Fortinet
Encyclopedia
Fortinet is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...

 and specializes in network security appliances. Fortinet’s flagship product line is sold under the brand name of FortiGate.

Corporate Overview

Fortinet was founded in 2000 by Ken Xie, the founder and former president and CEO of NetScreen
NetScreen Technologies
NetScreen Technologies was acquired by Juniper Networks for US$ 4 billion stock for stock in 2004.NetScreen Technologies developed ASIC-based Internet security systems and appliances that delivered high performance firewall, VPN and traffic shaping functionality to Internet data centers, e-business...

 (later sold to Juniper for more than $3.5 billion) and is a publicly-held company (in NASDAQ under the ticker symbol FTNT) Fortinet's position as the revenue leader in Unified Threat Management
Unified threat management
Unified Threat Management is a comprehensive solution that has recently emerged in the network security industry and since 2004, has gained widespread currency as a primary network gateway defense solution for organizations...

 (UTM) has been validated by IDC
International Data Corporation
International Data Corporation is a market research and analysis firm specializing in information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology. IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group...

 several times over.

The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with customer support, development and sales facilities throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Fortinet sells its systems and subscription service products through a network of 1,500 channel partners worldwide.

Fortinet is an international company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Fortinet distributes its systems and subscription based services using the Channel partner
Channel partner
A channel partner is a company that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market and sell the manufacturer's products, services, or technologies. This is usually done through a co-branding relationship...

 sales method. Fortinet also has relationships with various manufacturers, consulting firms, service providers, and integrators, but the extent and type of these relationships is unknown. Some examples of companies having a relationship with Fortinet are: Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is a global telecommunications corporation, headquartered in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services...

, HP ProCurve, ArcSight
ArcSight
ArcSight, an HP company, was founded in 2000 and is a technology company that provides security information and event management solutions. ArcSight headquarters are located in Cupertino, California, USA, with sales offices around the globe including the United States, the United Kingdom, France,...

, Citrix Systems
Citrix Systems
Citrix Systems, Inc. is a multinational corporation founded in 1989, that provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service , and cloud computing technologies, including Xen open source products....

, Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...

, Orange Business Services, Riverbed
Riverbed
Riverbed may refer to:*Stream bed, the channel bottom of a stream or river or creek*Wadi, a dry riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain*Riverbed Technology, an American technology company...

, AlterPoint and LogLogic
LogLogic
LogLogic is a technology company that specializes in Security Management, Compliance Reporting, and IT Operations products. LogLogic developed the first appliance-based log management platform. LogLogic's Log Management platform collects and correlates user activity and event data...

.

Funding

Fortinet has raised $100 million in five rounds of venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 investment from Acorn Campus, DEFTA Partners, DCM-Doll Capital Management, Fortunetech Partners, LLC., Forval Creative Inc., Meritech Capital Partners and Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures is a prominent venture capital firm focused on investments in early stage technology companies. The firm's partners include Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Nety Krishna, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, John Walecka, Geoff...

.

Fortinet is publicly traded on Nasdaq under the symbol FTNT as of Nov. 18, 2009.

Product Overview

Fortinet offers security gateways and products that are a blend of ASIC-accelerated performance, integrated multi-threat protection, and constantly-updated, in-depth threat intelligence. This delivers network, content, and application security for enterprises, managed service providers, and telecommunications carriers, while reducing total cost of ownership and providing a flexible, scalable path for expansion. The company offers the following product lines:
  • FortiGate multi-threat security appliances
  • FortiMail messaging security appliances
  • FortiWeb web application firewall
  • FortiDB database security appliance
  • FortiClient endpoint security suite
  • FortiWifi wireless security appliances
  • FortiAP thin client access point
  • FortiAnalyzer centralized reporting
  • FortiManager centralized management
  • FortiScan vulnerability management
  • FortiPlanner Wireless Accesspoint Planning Tool
  • FortiToken 2-factor Authentication solution

Patents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded Fortinet eight patents for networking inventions. The patents are part of the intellectual property Fortinet acquired from CoSine Communications, Inc., in May 2006. The patents strengthen Fortinet's intellectual property portfolio, and provide the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical management, storage, measurement and network performance needs of the enterprise and managed service provider markets. Fortinet now holds 80 patents and has more than 115 pending patent applications.

Other information

Fortinet contributes to the security community through its Global Security Research Team. An example of this is Fortinet’s membership in the Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Virus Information Alliance (VIA). Fortinet in recent years has led to the discovery of several critical vulnerabilities in commonly used software.

According to the OpenNet Initiative
OpenNet Initiative
The OpenNet Initiative is a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run...

, FortiGuard is used by the dictatorship of Myanmar
Myanmar
Burma , officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar , is a country in Southeast Asia. Burma is bordered by China on the northeast, Laos on the east, Thailand on the southeast, Bangladesh on the west, India on the northwest, the Bay of Bengal to the southwest, and the Andaman Sea on the south....

 to block communications critical of the regime carried over the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, a system known as the Myanmar Wide Web. Fortinet has promised to investigate the allegations, and the implied violation of US Government sanctions against the regime, noting that the software may have been sold to the regime by a third party; meanwhile, the Myanmar government features its adoption of the Fortinet firewall on its official website with other photos showing a Fortinet sales director presenting a gift to the Myanmar Prime Minister during a ceremony. In 2005, after becoming aware that its product may have reached Myanmar, Fortinet conducted an exhaustive review of channel partners and their compliance with import/export controls. The company implemented additional back-end controls which now render a product useless if it is diverted without appropriate authorizations to a party located in a U.S. sanctioned country.

In 2005, the gpl-violations.org
Gpl-violations.org
The gpl-violations.org is a not-for-profit project founded and led by Harald Welte in 2004. It works to make sure software licensed under the GNU General Public License is not used in ways prohibited by the license.-Goals:...

 project uncovered evidence that Fortinet had used GPL
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 code in its products against the terms of the license, and used cryptographic tools to conceal the violation. The violation was alleged to have occurred in the FortiOS system, which the gpl-violations.org project said contained elements of the linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 kernel. In response, a Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

court granted a temporary injunction against the company, preventing it from selling products until they were in compliance with the necessary license terms; Fortinet was required to make the source-code to GPL portions of their FortiOS freely available in compliance with GPL licensing.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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