>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida.
It's theCUBE, covering Accelerate '19.
Brought to you by Fortinet.
>> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE.
We are live at Fortinet Accelerate 2019
in noisy Orlando, Florida, I'm
Lisa Martin, welcoming two guests
to the program, one you know and love well.
John Maddison, the Executive Vice President of
Products and Solutions at Fortinet.
And John and I are pleased to also welcome
Peter Doggart, the Vice President of
Business Development at Symantec.
>> Thank you.
>> Lisa: Welcome back, welcome.
>> Thank you, Lisa.
>> Good to be here.
>> So guys, partnerships, symbiotic partnerships.
We've been talking about partnerships
all day, now we want to talk about
what's new with Fortinet and Symantec.
You guys just announced a couple months ago
an expansive partnership, Peter, let's go ahead
and start with you, you guys are saying
we're going to partner to deliver the most
robust and comprehensive cloud security service.
Why did Symantec decide to partner and
collaborate with Fortinet and why now?
>> Absolutely, so when we think about
what our customers are going through
they're going through a digital transformation.
Typically to the cloud, and we wanted to
make sure that we put forward the
best possible technology for out customers.
We chose Fortinet, we were great partners
actually before this whole thing started.
We looked at the technology that
they had to offer, we paired it with
what we have in our web security service
and it was a fantastic fit, and so far with the
show today at Accelerate, we made the right choice.
>> That's always good, right, to get some validation there.
Talk to us about the, maybe from a
customer's perspective, what were some of the
drivers saying hey guys, this partnership
can be really beneficial for your
joint customers, partners, and each company.
John, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, well I think it's a
very expansive relationship, Peter just
talked about having our next-gen firewall
inside their cloud, providing security there.
There's also opportunity at the endpoint.
For example, Symantec is the largest endpoint
under the 75 million endpoints out there.
We're the largest network security vendor
in terms of implementation, some
four million firewalls out there.
And what customers are saying is they want their
security solutions to work together.
They want the endpoint to see the network.
They want the network to see the endpoint.
They want to exchange information.
So one of the other question points is between
the endpoint and our next generation firewalls.
Providing policy exchange, providing the
ability to exchange that information.
So if I'm a large customer and I've got a
very all encompassing degree of
implementation of Symantec endpoints
SEP I think it's called, and they've got
Fortinet, they can simply connect
those two together and provide a
very comprehensive solution, and so we're getting
some great feedback from our customers about that.
>> Talk to me a little bit more about that.
Are you seeing this adoption, and I know
both Symantec and Fortinet have customers in
every industry of many sizes, but in terms of
some of the successes that you're seeing, I know
this is still really early on.
What are some of those that really excite you
that, like Peter, you said, we've made the right choice?
>> Yeah, I'll just follow on from a comment you made.
Whether you're a medium-sized customer, the
largest financial customer, security is a
very tough thing to solve, and
what you don't want to do is add
complexity to that problem, you also want to
make sure you don't know cost as well.
So the really cool thing we're doing here is
through the collaboration, through the
integrations that John spoke about
between the endpoint, network, and
the secure SD-WAN or the fabric.
We're actually solving those problems
in very intuitive ways, it's seamless for the customer.
It just clicks together, and that's what it should
be like, we don't want to add any complexity here, and
that's why we're doing this, right?
>> Yeah, and I think for customers
every time they need to add a security solution
it makes it more complex, it's more costs.
It's more operational overhead, so
if they've got existing vendors like
Symantec at the endpoint or for
cloud security and they've got Fortinet in there
for SD-WAN or next-gen firewall, if we can
simply switch on the connectivity policy exchange.
Threat intelligent exchange between those two things.
It's great for the customer 'cause they
instantly get a better solution that's
more secure and more cost-effective.
>> Of course, customers, you mentioned
you guys both mentioned a couple of words that
every customer wants, seamless, we want it to
click in, kind of plug and play.
Obviously it's an extensible undertaking
to integrate your solutions, talk to us
since this was just announced a few months ago.
Where are you in terms of integrating the
technologies, I think, we saw the
next-gen firewall integrated into
Symantec's web security service and
Symantec's endpoint solutions integrated into
the security fabric, where are you guys
on the phases of those integrations?
>> I'll let Peter talk about the WSS--
>> Yeah, yeah, so I think one big element to this
as I just mentioned was web security service
we have data centers around the planet and
what we're doing is taking the
virtual Fortinet solutions and we're
installing them now in all of our data pods
and we're in the, we're starting the
rollout phase this summer and we'll be
probably pretty much done with it as we
get into the fall season around the planet
and we'll be switching that on and
the really cool bit about this is
it's going to be one single interface.
The customer just simply switches on
firewalling, IPS, next-gen firewall.
It's completely seamless.
>> Lisa: From a management perspective.
>> Management policy, absolutely.
>> Lisa: I'm looking through one crystal ball.
>> One cloud, security SAS service, done.
>> Yes, and the endpoint's more on us to develop
so we have to develop this connector of
our next-gen firewall into the endpoint and
we're looking probably towards the end of
this quarter, early Q3 to do that.
And we'll start rolling that out
across different operating systems.
>> So talk to me about part about the channel.
So I know Fortinet is very much
dedicated to the channel, we've had
a number of your partners on, I know
we've got John Booth coming up next and
we've spoken with him for several years.
Saw a lot of statistics, a lot of
revenue growth, product growth, a Fortinet
driven by the channel, one of the main
pillars that was discussed in the keynotes
this morning was education, talked about
technology, talked about the ecosystem, collaboration
education, how are you guys working together
to educate your joint partners to
understand the impact potential that
Fortinet and Symantec customers are about to have?
>> Yeah, from a training perspective, obviously
we have our own individual training programs
and as I was saying earlier I think
one thing that's very important to customers is
more of an architectural approach.
I want to look at an architecture over
four or five years and I want to make sure
all of these pieces are integrated inside there.
So one of the things we do initially for
something like this for our partners is
produce what is sort of a fast track.
A fast track is a small module of
training that's focused on hands-on training of
both components to make sure that
all our partners understand how to integrate.
How to make that work as soon as possible
and then we follow that up with some more
detailed training on both solutions.
>> Excellent, and from a rollout perspective
is this something that's going to be going global
by the end of this year? >> It's going global.
It's going to go fast, it's going to start next week.
And the nice thing is when we map out our
channel parters because Symantec is a
very channel friendly company as well.
We've got some great overlap, but there's also
a ton of white space there for our partners too.
So I think it's going to really help both
obviously our fields but also our
channel partners engage, grow broader and
grow deeper into opportunities.
>> And we know that security is a
pan industry challenge as every organization
now lives and does successful lives in this
hybrid multi-cloud world, millions of
connected devices, every industry
has to react, otherwise every business
in every industry otherwise they face
going out of business, I noticed though
that there were a couple tracks here
John, some sessions focused on a couple of
verticals, healthcare, financial services, retail
for example, are you expecting to
see any leading edge industries
joint customers that really are
ripe for this integrated solution?
>> Maybe, but I also think that
Symantec's got a huge footprint across
all the verticals, across all the segments
the same as us, and so I think initially
you'll see some of the larger companies
who have these huge footprints of
endpoints and network security
implement these connectors, implement the
cloud security, and as you see that, they'll
roll down into the segments as well.
>> So at the event today and the last couple days
what is some of the feedback been from
partners, but from also end-user customers since
there's about four thousand people here today.
John, what are some of the things that you're hearing?
>> Well, we've been talking to some of our
customers before here, obviously, and
overwhelmingly positive feedback.
From the large customers, I spoke to some
partners here today as well, they really like
the ability to bring together a
leading edge endpoint solution and
network solution with cloud attached to it as well.
And so it's not often actually I've done a
partner announcement, and I've seen
so much excitement not only with
all the customers and all the partners but also
both organizations that we announced it
to our sales organizations, we're doing that with
Symantec later on this week and I see
a lot of excitement, so I think
that bodes well going forward.
>> And I imagine Peter, you're hearing
similar feedback form Symantec's install base.
>> Yeah, I mean it's just been tremendous.
This show for me has cemented the fact.
This is going to be a very special partnership.
The feedback I've been hearing from
potential customers, our own customers
coming to us who say hey, I've got these solutions.
It's fantastic you're doing this now.
To our partners saying this is
truly amazing what you're doing.
And it is very rare, you find these
two companies that can come together in a
meaningful way that can actually really impact.
What we're all trying to do here is fight the adversary.
>> Yeah, I mean you look at both companies
they're all big companies, cyber security companies.
Think semantics, probably enterprise
in the top two, top one, we're in the top five.
These are huge companies, and our footprints
from a product perspective is a bit of an
overlap here and there, but not really
which makes this exciting I think for our
partners and for both companies, and I think
yes, I see these relationships where
it's a local exchange, oh, we'll do a bit of this
integration on this API here, this is a
truly very integrated solution for
both our channel partners and our customers.
>> And let's talk about competition.
That came up a lot during the general session
this morning where-- >> It did?
>> Just a few times, a few people mentioned it
in passing on giant slides with arrows pointing.
No, I'm kidding, but really what was
very clear I think from not only the
general session this morning but also
thematic that we've heard on theCUBE today is
the industry leadership, the product
leadership that Fortinet is demonstrating.
But also Palo Alto Networks, CISCO, some of your
other competitors where you guys are
really proudly showing this is where we are
in relation to them, even so far as the
number of Gartner Insight, Gartner Peer Insight
reviews that Fortinet has gotten versus
your competitors, so let's start with you, Peter.
Talk to us about the competitive advantage that
Symantec sees this partnership being able to generate?
>> So, the way we look at it is
we're going to come to market now.
We both love technology, I think
we can agree that we're very much technology forward.
Very research forward, we're bringing those
pieces together, when you do that you're going to win.
And if you do that in a way that is
highly integrated, you're going to
beat the competition 'cause you're
going to have a clear advantage, we're going to
detect stuff faster, we're going to
respond to stuff faster, it's just
going to show very very well, and
I'm not going to point to a particular competitor.
>> Don't mention their names.
>> We're obviously a very large player in
industry, but we like this a lot.
Again, we think this will make a very big
impact so let's see where it goes.
>> And John, any predictions on what those
graphs might look like at Accelerate 2020?
>> 2020, that's a long time away from now but
we continue to grow as a company.
We take market share, we're aligning with
some of the big players such as Symantec
in the marketplace, so those graphs
definitely up and to the right.
Is that the right direction?
>> That's the right direction, and
last question is we talked a lot about
data sharing on a number of our segments today.
Is Symantec and Fortinet sharing
threat intelligence and if so why is that
a good thing, why is that important?
>> We're actually both founders of the
Cyber Threat Alliance, the CTA.
We already share, we did that two years ago at least.
I know we're expanding that, as John was saying.
With real time on the ground threat intelligence
sharing between our products, between our fabrics.
That will happen just automatically.
>> Yeah, it's important though.
You got the global sharing through the CTA
but also going forward because of targeted
attacks you have the local sharing.
So we'll have global sharing with
big amounts of threat intelligence and data
but at the local level between the
endpoints on the network security, we'll
have threat sharing there as well.
>> And it's important you do that fast.
Security changes by the second.
If you don't react to something quickly, if you
don't share that intelligence that's
actionable and relevant, you may as well just
give up, you got to be fast and responsive.
>> And last question is you mentioned the word
react, and we talked about that a lot today
as well as how, and I'll ask you both this.
Peter, I'll start with you, how is this
partnership going to enable your
joint customers to eventually go from
being reactive to proactive to predictive?
>> Yeah, for sure, well I think some of these
integrations would work here, it's all about
being proactive, so as an example, if we
see something in our network that
we've seen in a corner case we can
automatically give it over to Fortinet.
They will be inoculated everywhere around the
planet in every single device and vice versa.
If Fortinet sees something in their network that
we've never seen before, we can inoculate
all of our endpoints, all of our customers.
That's being truly proactive, that's how you get ahead.
>> Excellent.
>> It's all about sharing that threat intelligence
as fast as possible across as much of the
attack surface as possible and
that's what the relationship is about.
>> Well guys thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE
and sharing with us a little bit more about
the partnership with Symantec and Fortinet.
We look forward to hearing what comes in
this year ahead and we'll talk to you next year.
>> Both: Thank you.
>> I look forward to it.
>> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE.
I'm Lisa Martin live from Fortinet Accelerate 2019.
Thanks for watching.
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