challenges that they're faced with, because VARS will tell you that the transition from being a reseller to an MSP can be very, very expensive. And so, with FortiSIEM for MSSP and the as of service offerings, we're reducing that. And so, there are , they're resonating to that. But the other thing is, for the mid-market customer, the Security Fabric alleviates the need for the Cyber skills gap, right? We can't hire fast enough, and so, by depending upon the broad integrated and automated posture that this Fortinet Security Fabric allows, it really allows partners and customers to overcome some of the challenges, just from a head count standpoint. And I think that the NSE program also does a very good job of filling that gap as well. >> So the partner used to mean, these are the, for that group of customers, who our direct sales organization can't make money on, we will give them to partners, or the very, very large, for a very, very large company that's owned by Accenture or owned by Dimension Data, or something like that, >> Yup >> We'll work with them and deliver it. And that kind of middle was kind of lost. But even today, that Loewen, that idea of segmenting purely on the basis of how big they are, is problematic because there's a lot of small companies happening because of this digital transformation they're going to very rapidly grow into some very, very big footprints. >> Absolutely >> So how is that line between what Fortinet does, what the partner does, what the customer does, to achieve these outcomes, starting to shift? >> We're going to be introducing an ecosystem based approach. It's called Partner to Partner Connect, and it is to actually do that very thing. For those partners that may be in the mid-market, that need those expertise, we're going to allow partners to create almost a marketplace of service offerings so they can fill their gaps and they can build meaningful practices, leveraging what Fortinet is doing, but also leveraging somewhat some of our other partners are doing. We're seeing this immediately done with our distribution partners, in North America, and we're going to be introducing the Partner to Partner Connect later this year, and accessible through our Partner Portal. >> And those competencies that are associated with the NSE and the education, then become part of those Partner to Partner brands >> John: Absolutely >> Which makes it easy for those partners to be more trustworthy of whatever accommodations they put together to serve customers. >> Yup, I'll give you an example. So, we're also going to be announcing tomorrow afternoon in our North America breakout session, a Cloud Channel Initiative, and so our goal with this Cloud Channel Initiative, is to allow partners to build meaningful security and networking businesses in the public Cloud. We're going to utilize blueprints for reference architectures, we're going to align with education and certification, and then we're going to guide them through enablement to go to market. That's one of the things also we released this week was the NSE7 for public and private Cloud. So again, as we introduce new technologies and we introduce new opportunities, we're also aligning that to education as well, so the partners can be self service, because the better job a partner does is developing that competency , then the more services rich they're going to be able to deliver to the end customer themselves. >> What are some of your expectations in terms of FY19, I know this is a 20% year on your growth that Fortinet as a company achieved last year, I imagine a good amount of that was driven and influenced by the channel, but as this momentum continues to grow, as we saw this morning, and we've heard throughout this show today, what are some of your expectations about growing the number of partners in the programs that you talked about, like by the end of this year? >> Yes, we recognize, you know, first of all we appreciate our partners so much, and we want to ensure that we are enabling their business we're absolute in active recruitment mode. You know, we're currently going through recruitment and reactivation campaigns with partners that we want or maybe have done business with us before. We see we're coming off of a quarter in which we set a record for the most deal registrations and so that's really the metric in which we look for partner impact. They bring us an opportunity, we give them additional margin and we protect them. So, Q1, fiscal Q1 for us, was our largest deal registration quarter we've ever had. And in 2018 we saw a 52% increase in closed opportunities through our deal registration program. So the impact of the North American Channel is absolutely being felt and we're really excited about the new partner program and what it's going to allow us to do as we expand more into the MSP market, more into the Cloud market, and then hopefully go enable that whole consultancy layer that's out there as well, to help customers on their journey. >> So in terms of your session tomorrow, 'Transforming Your Profitability with Fortinet's Tailor Made Programs,' you mentioned some of the new announcements, what are like the top three take aways that attendees from that session are going to walk away with? >> Well it's going to be, we want to drive partner initiated revenue, we want to do that through competency development, through Widespace account penetration, and through meaningful investments that allow our partners to scale their business. >> Lisa: Lot of momentum, John thank you so much for visiting with Peter and me on theCUBE this afternoon, we can't wait to hear what great news you have next year. >> I look forward to it, thank you both. >> Excellent, our pleasure. For Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> live from Orlando, Florida It's the que covering accelerate nineteen. By important, >> Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate twenty nineteen. Live from Orlando, Florida Lisa Martin with Peter Births and we're pleased to welcome back to the Cube. One of our alumni. John Madison, the executive vice president of Products and Solutions from Fortinet. John, It's great to have you back on The Cube >> is great to be here again. >> Lots of momentum. That fourteen that is coming into twenty nineteen with I can't believe we're in April. Already, lots of growth in revenue product revenue was up. You guys talked about the expansion of the partner network with some of your fabric ready partners on already today. You talked about this third generation and security. How fortunate is uniquely delivering that for our viewers who you weren't didn't have the opportunity to attend. Your keynote kind of talked to us about that in this hybrid world. How is supporting that delivering this third generation? What makes you guys difference? >> Yeah, so we talk about the third generation now. Everyone has different generations. That's fine. We call it the security driven networking, and it's really the Genesis ofthe forty nine for a long time in bringing together networking and security into one place. I think these days or in the past, people have built out the networks, the network layer. Then they try and connect users and applications. And they go, Wait a minute, this person security over here in a bit, over here and over there in our mind, start with both. Start with a security driven networking concept. Make sure it works end to end, and that will be the most sophisticated, most secure application and network you can have. >> And what enable supporting that to deliver this unique. Because a number of times today and Ken's key nodes, I think Patrice as well. I can't recall if yours competition came up where the audience was shown the strength in numbers that fourteen that has what makes us unique and what you're delivering. One of >> the key differentiators from the start is being making sure we can run a routing stacks. Sometimes today he referred to as ehs tea. When Stax or so security stacks in a very small footprint, and to do that, you need to spend a lot of money on what we call security processes which go inside our appliances, but to make sure that runs very fast. But having said that, I definitely think customer is going to be in a hybrid world forever for a very long time, at least anyway, where not only appliances but also virtual machines and FBI security. We also talk about this fabric concept that ables to cover the incomplete digital attack surface. So there's a very important point, and we find a lot of customers now agreed that they want to consolidate. They want to make it simpler. They need to move faster to this digital world, and anyway, you have to do that is through a consolidated >> approach. So let's build on this. They want to consolidate. They want to make it simpler, more common, and how the policies and management now along comes. Yet what's the dynamic there? >> But what's happening is that all the people referred to the perimeter disappearing. Okay, that's happening to a certain extent because data's moving into cloud. You've got different one implementations, but what's happening when you do that is to creating New Edge is a really good example, a zesty wherein which used to be very closed off. The one used to be something that connects branch offices back to the data center, but nobody got involved in that. Well, now you're opening up that when two different types of transport mechanism you're creating an edge I always refer to these edges is being created by different trust levels. There is a maybe a secure trust level here, less trust here. It creates an edge, and you absolutely need to protect all those edges. >> Would give us an example that So, for example, when you say differentiated trust levels, my edge might be at a customer location. Is that kind of what versus my edge might be in a branch office? Is that what you mean by different trust level? Push that concept for >> you know, It's more, for example, if I got a branch office and I've got one connective ity going back to my data center that's encrypted and secure. But I've also opened up connected to the Internet, the trust level between that encrypted link on my connection to the to the Internet's very different Internets open. Anyone can see they're so that trust level between those two is very different. and that's what creates the edge. >> And so, therefore, that becomes a key feature in how we design different edge implementations. It >> is. It's also a key requirement on what type of deployment Mody use have appliances have virtual machines. We have clouds, containers. AP eyes going forward. I'm finding that customers are still very reluctant to put software implementations of firewalls against the Internet. Appliances are hardened. They run faster. Having said that, inside the cloud, obviously, and inside software defined data centers virtual fine. >> Where some of those customer concerns that you're hearing >> well, I think what happens is, you know, if you putting a piece of software against the Internet, it's open to all sorts of attack. It's the same as giving I P addresses to anything. It's like a factory that creates an edge as well, and you need to harm that age against that. >> And how can Estevez When How Why is this such a crucial component of digital transformation? >> You know, sometimes markets are over hyped. I remember the Casby marketplace a few years ago. It just was a feature. To be honest, I think sd one extremely important. The reason is important is the SD one controller. That controller eventually tells users and devices how to get to the applications. And so I tell customers that investment for you is extremely important. You need to own it. You need to make sure it's flexible. Need to make sure it's secure. And so I think the SD, where marketplace or one edge is the kind of larger term for it is extremely important investment for customers. Do >> you anticipate that? I mean, you guys invested. You guys put forward a lot of products, made a number of different announcements again, going back to that notion of simplicity, that notion of consolidation. What is the breaking point for your typical group in terms of the complexity of that they can accommodate and absorbed? When we start adding additional function within the overall network, especially from a security standpoint, >> well, I think it's a bit broken already. They're really struggling to keep up from our perspective. No, today we announced our forty or sixty twos are major operating system, and what we try and do is consolidate functionality as much as possible. Inside our fabric through a single console, there was single operations capability, so it's easier for the operations people. For this critique people to implement things and find information. Ross implementing order made in mechanisms like security ratings. We should do a background run off best practices, for example, that make it again easier for those those teams to run a full analysis. What's going on? >> So was it about three hundred features roughly roughly >> accountable individually? >> Okay, good. We'LL do a recount of that, but a tremendous amount of feature addition to forty OS announced today. What are some of the things business outcomes? Peter and I were talking about outcomes with several of our guests earlier. Business outcomes, New revenue streams New product's going to market faster, the also being able to become less reactive, maybe more proactive in terms of security codes. Can you walk us through some of the outcomes that fourteen customers can expect to achieve from some of the O. S announcement in the handsome? It's already >> talked about one, which was the consolidation, which means they can do multiple things with single platform us, an important one for them. Also, some of the some of the cost savings around that's on the operational cost savings. I think also for our partners. For example, they like the fact that we're keeping that we keep adding services on top of that fabric. They can take those services, then apply them to their customers and make sure they can add value inside as well. So there's two angles to it. The one is making sure our customers are better protected. They can consolidate, save money, invest better training and then to our partners so that they can provide more value to their customers. >> So one of the things we're talking about is the fact that you have invested in a six it's and security processing units and content processing units, etcetera, that are capable of accelerating the rate at which these crucial security algorithms run. That opens up That creates additional capacity to add more function both for you as well as your partners. Are you starting to see some of your ecosystem grow faster as they better exploit that inherent power and performance that you have within your appliances and devices? >> Definitely. I think we're seeing new partners come from new areas. It also fragments of it, and that's why we announced this new partner initiative going forward, which is a bit more customizable, but but I, you know, I do think that going forward, both our customers and our partners are looking for more of an architecture approach again. If you go back five years, here's a box and off you go and install it, and we're good on again When you saw the security threats. Yes, we produce a point solution to fix the normal way. Keep moving on. They're now looking at architectures over the next five years, known only just cybersecurity architectures but Network Inc architectures, storage architectures and all coming together. So we definitely need to train our partners. I think here we had over fifty of are what we call Network's network security expert. Eight. It's the highest level of architecture and half of the partners, But going forward, we see much more partner involvement in architecture approach on. Our customers want that because they don't want to have a point solution that's out of date in a year's time or a new threat comes along and makes it redundant. >> So how are you? You mentioned you mentioned network security and storage. What other things are starting to inform that architectural approach that you're taking. >> It's everything now. So we know the factories now a completely automated all that. If utilities of I P addresses are running almost all the way down to the end point, just everything has more flexibility and more open eso. Definitely All that information's bouncing around inside I ot devices inside the wire inside data centers on all that data needs protecting. That's the key of protecting the data. And to do that again, we keep saying you need tohave. An integrated approach to networking and security >> Has the customer work with forty Net and your partner ecosystem to achieve that integrated approach. Assuming that there is a, you know, an enterprise out there that's got a spectrum of hybrid multiplied environment with the spectrum of Security point Solutions pointed it in a different components of an infrastructure. How do you help them on that journey of taking the many disparate security solutions and leveraging the power of fourteen and your partners to get that integrated, truly integrated, consolidate consolidated view? It's a couple >> of steps, maybe, maybe many steps. The first one is, oh, customers don't want to throw everything else straightaway. So what they want to do is build to integrating Connect. So we have some of our partners. Here, for example, are fabric ready partners way have connectors. We build into their platforms and orchestration systems, and that's their first step. Once they get there, they start looking across to see what they can to consolidate. So can they take a specific solution from this and I'm bringing inside? And then eventually they start to look at the long term architecture if they're moving APS to the cloud or they want to open up their wear or the one who provide kind of SD functionality inside their branch, So it's definitely a phase approached. I don't see many customers. Some customers would take an application and created from scratch inside the cloud. They can't do that with their infrastructure, the kind just completely wipe it clean. Start again. It's definitely more of a phase approach. >> So if you think about the face approach on you, talk way heard from, uh, we heard from the sales of sport side the notion that the S P s the service providers want greater customization. The enterprise wants a different level of access to the core technologies, so that they could do not customization. Not exactly remember Jack with the term was what What degree will customers retain control over how that architecture gets implemented versus what degree is going to get baked into the stack itself? A >> bit of >> both, I think, you know, for most customers, they're running towards a digital platform on. They need to own the digital powerful. If they give up complete control, how do they control that destiny going forward? So they want to own the digital platform, but they haven't got the resources to do everything. So that allows saw some to service providers and carriers. Some of the partners, for example. But I'm going to keep coming back to this. They want to get to a point in five years time, but they've got a digital footprint, is very flexible, but they also want to make sure it's very secure because as you open up that digital footprint, you opening up all these different edges. Inside the network, >> it's coherent, which is the are contested approach. Yes, because if they don't have a coherent approach to doing it, they don't know what interfaces are or are not competent, and that includes interfaces with partners. >> Yeah, they have to look forward and say I'm gonna implement X amount in the cloud. Arnot gonna have some edge compute going on here. I want to shake. Make sure my branches have the best quality of service for these certain applications that go back to this. So they would look at all those parameters and an architect, something from there. >> So we know that security network, security app, security info, security cloud security is our imperatives for every industry. But I didn't notice that the breakouts today feature. I think there's a couple of vertical features healthcare, financial services, retail. I was just curious. Are theirs just great use cases that show the potential power of forty nets technologies? Or are those industries that are either early adopters or maybe more leading edge? Because they have such a tremendous amount of data that needs to be secured as their ecosystem does this? >> Yeah. So the industry verticals, I think I think for the very large ones, they're very similar. All of them have I ot this expanding order and wanna have a flexible land system. Almost got something. Some computer power in the cloud and the edge going forward. So I know there's differences and industries. For the very large enterprises, it's the problem. Seems the same. This huge organizations, and they have all of these things going on in the right corner at you. Calm down, Toa mid enterprise. I think there's more reason to consolidate. But you seymour differences in the way the approach, things like health care that really, really focused on that healthcare kind of security of devices inside hospitals, et cetera. Education. Oh, they need to connect in these big data banks. Transfer the research information. So big organizations, I say pretty much the same problem. Midsize organizations become more relevant to the specific industry. >> Well, John, thank you so much for carving out some time to speak with Peter and need Today. We appreciate that. And it's exciting to see and feel the mo mentum the forty Niners bringing into twenty nineteen. >> Well, thanks for inviting me. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for your time is well for Peter. Boris. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 19. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE live from Fortinet Accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris. You can hear all the folks behind us on the show floor. There's about 4000 people here in Orlando from 40 different countries. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Warren Small, the Senior Vice President of Transformation and Security at Dimension Data. Warren, thank you so much for joining Peter and me on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me guys, it's a great pleasure. >> Lots of energy behind us, let's go ahead and start out so our viewers get a view of Dimension Data, who you guys are, what you do, where you're headquartered. >> Absolutely, so first and foremost, thank you again, for having me. Dimension Data, we're a part of NTT, headquartered out of London. Today we're a global organization with presence in every major country. As an organization, we have have eight billion dollars in revenue, and employ about 30,000 people. I'm from group security, I'm responsible for transforming our business to be more solutions and outcome focused. To help our clients with their digital aspirations. >> You're a general partner in the operational technology space with Fortinet. Tell us a little bit about the history of your partnership. >> Yeah, fantastic, that's a new focus area for us, absolutely, but Dimension Data has been a longtime partner with Fortinet across the entire security portfolio. We've made a significant investment today in being very intentional around partnering with Fortinet for operational technology because we believe fabric approach has a good ecosystem, as articulated by Ken and Patrice this morning, around the partners they've sought to help clients address this operational technology risk. >> One of the things, I think it was Ken talked about this morning, is this notion of how the edge is going to be distinguished by different levels of trust. A little bit of background, at Wikibon, we talk about how digital transformation is the process by which a business institutionalizes and operational it's the role in data as an asset plays in it's business. So we talk about data zones having a zone of data proximate to whatever event is going to take place. Ken talked about almost a zone of trust proximate to where an event's going to take place in OT. You're talking to an enormous number of customers about outcomes and in trying to match technology to those outcomes. How does that notion of trust being one of the primary determinants design elements for thinking about OT? >> I think incredible question, thank you so much. I think there two ways to answer the question. We have a philosophy around being secure by design, and by nature, being secure by design, there's inherent trust, because we understand the clients' business outcome. Today, we're faced with an incredible amount of innovation. I think we all want innovation, everything that we do. One of the things I keep talking to my family about is how easy my job has become through innovation. Whether that's booking an airline ticket and downloading a ticket but now we talk about the credibility of the airline. We talk about the credibility of the airline industry. We talk about the credibility of the transportation industry. It's not just the tickets. So when we're talking about the service, we're talking about the integrity of the airline. It's all those pixels that are integrated. You know, nobody talks to you today about an OT outage when your bags are delayed. Nobody's talking to you today about an airline delay because there's been some water leak. An IOT sensor has detected the water leak and now they're trying to get emergency services to come in, investigate the problem. I think that's the challenge you're faced with. Inherent in the secure by design being a philosophy with all business stakeholders, business now have an appreciation that security is no longer that fear factor. It's now an enabler of the business outcome that we want to deliver to our clients who are crying out for services. >> I might even say it's part of the brand, right? >> Small: Absolutely. >> You go back to systems theory and you talk about a competent interface And a competent interface is performance, it's trustworthy, it behaves as designed, it's monitorable, it's all those other things and in many respects as we move to a digital business, the fundamental tenant of competency is tied into how well the network retains a security profile so that the business can take on new options but serve customers the way it's expected to. >> Small: Absolutely. I like telling my colleagues is when we see some of our clients that are either in the oil and gas industry or critical infrastructure, when you go a plant, they always talk about fatalities. They always talk about how many incidents they have, it's that real. In cyber-security today, in this digital attacks, you don't see it but once you automate a system or you automate part of a plant, there could be some fatalities. I read an article recently about how you can manipulate data that says to a patient that they aren't really sick. I'm a bit torn, because if I go to a doctor, I want to be told if something wrong with me. Maybe I don't want to know, but in reality, I do want to know so I can take action. That's the challenge we're faced with today is that it's uncertainty of manipulation. This is uncertainty today because as we connect these two worlds to create better efficiencies or to provide a better service to the patient all of a sudden is it creating more risks. There are many stories I could share with you that told to me or either our clients share with us of the real life problems if an IOT device is not protected and at most times there's a device that's connected that nobody knows about. >> How do you lead that conversation about security away from fear and more to this is how we could help you stop being reactive and actually be proactive? >> Today, as a team, we talk about innovation. Today we talk about what if. We talk about the value of the way I do my job today. I'm collaborating, the other day I did a count of just a number of apps that I use to make a phone call to have a meeting with somebody. I probably have about seven and you could count the same. Whether it's vendor X or OEM Y but I have an innate level of trust that that vendor, that OEM, that's provided the application to me is trustworthy. I download it and I get on with my meeting. It's very much the same the way I communicate and collaborate with my peers, whether it's internally or externally. I no longer live with the fear that someone may steal my data because I know there's a process in place and we put mechanisms in place to make sure that critical data cannot be shared. Much the same with other aspects of technology. If we have the conversation of the value that can be derived if there is integrity. I look around me and it was interesting. I got into the elevator here and it's a pretty old elevator, right? But there's a level of trust that it was certified and that it is certified, and it's validated, that it works. That's the only trust I have, because for those that know me, I'm pretty scared of elevators. Claustrophobic, right? >> Using you as a proxy for a lot of users because Dimension Data is deep into a number of global 500 companies, global 2000 companies. Do you think executives really understand that crucial relationship between their digital business, their brand, and the role that security networking, specifically security, and secure networking will impact their brand and their business? >> I think they're starting to appreciate the impact. I think it's much in the face now. The numerous attacks that are out there. In fact, I was saying to some of my colleagues and some of my peers, on Friday morning, I was in a conference call and it was the first time I was meeting an individual and about three months before that I had spoken to his CIO, the employee's CIO, and I'd spoken to him about his challenges and I was articulating the value of his brand because they make critical components of motor vehicles. And we were talking about what if there's a malfunction. So, it then got down to this individual, and we had a conversation, and I said to him it's interesting what you shared with me, because it almost sounded like I was having a conversation with you, but you were talking to me, so that your CIO asked you to take this action. It wasn't, it's just become a business problem that's been discussed at the boardroom level. I think if you live in the US, like myself, I've now become a user of this thing called Amazon. My wife's a more frequent user myself, but we rely that a parcel is delivered at a certain time. And we rely on the fact that if Amazon tells us it's going to be shipped and you will receive it, my nine year old, he wants to have his Pokemon cards arrive on Friday, not on Saturday. So, we have to rely that there's integrity in what they are sharing with us, and that they have to rely that their partners have integrity in their systems, and they have to start demonstrating that these are secure systems. These are secure manufacturing plants. These are secure supply chain plants. >> What does that C-suite, and I'm glad you brought that question up, Peter, because I'm always curious, this can't be a conversation anymore at the network security level. >> Or just at the network security level. >> Exactly, it's so pervasive, right? From a C-suite's perspective, what are the outcomes that that CIO has to deliver back to the business. You mentioned healthcare a minute ago, and obviously that's an industry that affects every single person, whether the data is true or not, it affects all of us, but that CIO has to deliver outcomes, whether it's a hospital, or an E-commerce spender like an Amazon, has to deliver to me what their customers need. How is Dimension Data and Fortinet helping that CIO meet her or his business level objectives so the business is competitive, successful, et cetera? >> Absolutely. So a little bit about Dimension Data. We go to market with practices, so we have a digital business solutions practice, and we partner very heavily with our digital business solution's practice. We work with clients around ideation. We work with clients around how they're going to transform their business, so when we talk about smart healthcare, what does that really mean to a user? From a pharmaceutical perspective, from a hospital perspective, how does that really help? We put a number of use cases where we demonstrate to clients what's the value of providing better service to someone when they are first impacted or first injured? If we can diagnose, we can detect, and we can communicate back to be it the hospital or healthcare provider, that's the service that has high integrity. I'm going to subscribe to a healthcare provider or a healthcare practitioner that subscribes to a smart healthcare philosophy. I'm a traveling father, I'm a traveling husband, but the value for me is knowing that I'm always connected, and the services I subscribe to by providers have integrity, and that my wife doesn't have to provide the details on a continuous basis to multiple providers. I had a very emotional conversation once to an individual who shared the impact of sharing data on multiple instances with multiple providers. It wasn't that they had to share, but it was the delayed cause by having to share the information on multiple instances, and then the associated risk. I always talk about I gave you the example about sharing. We talk about, I tell my 13 year old, I say to him, what don't you want me to know about you so be cautious what you share. >> One quick question for you. We're talking increasingly about critical infrastructure, essential infrastructure. We're having more conversations in theCUBE, but it's not broadly diffusing into the general population. A lot of that, one of the reasons for that, is that people believe it's going to be unbelievably expensive. But it seems to me, and this is what I'm testing, that an investment in updating critical infrastructure so that you got better security, you got more network ability, you're using technology more appropriately, will also have the benefit that you can increase the optimization of the resources that are associated with that infrastructure. When you work with clients, do you see that kind of ameliorating trade off where yes we have to invest in these things, but there is a derivative benefit that we're going to increase the optimization of them? >> Absolutely. I'll answer that in a number of different ways. But the first one is efficiency and that's what everybody is driving towards. Can we get greater efficiency by integrating these two worlds? But as you said, what they don't realize is you can't just connect these two worlds without making sure that they are capable of being integrated and that's the first stance we take with a number of clients irrespective of the industry that they're in is what do you know and what do you think you know? Because if you have an understanding and you have a design of what needs to be enabled, what needs to be remediated, and what needs to be changed, you can move a lot faster, and you know who to engage in terms of partnerships. You know, I was talking about that example earlier. It was absolutely a case where the client knew immediately, if we connect these two worlds the devices that facilitate the connection need to be replaced. Another example was a client was implementing a software defined network for all their plants. What they didn't realize was the technology would not enable that software defined networking. So without a plan which we've been extremely intentional in building what we call a cyber-security advisory for operational technology networks is to help our clients with their design and that plan and methodology to go and execute. >> Last question in about 30 seconds, no pressure. Lot of growth, lot of potential in the market that Ken Xie, Patrice Perche talked about this morning during the keynote. What excites you about this momentum that their business growth is carrying into 2019? >> I think a number of ways to answer but 30 seconds, what I'm grateful for is how Ken Xie and Patrice articulated it. It's all about education. If we have the right people, we can move faster. Second is that there's immense value in the integration of their fabric network. We see a lot of value in the client conversations that we have today is what do we have that we can leverage? How can we make it better as opposed to replace? That'll give us the ability. Patrice mentioned a stat of 50% of organizations have unfilled roles and I think sometimes it may be greater because it depends on who we're measuring, right? And in what roles in these organizations. But the potential for us is incredible as a manage security service provider and a platform organization that we have the teamwork in Fortinet that allows us to co-invest in the platform that we are building to deliver better outcomes to our clients. >> Warren, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE with me this afternoon. We're looking forward to hearing more great news from Dimension Data and Fortinet over the next year and years to come! >> Thank you so much, lovely to be here. >> Our pleasure. For Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (tech music)

>> 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)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE and we're excited to be here doing our second year of coverage of this longstanding event. My cohost for the day is Peter Burris; excited to be co-hosting with Peter again, and we're very excited to be joined by the CEO, Founder, and Chief Chairman of Fortinet, Ken Xie, Ken welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Peter. Happy to be here. >> It's great to be here for us as well, and the title of your Keynote was Leading the Change in Security Transformation, but something as a marketer I geeked out on before that, was the tagline of the event, Strength in Numbers. You shared some fantastic numbers that I'm sure you're quite proud of. In 2017, $1.8 in billing, huge growth in customer acquisitions 17.8 thousand new customers acquired in 2017 alone, and you also shared that Forinet protects around 90% of the Global S&P 100. Great brands and logos you shared Apple, Coca Cola, Oracle. Tell us a little bit more and kind of as an extension of your Keynote, this strength in numbers that you must be very proud of. >> Yeah, I'm an engineer background, always liked the number, and not only we become much bigger company, we actually has 25 to 30% global employment in a network security space. That give a huge customer base and last year sales grow 19% and we keeping leading the space with a new product we just announced today. The FortiGate 6000 and also the FortiOS 6.0. So all this changing the landscape and like I said last year we believe the space is in a transition now, they've got a new generation infrastructure security, so we want to lead again. We started the company 18 years ago to get into we called a UTM network firewall space. We feel infrastructure security is very important now. And that we want to lead in the transition and lead in the change. >> So growth was a big theme or is a big theme. Some of the things that we're also interesting is another theme of really this evolution, this landscape I think you and Peter will probably get into more the technology, but give our viewers a little bit of an extension of what you shared in your keynote about the evolution. These three generations of internet and network security. >> Yeah, when I first start my network security career the first company I was study at Stanford University, I was in the 20s. It was very exciting is that a space keeping changing and grow very fast, that makes me keeping have to learning everyday and that I like. And then we start a company call Net Screen when it was early 30s, that's my second company. We call the first generation network security which secured a connection into the trust company environment and the Net Screens a leader, later being sold for $4 billion. Then starting in 2000, we see the space changing. Basically you only secure the connection, no longer enough. Just like a today you only validate yourself go to travel with a ticket no longer enough, they need to see what you carry, what's the what's the luggage has, right. So that's where we call them in application and content security they call the UTM firewall, that's how Fortinet started. That's the second generation starting replacing the first generation. But compared to 18 years ago, since change it again and nowadays the data no longer stay inside company, they go to the mobile device, they go to the cloud, they call auditive application go to the IoT is everywhere. So that's where the security also need to be changed and follow the important data secure the whole infrastructure. That's why keeping talking from last year this year is really the infrastructure security that secure fabric the starting get very important and we want to lead in this space again like we did 18 years ago starting Fortinet. >> Ken, I'd like to tie that, what you just talked about, back to this notion of strength in numbers. Clearly the bad guys that would do a company harm are many and varied and sometimes they actually work together. There's danger in numbers Fortinet is trying to pull together utilizing advanced technologies, new ways of using data and AI and pattern recognition and a lot of other things to counter effect that. What does that say about the nature of the relationships that Fortinet is going to have to have with its customers going forward? How is that evolving, the idea of a deeper sharing? What do you think? >> Actually, the good guy also started working together now. We formed the they call it the Cyber Threat Alliance, the CTA, and Fortinet is one of the founding company with the five other company including Palo Alto Network, Check Point and McAfee and also feel a Cisco, there's a few other company all working together now. We also have, we call, the Fabric-Ready Program which has 42 big partners including like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all this bigger company because to defend the latest newest Fabric threat you have to be working together and that also protect the whole infrastructure. You also need a few company working together and it's a because on average every big enterprise they deploy 20 to 30 different products from different company. Management cost is number one, the highest cost in the big enterprise security space because you have to learn so many different products from so many different vendor, most of them competitor and now even working together, now communicate together. So that's where we want to change the landscape. We want to provide how infrastructure security can work better and not only partner together but also share the data, share the information, share the intelligence. >> So fundamentally there is the relationship is changing very dramatically as a way of countering the bad actors by having the good actors work more closely together and that drives a degree of collaboration coordination and a new sense of trust. But you also mentioned that the average enterprise is 20 to 30 fraud based security products. Every time you introduce a new product, you introduce some benefits you introduce some costs, potentially some new threat surfaces. How should enterprises think about what is too many, what is not enough when they start thinking about the partnerships that needed put together to sustain that secure profile? >> In order to have the best protection today you need to secure the whole infrastructure, the whole cyberspace. Network security still the biggest and also grow very fast and then there's the endpoint and there's a like a cloud security, there's a whole different application, email, web and all the other cloud all the other IoT. You really need to make sure all these different piece working together, communicate together and the best way is really, they have to have a single panel of our management service. They can look at them, they can make it integrate together they can automate together, because today's attack can happen within seconds when they get in the company network. It's very difficult for human to react on that. That's where how to integrate, how to automate, this different piece, that is so important. That's where the Fabric approach, the infrastructure approach get very important. Otherwise, you cannot react quick enough, in fact, to defend yourself in a current environment. On the other side for your question, how many vendor do you have, I feel the less the better. At least they have to work together. If they're not working together, will make it even more difficult to defend because each part they not communicate and not react and not automate will make the job very, very difficult and that's where all this working together and the less vendor they can all responsible for all your security it's better. So that's where we see some consolidation in the space. They do still have a lot of new company come up, like you mentioned, there's close to 2,000 separate security company. A lot of them try to address the point solution. I mentioned there's a four different level engineer after engineer work there because I see 90% company they do the detection. There's a certain application you can detect the intrusion and then the next level is where they after you attack what are going to do about it. Is it really the prevention setting kick in automatic pull out the bad actor. After that, then you need to go to the integration because there's so many different products, so many different piece you need to working together, that's the integration. Eventually the performance and cost. Because security on average still cost 100 times more expensive under same traffic and also much slower compared to the routing switch in networking device. That's what the performance cost. Also starting in the highest level, that's also very difficult to handle. >> So, we're just enough to start with the idea of data integration, secure data integration amongst the security platform, so enough to do as little as possible, as few as possible to do that, but enough to cover all the infrastructure. >> Yes, because the data is all a whole different structure. You no longer does have to trust environment. Because even inside the company, there's so many different way you can access to the outside, whether it by your mobile device so there's a multiple way you can connect on the internet and today in the enterprise 90% connection goes to Wi-Fi now it's not goes to a wired network, that's also difficult to manage. So that's where we will hide it together and make it all working together it's very important. >> So, in the spirit of collaboration, collaborating with vendors. When you're talking with enterprises that have this myriad security solutions in place now, how are they helping to guide and really impact Fortinet's technologies to help them succeed. What's that kind of customer collaboration like, I know you meet with a lot of customers, how are they helping to influence the leading security technologies you deliver? >> We always want to listen the customer. They have the highest priority, they gave us the best feedback. Like the presentation they talked about there's a case from Olerica which is where they have a lot of branch office and they want to use in the latest technology and networking technology, SD-WAN. Are working together with security, that's ready the new trend and how to make sure they have all the availability, they have the flexibility software-defined networking there and also make sure to security also there to handle the customer data, that's all very important so that's what we work very closely with customer to response what they need. That's where I'm still very proud to be no longer kind of engineer anymore but will still try to build in an engineer technology company. Listen to the customer react quick because to handle security space, cyber security, internet security, you have to work to quickly react for the change, on internet, on application. So that's where follow the customer and give them the quick best solution it's very very important. >> On the customer side in Anaemia we talked about that was talked a little bit about this morning with GDPR are is around the corner, May 2018. Do you see your work coordinates work with customers in Anaemia as potentially being, kind of, leading-edge to help customers in the Americas and Asia-Pacific be more prepared for different types of compliance regulations? >> We see the GDPR as an additional opportunity, as a additional complement solution compared to all the new product technology would come up. They definitely gave us an additional business rate, additional opportunity, to really help customer protect the data, make the data stay in their own environment and the same time, internet is a very global thing, and how to make sure different country, different region, working together is also very important. I think it's a GDPR is a great opportunity to keeping expanding a security space and make it safer for the consumer for the end-user. >> So Ken as CEO Fortinet or a CEO was tough act, but as CEO you have to be worried about the security of your business and as a security company you're as much attacked, if not more attacked than a lot of other people because getting to your stuff would allow folks to get to a lot of other stuff. How do you regard the Fortinet capabilities inside Fortinet capability as providing you a source of differentiation in the technology industry? >> Yeah we keep security in mind as the highest priority within a company. That's where we develop a lot of product, we also internally use tests first. You can see from endpoint, the network side, the email, to the web, to the Wi-Fi access, to the cloud, to the IoT, it's all developing internally, it tests internally so the infrastructure security actually give you multiple layer protection. No longer just have one single firewall, you pass the fire were all open up. It's really multiple layer, like a rather the ransomware or something they had to pass multiple layer protection in order to really reach the data there. So that's where we see the infrastructure security with all different products and developed together, engineer working together is very important. And we also have were strong engineer and also we call the IT security team lead by Phil Cauld, I think you are being interview him later and he has a great team and a great experience in NSA for about 30 years, secure country. And that's where we leverage the best people, the best technology to provide the best security. Not only the portal side, also our own the internal security in this space. >> So, in the last minute or so that we have here, one of the things that Patrice Perce your global sales leader said during his keynote this morning was that security transformation, this is the year for it. So, in a minute or so, kind of what are some of the things besides fueling security transformation for your customers do you see as priorities and an exciting futures this year for Fortinet, including you talked about IoT, that's a $9 billion opportunity. You mentioned the securing the connected car to a very cool car in there, what are some of the things that are exciting to you as the leader of this company in 2018? >> We host some basic technology, not another company has. Like a built in security for a single chip. I also mentioned like some other bigger company, like a Google started building a TPU for the cloud computing and Nvidia the GPU. So we actually saw this vision 18 years ago when we start a company and the combine the best hardware and best technology with solve for all this service together. So, long term you will see the huge benefit and that's also like translate into today you can see all these technology enable us to really provide a better service to the customer to the partner and we all starting benefit for all this investment right now. >> Well Ken, thank you so much for joining us back on theCUBE. It's our pleasure to be here at the 16th year of the event, our second time here. Thanks for sharing your insight and we're looking forward to a great show. >> Thank you, great questions, it's the best platform to really promoting the technology, promoting the infrastructure security, thank you very much. >> Likewise, we like to hear that. For my co-host Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin, we are coming to you from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. Thanks for watching, stick around we have great content coming up.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Fortinet Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Hi. Welcome back to Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with the Cube. We're excited to be here for our second year. I'm joined by Peter Burris from the Cube as well. And we're very excited to be joined by our next guest, John Bove, the Vice President of America's channels at Fortinet. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thank you for having us. >> So, it's exciting for us to be here. I, as a marketer, geek out on tag lines. >> Yup. >> So, I'd love for you to kind of tell our viewers, strength and numbers. >> Yup. >> As the title of event. What does that mean? >> Well, it's really about the depth and breadth of what Fortinet's doing in the marketplace. You know, bringing the security fabric, not only to our customers, but to enable our partner community, right. So, Accelerate is a collection and we have about, almost 3,000 attendees here, about 2,300 of those are our carrier partners, resell partners, manage security service providers, and also our fabric ready alliance partners, right. So, the security fabric has allowed us to incorporate, you know, some additional third party technologies, right. And it's really, we're creating a really strong culture around, you know, integration and openness. >> Before we get into the technology, let's talk about pivot on that culture for a second. >> Sure. >> 'Cause one of the things that, that was evident from the keynotes this morning that Kenzie talked about, which really, this long standing partner driven culture that Fortinet has. You've recently come back to Fortinet. >> I have. >> Tell us about being a boomerang. What excites you about coming back? But also, how has that culture of really being partner-focus and maybe partner-first evolve? >> Well, the channel first culture at Fortinet makes my job really easy, right. And the reason that I came back was here with the company for six years, we experienced a tremendous, you know, run of revenue. And to have the opportunity to lead the America's Channel Organization is a great privilege. But, it really comes from the culture within the company of being a channel leverage and a channel first company. I think, you know, in Patrice's keynote this morning, and in Ken's keynote as well, they really talked about the channel program, and the channel partners. You know, the partners are the fabric of what we do as an organization. You know, and we're doing the security fabric. Something that they can build a business around. >> Joe, as you think about what the type or the nature of the changes that are taking place in all business. Security business, and as we've heard today, the repitity with which changes happening in security world. That, I got to believe is putting a fair amount of stress on your partners because they have to come up to speed very, very rapidly on new things, even as they demonstrate that they can sustain operational excellence for all things. What is the role that education's playing? Culturating your partner's to a new network. Or a new approach doing these, how is that leading to a better set of capabilities for your customers? >> Sure. Well, I think the one change in this digital transformation era is change, right. We're seeing customers consume technologies much differently than they ever have before. And so our partners have to be in a situation to be able to deliver those technologies. We're seeing the threat landscape continue to widen and be very broad in nature. And so, existing postures and existing deployments are not necessarily going to be able to protect those customers and quite frankly, from a partner standpoint, the way that they look at their business, and build their business needs to be different today than it was due to the change that digital transformation is driving. >> So in terms of your, sort of, symbiosis with the channel, we talked with Phil Quade just a minute ago, we talked about, you know, how our seat is looking to him, to say how are you guys doing this at Fortinet in terms of security? Tell me about the symbiotic relationship with your partners. What information are they bringing to you from the front lines from the customers? Whether it's education, fedsled, healthcare, that is helping to evolve Fortinet's technologies >> I mean, at the end of the day, security is a very noisy space right now, right. And we depend upon our partners, not only to ensure our programs and how we go deliver, you know, value to them, but also, I mean what the customers are telling them, and what they're seeing in the marketplace today. We're really focused on service enablement and the service delivery because the transactional type of business that we've seen in the past is no longer the route to market for success for, you know, the broad base, you know channel organizations, right. So, you know, we have a responsibility as a company to ensure that our partners have the capabilities to deliver services in ways that customers want it, you know, consume. You know, IOT is a marketplace that's been created, right. OT is opportunistic for the bad actors, right. The move to, of workloads, to public clouds and data based applications, and the fabric is really resonating with those partners in terms of being able to meet those customers changing needs. >> And you guys have had a, do a partner advisory council. >> We do. >> How long has that been going on? And what are some of the things that excite you about it? >> Yeah, so. Over 10 years we've had a partner advisory council. And it's, you know, it's industry leaders that are business owners and business drivers that, you know, really kind of keep us honest about what we're doing internally. They have access to our executive staff. They have access to, you know, product roadmaps as well. And you know, with the creation of the fabric, and what we're doing with our alliance partnerships, you know, they're kind of helping fill some of those holes as to, you know, what we're seeing in the marketplace today. You know, I think today we announced 11 additional fabric alliance partners. You know, today, organizations like Fanta for orchestration and automation, right. Integration is truly the new best breed. But the ability to react when things occur, and to orchestrate and to automate those controls are really important. And the company's done a great job, and we attribute a lot of that guidance to our partner advisory council. >> As Fortinet grows and expands its footprint, which in place new types of arrangements, like the CTA and other types of things, it's ecosystem continues to expand, in a way that Fortinet is moving towards the center. More of a focus, at least a low side >> Right. >> within the ecosystem. What does that mean from your ability to get partners, to influence partner behavior and customers, and get more pull through out of the entire ecosystem? How is that going to shape the way Fortinet competes in a way Fortinet serves its customers over the next few years? >> I think, simply put, you know, the tailwinds we have behind us. You know, we're on the precipice of two billion dollars in revenue. You know, we've got now line of sight to three and four here pretty quickly. We definitely think that the fabric is going to allow us to continue to scale and grow. You know, through that partner community. But quite frankly, I am amazed just in my time here, you know, how partners have embraced and really wrapped a business practice, in a service is first business practice, you know around that fabric. So, we're really excited about the opportunity that we have at hand. I think the fabric is going to continue to, you know, change the game, right. It's not about, you know, products. It's about delivering an integrated solution. >> Speaking of the fabric. I was kind of thinking of pivoting on what you were saying Peter, about differentiation. When partners have choices of companies to work with, you guys have been in this place for a really long time. >> We have, yup. >> But, besides the fabric, what are some of, maybe the other top two differentiators where a partner may be coming into the program that's, I get it, for with this partnership with Fortinet, we can go and really revolutionize customers in any industry >> You know, we're really unique in the market because we serve from the S&B to the mid-market, to the enterprise and some of the largest service provider brands. And that affords our partner community to be extremely diverse, and we want to be very easy to work with. So I think more than anything, my goal is to be simple and predictable in nature, and ensure that we're driving a very margin rich solution. You know, a lot of companies in the market will be enterprise focused or mid-market focused, and so, you know, we're really keen on establishing clear routes to market with our partner community. Aligning and investing where they fit. And then taking advantage of some of, even the vertical opportunities that the partners present based on those capabilities. >> I was, we were chatting a little bit earlier about education and that was one of the things I was reading, that, in some articles, that some of your guys did. And it's been awhile since I've been in college, and it just, it's so remarkable how, you know, smart classrooms, and it's BYOD, and how vulnerable school districts are for, obvious reasons we won't go into, for political reasons. But, even from a security perspective, I'm curious if there's any kind of, maybe, favorite example that you have of a partner, customer, through the channel in education that has really been able to facilitate a digital business transformation with the under pending of security, security transformation. >> I actually was just in a partner meeting, and we were talking about that very topic. And they had established with a, one of the top five largest school districts in the United States. A, you know, a fully deployed wireless mesh network. That they, once that was deployed, then they really were able to underpin it with, you know, the fortigate, fortios, and really be able to deliver the security posture back through that wireless infrastructure. You know, you make a really good point. We're seeing more and more internet connected devices. A lot of those internet connected devices are very low end in terms of their overall price point. And so these organizations, they're not necessarily pushing out vulnerabilities to it. And in patches in remediation. And that's why IOT security is so important in that kind of K through 12 example, right. Leveraging fortios, connecting to both land and wireless land capabilities, and it really, that's a great use case of how the fabric can impact a customer. >> So as you imagine the world of partnership in a play in the future, will they be more purveyors of hardware, purveyors of software, purveyors of services? How do you think the ecosystem's going to evolve as Fortinet expands it's footprint? >> Sure. That's a really good question. And quite frankly, I spend a lot of my time thinking about that. I feel, I truly feel like we have an obligation and a responsibility to help our partners through this digital transformation into where we think things are going to go. Things are moving towards security as a service. Things are moving towards, you know, on demand, you know, pay as you go, consumption modeling, right. And we have to put our partners in a situation to be able to deliver some goods and services to our customer based the way they want to buy, and make sure that they're driving value after the transaction. Because, you know, selling to the transaction is probably going to be a dying, you know, breed. It's really important that partners have the capabilities to install, deploy and support on the ongoing basis, in which is really becoming a best practice in the security space. >> And one of the other things about digital business is that historically businesses have been aligned by the arrangement of their assets so you can look at a transportation company and say, oh, that company is transportation assets, or financial services company and say, oh, that company is financial services assets. But digital business starts changing that. Because when you bring programmability and digital orientation to a lot of these assets, you reduce the specificity of those assets which increases mobility across businesses. >> That's right. >> How do you think the opportunity of helping partners transform in this business way is going to increase the noise or complexity or the interconnectedness and the potential conflicts within partners, as they go after? As their expertise, and their relationships becomes more fungible. >> That's a, I mean, that's really good point. We deal and we want to ensure that we've got a programmatic way to handle, you know, channel conflicts. Right, I mean at the end of the day. Partner brings us >> But also channel opportunity >> And channel opportunity, that's right. You know, so it's really about being consistent in how you treat, you know, the partner community and having really set rules. But, you know, digital transformation, if anything else, the thing that makes Fortinet so unique, is we are an engineering company. Security is very complicated. And the good news is that the heart of what we do is technology. The feedback we continue to get from our partners is that our technology is second to none. So we win on the technology side. And now with the momentum that we're seeing with the, you know, the fabric or the alliance programs, the momentum that we're seeing in the marketplace, and really kind of being prepared for this shift of technology by introducing the fabric concept. You know, we're really excited about the opportunity for our partners and the role they're going to play in the coming years. >> So as we kind of, you know, wrap things up here. I'll go back to where we started off with John and talking about the strength and numbers. And some things that I wrote down that I think Patrice shared this morning. Nearly 18,000 new customers acquired in 2017. >> That's right. >> What are your, as the channel chief. What are your hopes and dreams for what that number will look like at the end, by the end of 2018? >> You know, at the end of the day, I want to be able to drive and enable to channel organization to go take advantage of the tailwinds in the market, right. We want to go, continue to drive market share in the S&B, that's going to be partner-led. We want to go expand in the fabric, you know, within the mid-market. And we want to be very opportunistic in the enterprise, to go knock down some of the largest logos. You know, I'm mostly, the opportunity we have in the U.S. alone is really quite significant. And we're really excited to see, you know, as, you know, we just exceed the half a billion dollar mark in Q4 for the first time as a company, and so as we start, you know, planning in future quarters. It's really exciting to be a part of the momentum we have here at Fortinet. >> And I think the momentum is tangible. You can feel it here. You can hear it behind us in the expo. So >> It's quite exciting. >> We thank you so much John for stopping by to keep sharing >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely. Sharing your insights and how the, I'm feeling another tagline with the fabric of our lives, but I think somebody else beat you guys to it. Cotton maybe? Anyway, thanks so much John for sharing what's going on in the channel and we wish you a great show. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> And for my co-host, Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the Cube live from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (light techno music)

>> (Narrator) Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18. Brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE and we're excited to be here doing our second year of coverage of this longstanding event. My cohost for the day is Peter Burris; excited to be co-hosting with Peter again, and we're very excited to be joined by the CEO, Founder, and Chief Chairman of Fortinet, Ken Xie, Ken welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Peter. Happy to be here. >> It's great to be here for us as well, and the title of your Keynote was Leading the Change in Security Transformation, but something as a marketer I geeked out on before that, was the tagline of the event, Strength in Numbers. You shared some fantastic numbers that I'm sure you're quite proud of. In 207, $1.8 in billing, huge growth in customer acquisitions 17.8 thousand new customers acquired in 2017 alone, and you also shared that Forinet protects around 90% of the Global S&P 100. Great brands and logos you shared Apple, Coca Cola, Oracle. Tell us a little bit more and kind of as an extension of your Keynote, this strength in numbers that you must be very proud of. >> Yeah, I'm an engineer background, always liked the number, and not only we become much bigger company, we actually has 25 to 30% global employment in a network security space. That give a huge customer base and last year sales grow 19% and we keeping leading the space with a new port out we just announced today. The FortiGate 6000 and also the FortiOS 6.0. So all this changing in the landscape and like I said last year we believe the space is in a transition now, they've got a new generation infrastructure security, so we want to lead again. We started the company 18 years ago to get into we called a UTM network firewall space. We feel infrastructure security is very important now. And that we want to lead in the transition and lead in the change. >> So growth was a big theme or is a big theme. Some of the things that we're also interesting is another theme of really this evolution, this landscape I think you and Peter will probably get into more the technology, but give our viewers a little bit of an extension of what you shared in your keynote about the evolution. These three generations of internet and network security. >> Yeah, when I first start my network security career the first company I was study at Stanford University, I was in the 20s. It was very exciting is that a space keeping changing and grow very fast, that makes me keeping have to learning everyday and that I like. And then we start a company call Net Screen when it was early 30s, that's my second company. We call the first generation network security which secured a connection into the trust company environment and the Net Screens a leader, later being sold for $4 billion. Then starting in 2000, we see the space changing. Basically you only secure the connection, no longer enough. Just like a today you only validate yourself go to travel with a ticket no longer enough, they need to see what you carry, what's the what's the luggage has, right. So that's where we call them in application and content security they call the UTM firewall, that's how Fortinet started. That's the second generation starting replacing the first generation. But compared to 18 years ago, since change it again and nowadays the data no longer stay inside company, they go to the mobile device, they go to the cloud, they call auditive application go to the IoT is everywhere. So that's where the security also need to be changed and follow the important data secure the whole infrastructure. That's why keeping talking from last year this year is really the infrastructure security that secure fabric the starting get very important and we want to lead in this space again like we did 18 years ago starting Fortinet. >> Ken, I'd like to tie that, what you just talked about, back to this notion of strength in numbers. Clearly the bad guys that would do a company harm are many and varied and sometimes they actually work together. There's danger in numbers Fortinet is trying to pull together utilizing advanced technologies, new ways of using data and AI and pattern recognition and a lot of other things to counter effect that. What does that say about the nature of the relationships that Fortinet is going to have to have with its customers going forward? How is that evolving, the idea of a deeper sharing? What do you think? >> Actually, the good guy also started working together now. We formed the they call it the Cyber Threat Alliance, the CTA, and Fortinet is one of the founding company with the five other company including Palo Alto Network, Check Point and McAfee and also feel a Cisco, there's a few other company all working together now. We also have, we call, the Fabric-Ready Program which has a 42 bigger partner including like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all this bigger company because to defend the latest newest Fabric threat you have to be working together and that also protect the whole infrastructure. You also need a few company working together and it's a because on average every big enterprise they deploy 20 to 30 different products from different company. Management cost is number one, the highest cost in the big enterprise security space because you have to learn so many different products from so many different vendor, most of them competitor and now even working together, now communicate together. So that's where we want to change the landscape. We want to provide how infrastructure security can work better and not only partner together but also share the data, share the information, share the intelligence. >> So fundamentally there is the relationship is changing very dramatically as a way of countering the bad actors by having the good actors work more closely together and that drives a degree of collaboration coordination and a new sense of trust. But you also mentioned that the average enterprise is 20 to 30 fraud based security products. Every time you introduce a new product, you introduce some benefits you introduce some costs, potentially some new threat surfaces. How should enterprises think about what is too many, what is not enough when they start thinking about the partnerships that needed put together to sustain that secure profile? >> In order to have the best protection today you need to secure the whole infrastructure, the whole cyberspace. Network security still the biggest and also grow very fast and then there's the endpoint and there's a like a cloud security, there's a whole different application, email, web and all the other cloud all the other IoT. You really need to make sure all these different piece working together, communicate together and the best way is really, they have to have a single panel of our management service. They can look at them, they can make it integrate together they can automate together, because today's attack can happen within seconds when they get in the company network. It's very difficult for human to react on that. That's where how to integrate, how to automate, this different piece, that is so important. That's where the Fabric approach, the infrastructure approach get very important. Otherwise, you cannot react quick enough, in fact, to defend yourself in a current environment. On the other side for your question, how many vendor do you have, I feel the less the better. At least they have to work together. If they're not working together, will make it even more difficult to defend because each part they not communicate and not react and not automate will make the job very, very difficult and that's where all this working together and the less vendor they can all responsible for all your security it's better. So that's where we see some consolidation in the space. They do still have a lot of new company come up, like you mentioned, there's close to 2,000 separate security company. A lot of them try to address the point solution. I mentioned there's a four different level engineer after engineer work there because I see 90% company they do the detection. There's a certain application you can detect the intrusion and then the next level is where they after you attack what are going to do about it. Is it really the prevention setting kick in automatic pull out the bad actor. After that, then you need to go to the integration because there's so many different products, so many different piece you need to working together, that's the integration. Eventually the performance and cost. Because security on average still cost 100 times more expensive under same traffic and also much slower compared to the routing switch in networking device. That's what the performance cost. Also starting in the highest level, that's also very difficult to handle. >> So, we're just enough to start with the idea of data integration, secure data integration amongst the security platform, so enough to do as little as possible, as few as possible to do that, but enough to cover all the infrastructure. >> Yes, because the data is all a whole different structure. You no longer does have to trust environment. Because even inside the company, there's so many different way you can access to the outside, whether it by your mobile device so there's a multiple way you can connect on the internet and today in the enterprise 90% connection goes to Wi-Fi now it's not goes to a wired network, that's also difficult to manage. So that's where we will hide it together and make it all working together it's very important. >> So, in the spirit of collaboration, collaborating with vendors. When you're talking with enterprises that have this myriad security solutions in place now, how are they helping to guide and really impact Fortinet's technologies to help them succeed. What's that kind of customer collaboration like, I know you meet with a lot of customers, how are they helping to influence the leading security technologies you deliver? >> We always want to listen the customer. They have the highest priority, they gave us the best feedback. Like the presentation they talked about there's a case from Olerica which is where they have a lot of branch office and they want to use in the latest technology and networking technology. I see when I'm working together with security, that's ready the new trend and how to make sure they have all the availability, they have the flexibility software-defined networking there and also make sure to security also there to handle the customer data, that's all very important so that's what we work very closely with customer to response what they need. That's where I'm still very proud to be no longer kind of engineer anymore but will still try to build in an engineer technology company. Lesson to the customer react quick because to handle security space, cyber security, internet security, you have to be work quickly react for the change, on internet, on application. So that's where follow the customer and give them the quick best solution it's very very important. On the customer side in Anaemia we talked about that was talked a little bit about this morning with GDPR are is around the corner, May 2018. Do you see your work coordinates work with customers in Anaemia as potentially being, kind of, leading-edge to help customers in the Americas and Asia-Pacific be more prepared for different types of compliance regulations? >> We see the GDPR as an additional opportunity, as a additional complement solution compared to all the new product technology would come up. They definitely gave us an additional business rate, additional opportunity, to really help customer protect the data, make the data stay in their own environment and the same time, internet is a very global thing, and how to make sure different country, different region, working together is also very important. I think it's a GDPR is a great opportunity to keeping expanding a security space and make it safer for the consumer for the end-user. >> So Ken as CEO Fortinet or a CEO was tough act, but as CEO you have to be worried about the security of your business and as a security company you're as much attacked, if not more attacked than a lot of other people because getting to your stuff would allow folks to get to a lot of other stuff. How do you regard the Fortinet capabilities inside Fortinet capability as providing you a source of differentiation in the technology industry? >> Yeah we keep security in mind as the highest priority within a company. That's where we develop a lot of product, we also internally use tests first. You can see from endpoint, the network side, the email, to the web, to the Wi-Fi access, to the cloud, to the IoT, it's all developing internally, it tests internally so the infrastructure security actually give you multiple layer protection. No longer just have one single firewall, you pass the fire were all open up. It's really multiple layer, like a rather the ransomware or something they had to pass multiple layer protection in order to really reach the data there. So that's where we see the infrastructure security with all different products and developed together, engineer working together is very important. And we also have were strong engineer and also we call the IT security team lead by Phil Cauld, I think you are being interview him later and he has a great team and a great experience in NSA for about 30 years, secure country. And that's where we leverage the best people, the best technology to provide the best security. Not only the portal side, also our own the internal security in this space. >> So, in the last minute or so that we have here, one of the things that Patrice Perce your global sales leader said during his keynote this morning was that security transformation, this is the year for it. So, in a minute or so, kind of what are some of the things besides fueling security transformation for your customers do you see as priorities and an exciting futures this year for Fortinet, including you talked about IoT, that's a $9 billion opportunity. You mentioned the securing the connected car to a very cool car in there, what are some of the things that are exciting to you as the leader of this company in 2018? >> We host some basic technology, not another company has. Like a built in security for a single chip. I also mentioned like some other bigger company, like a Google started building a TPU for the cloud computing and Nvidia the GPU. So we actually saw this vision 18 years ago when we start a company and the combine the best hardware and best technology with solve for all this service together. So, long term you will see the huge benefit and that's also like translate into today you can see all these technology enable us to really provide a better service to the customer to the partner and we all starting benefit for all this investment right now. >> Well Ken, thank you so much for joining us back on theCUBE. It's our pleasure to be here at the 16th year of the event, our second time here. Thanks for sharing your insight and we're looking forward to a great show. >> Thank you, great questions, it's the best platform to really promoting the technology, promoting the infrastructure security, thank you very much. >> Likewise, we like to hear that. For my co-host Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin, we are coming to you from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. Thanks for watching, stick around we have great content coming up.