>> 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)