Fortinet cements India presence with second R&D unit; expands tech team

Fortinet, the Nasdaq-listed $1-billion cybersecurity solutions firm, opened its second largest R&D facility outside North America, in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

Spread across 25,000 sq ft, and with a team of 150 engineers to begin with, the Fortinet Innovation Centre will focus on developing algorithms that secure large-enterprise networks running mobile and IoT devices and location-based services.

This centre will add to Fortinet’s 20-member R&D team in Hyderabad, which builds the hardware logic for its DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack mitigation appliances.

“Today, most connected devices use Wi-Fi as their default connectivity standard. With the proliferation of IoT, seamlessly blending Wi-Fi access with network protection is an integral part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, which we launched this March. Therefore, research activities carried out by this team are highly relevant not only in the Indian market, but for the rest of the world as well,” Patrice Perche, Senior Executive VP (Worldwide Sales and Support), Fortinet, told BusinessLine .

Fortinet’s expertise in enterprise class Wi-Fi systems was strengthened with its acquisition of intelligent Wi-Fi networking firm, Meru Networks, last July.

Stating that India is among the top three revenue generators and the fastest growing market for Fortinet in the APAC region, Perche said: “We chose to ramp up our R&D presence in India not only because of the expertise and qualifications of Indian engineers, but also to address the needs of the Indian market, which is one of our top markets, with over 15,000 customers across the enterprise, telco and SMB market segments.”

Globally, 45 per cent of Fortinet’s revenue comes from enterprises, 20 per cent from telcos and 35 per cent from the SMB segment. While the company has been growing its revenue by 30 per cent Y-o-Y, India revenues are growing above global growth rates, he said.

Asked about Fortinet’s recently revealed product vulnerabilities, hacked by Shadow Brokers, a pseudonymous group of hackers, Perche said: “That was an issue faced by the previous release of FortiOS, which has been addressed; we are now on FortiOS version 5.4.”

Fortinet also inaugurated its new 60,000 sq ft office, spread across three floors in Bengaluru, which houses its new Innovation Centre, Technical Assistance Centre (TAC), and Sales office, with a total headcount of 260 people.

To support VIP customers in India and in anticipation of growing demand for its solutions, the company has expanded the TAC team to 70 engineers to provide Level 2 and Level 3 advanced support as well as professional services, in addition to Level 1 support provided to customers in India, Europe, West Asia, Africa, and SAARC nations.

Asked about the company’s growth trajectory, Perche said: “We are the largest vendor in unit sales with 2.7 million appliances sold till date. The goal is to take Fortinet from the third largest network security appliances firm after Cisco and Check Point to number one, in the next three years. We are already number one in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and France.”

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