Jerry Ungerman, then Checkpoint Software's CEO, had it easy in 2004 when dissing Fortinet : "It's just another antivirus vendor", he said. But the fact is Fortinet's success in the UTM market has nothing to envy to Checkpoint's early fame. Even if Fortinet at that time already had ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) based hardware firewall, VPN and antivirus, to many it stayed just another antivirus vendor. But it was, even then, quite a dangerous oversight to dismiss the company as such. For Fortinet's mastermind is Ken Xie, Netscreen's veteran founder. And Netscreen was sold to Juniper for $3,5 billion, which hardly qualifies as a failure.

Today Ken Xie might very well be about to pull it again with Fortinet. The company recorded a 50% growth in appliance shipments for 2007. In a little bit more than four years, up to 2006, it had sold 200,000 security appliances. And 100,000 more the year after that. A growth the company was able to sustain in a very crowded market, UTM appliances now being quite a fashionable commodity as well as a sought-after security solution.

In such a crowded market Fortinet sets itself apart thanks to many features. It is not just an antivirus vendor, but yes, it is an antivirus vendor alright. The company's strength is to have a deeper level of control over the elements within its UTM platform. From antivirus to firewall, from IPS to VPN, content filtering or antispam, Fortinet controls them all. That's unlike most UTM vendors who rely on third-party solutions (Checkpoint for example uses Kaspersky Antivirus within its appliances). This approach coupled with the use of dedicated chips to boost traffic analysis and filtering gives Fortinet a true, and unique, technical asset.   

As early as 2000, Ken Xie envisioned to offer products that could be used "as is" by telecom operators, MSSPs (Managed Security Services Providers), corporations and SMBs alike. Having full control over every pieces of its products allows Fortinet to address several market opportunities with much flexibility. "We do answer UTM bids of course, but you'll also find us answering antivirus-only bids, or IPS-only bids, or content filtering bids and so on", says french Fortinet country manager Yann Pradelle.

Fortinet did get a bump along the road, though. That was when Open Source watch guard GPL Violation determined the company was using Open Source components in its appliances (namely the Linux kernel and other free softwares) without mentioning this fact and, worse, even trying to hide it using crypto counter-measures. A lawsuit was brought to a German court and settled in 2005 when Fortinet agreed to update its end-user license, to mention its use of GPL components and to disclose their (modified) source code.

Despite this setback, Xie's plan seems to be succeeding. Gartner named Fortinet in its infamous Magic Quadrant as a leader on the UTM market. It's market share for 2006 for this segment was 14,4%. That's better than Cisco, Juniper, SonicWall, Crossbeam and... Checkpoint Software. While a private company and thus not disclosing revenue growth, Fortinet estimated its growth range was close to the mid-30% range in 2007.
In a $967 millions market showing a 42% progression since 2005, this is quite a feat. And there's still room for improvement, as IDC forecasts UTM will account for 50% of all network security spendings by 2011, with a combined yearly growth of 26,2%. 

For now, Fortinet still appears as the market leader according the 2007 end-of-year market analysis, both in revenue and sales. A feat that, should we be allowed to make a bold guess, could mark the company for a major buyout. Letting Ken Xie free to found yet another start-up ?