Transcript
Christiana Olgaert. Good morning, welcome here at Accelerate in Las Vegas. I want to talk to you a little bit about financial stability. Financial stability matters because cyber threats do not pause during economic downturns, market volatility, or other global disruptions, which we see right now in the world. So how can Fortinet convince you to be stable? So we have built a profitable global business over 25 years, and Ken talked about it. You can see on the left side of the screen that we've grown our billings every year since IPO, and we've been even get profitable. On the right side, you see our 25 metrics. You can see that we are a real significant business with financial outcomes for our partners and customers. Financial strength, scale, and resilience matters because security is not a one-time purchase. Security is a commitment by our customers to a longer time, and also the partners are building a business on Fortinet. So it's really important that we honor this long-term commitment through financial resilience in our scale that allows us to innovate like Ken talked about, and we see a lot at this event. And we can invest ahead of the threat landscape without giving up profitability. So what makes us resilient and what gives us the profitability? We are a highly diversified business, and you have seen that. We have customers across all segments and sizes. We sell in all geographies. We have customers in 200 countries, and we also sell to a lot of different industries. And that gives us the diversification and scale that matters because it makes us more resilient. It makes us more stable. And even when markets are volatile, we can stay focused and innovate. So this is where the benefit of our diversification helps us from a financial perspective as well. You've seen the slide, but what I want to talk about here is that we deliver certain solutions differently than our competitors. We deliver SaaS in our cloud solution through a hybrid model, own data centers, points of presence, colos, and public cloud. Why does this matter? There are three reasons that this matters. It's control, performance, and economics. So control means we optimize our infrastructure specifically for security workloads. Performance, because we place capacity where our customers need the access. And economics, because we avoid unpredictable cost through cloud consumption models only. So we want to be in control, and this is why our infrastructure slide really matters for our customers. It allows us to deliver better cost points for our cloud solutions. What else is required to manage cybersecurity across borders? We have people, as you know, all over the place. We have infrastructure in many countries, and we have a lot of partners, over 10,000 active partners, that gives us a global ecosystem supporting our customers. We also invest in training and skills development with academic partners in more than 100 countries. Last year alone, we trained 250,000 people. And why is this important? We don't just train customers and partners. We also train the general public, because the human is a shield for cyber threats, and the more we are trained, the more secure the companies are. In addition, what is important is, because of our global scale, we need to certify our products for many countries and many regulations. And you will know that we are constantly auditing and constantly updating our certifications. So regulations, customer expectations, and threat profiles differ by region. But cybersecurity does not stop at the border. This is why it is so crucial that we have developed this global scale. Let me talk a little bit about our go-to-market strategy. And you know from Ken where we are innovating. Our strategy is organized around three engines, secure networking, unified SASE, and security operations. And this product portfolio is integrated through our 4DOS. Each of these markets are large and growing. And importantly, Fortinet is growing faster than the market, which creates a ton of opportunity for our partners to grow with us. For our customers, it means you are aligning with a platform that's being actively invested in and constantly addressing new threats. For us, it means continued innovation and growth delivered with good profitability. What you can see is, while we started in secure networking many years ago, 25 years ago, our billings mix and our business mix is shifting towards unified SASE and secure operations. This gives our partners the ability to upsell customers on our newer products. But it also comes with typically a business mix shift towards more services. But interestingly enough, many of our customers are also interested in our breadth of solution portfolio. So since we sell many of our solutions in multiple form factors, we even see on the unified SASE and the secure ops side a lot of on-prem solutions. The shift matters, though, because with newer solutions and with a broader portfolio, we can drive more outcomes for our customers and involved in their security lifecycle. But no good solution without services. It's really important that security outcomes are driven through services as well. What we have is FortiCare, which is typically bundled with our SaaS products, but also with our hardware. You need to buy FortiCare. It's not just support. With FortiCare, you get upgrades and updates to firmware and OS. So it's extremely important to have that service. With FortiCare Threat Intelligence, what we deliver is day-to-day threat intelligence for specific products. So these are custom for our products. And then our partners and Fortinet delivers advanced services and professional services so you can get the best outcome, quick deployments, upgrades, and updates being installed. Because it's important that you have consistent security posture, a good experience with our products, and you generate the operational efficiency that we deliver to you. So now, let me talk a little bit why CFOs allocate budgets to cybersecurity. One area is OT security. It's really important for CFOs because if there's a breach, it's immediately financed. In OT, in operational technology, disruption means lost revenue, safety risk, and brand damage. So Fortinet has a lot of solutions that help our customers because the OT systems typically are not designed with security in mind. And so we integrate through our partnerships with control system providers into their solutions and help customers secure their operational technology. Another area where the CFO organization or the finance organization benefits from Fortinet is when customers deploy our products across the board. Let me talk about a customer journey here, which is very common and a very typical customer journey for Fortinet. The customer is a large organization which had over 1,000 sites with mission critical services that need to be delivered to the public. They had a legacy MPLS-based infrastructure, and the infrastructure needed to be managed by two different partners. So what did they do? Because it was not compliant with their country security regulations, and they couldn't be flexible with their technology, they decided for Fortinet. They purchased firewalls, LAN equipment, and implemented SD-WAN. And they were able to unify their management, get consistent security, and through vendor consolidation save a lot of money because it's so much easier to navigate. What was in it for the partner? Well, one of the partners who was managing the legacy infrastructure knew the customer really well and was the Fortinet implementation partner to de-risk the transformation for this customer. Now they're in the process of implementing Fortisasi because they want to move certain workloads to the cloud and still have a unified management and consistent security. So this is where the value of cybersecurity is for the CFO. It's a financial risk management discipline. The benefits show up not only in avoided cost for breaches, ransomware, and so on, but also in operational benefits like digitization, efficiency, and compliance. The ROI comes from risk reduction, from cost minimization, and productivity enablement. And Fortinet is really helping in these areas because our broad solutions, integrated, power efficient, help you with cost reduction. Our global presence and financial strength helps with investment protection. And our constant innovation gives you the comfort that we are on top of cybersecurity. Let me wrap it up. Financial stability, our broad solution, our constant innovation, and our global ecosystem through partners, through infrastructure, through training, through our own employee base creates the customer value. And this is why customers have chosen Fortinet for a long time. And we hope more customers are going to choose Fortinet. So let me thank everyone who trusts Fortinet already. And please enjoy all the innovation that we are bringing to you at this event. And I hope to see you next year. Thank you.
