The Gately Report: Fortinet Ceases Russia Operations, Talks Growth with Partners, Kaspersky Rebuffs German Warning

Fortinet channel partners played a big role in the cybersecurity giant’s strong 2021 earnings. Furthermore, the company expects more growth this year.

That’s according to Jon Bove, Fortinet’s vice president of channel sales. This week, Fortinet announced five new service providers – GO Telecom, Microland, Radius Telecoms, Spectrotel and Time dotCom – have added Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to their managed service portfolios.

Ceasing All Operations Within Russia

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fortinet earlier this month ceased operations within Russia. This included the suspension of Fortinet sales, support and professional services.

Fortinet provided the following statement:

“We regret the impact this will have on our employees, partners and customers who are adversely impacted by the actions of the Russian government. Fortinet has multiple efforts underway with our customers and partners, including governments around the world, to prepare for and defend against cyberattacks. These efforts include sharing the latest threat intelligence from our FortiGuard Labs as well as our broad ecosystem of threat intelligence partners.”

Fortinet is encouraging all organizations to elevate their defenses in light of the heightened cybersecurity risk.

“This should include a risk-prioritized approach to fully updating and patching cybersecurity solutions, reviewing overall security postures to ensure any gaps are addressed, and using recent threat intelligence to protect against possible threat vectors,” it said. “It should also involve a review of basic cyber hygiene best practices. Fortinet stands ready to help support and protect our customers and partners.”

Opportunities Abound for Fortinet Channel Partners

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Bove and John Maddison, Fortinet’s CMO and executive vice president of products, talk about ongoing and new opportunities for partners.

Channel Futures: Fortinet this month reported its full year 2021 financial results, which showed a 29% year-over-year increase in total revenue. What role did partners play in this growth?

Fortinet’s Jon Bove

Jon Bove: First of all, what an incredible year. And being a channel-centric company, partners are a part of every bit of our go-to-market, and we really attribute a lot of our success — both historical but also forward-looking to them. The opportunity that we present partners is so unique. In the second quarter, we exceeded 6,000 new [customers] and so partners through deal registration play a huge part of that. But at the same time, I think the enablement that we deliver through our Engage partner program that we introduced last year, we were very thoughtful in that approach. We wanted to give partners the ability to engage with us, expand not from a traditional VAR model, but also into managed security services and into helping customers on their journey to cloud and then also specialized.

Fortinet’s John Maddison

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