ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
The culture in Fortinet
has always been one of
personal accountability
and work from
anywhere. And this
allowed us to transition
to 100% work from
home very easily.
of personal accountability and work from
anywhere. And this allowed us to transition
to 100% work from home very easily. So,
this allowed us to keep all our customers
and partner engagements going to help our
partners continue their Fortinet business.
Secondly, we were in a position, not
only to advise customers but to advise
partners also, on how to transition their
entire workforce to home-working very
quickly. Our solutions provide very high
remote working connections built-in without
licence. This was invaluable across the board
in enacting a reaction plan to lockdown for
both customers and our partners.
And thirdly, we were able to help our
partners build alternatives for customers
as a lot of projects stalled as people and
products couldn’t move around, they couldn’t
get to data centres etc. We helped a lot of
partners, who haven’t embraced public cloud
in a meaningful way yet, transition customer
projects from on-prem to public cloud where
the whole project can be done from start to
finish remotely. And this is thanks to the very
wide availability of Fortinet solutions and
in all of the public cloud platforms, which
was thankfully signalled recently by our
recent award from Microsoft for Commercial
Partner of the Year for Azure.
I think it remains to be seen what the
new longer-term normal will look like. But
Fortinet has succeeded with its partners
through the initial phase. So, we’re very
confident that we will continue together,
whatever the future brings.
Have changing customer
requirements during COVID-19,
such as working from home,
impacted your channel strategy?
For the channel strategy, no, not really.
Our top-level goal is focus – to relentlessly
focus with and on our enterprise partners,
on our customers, as we just talked about.
Certainly the mechanism of that focus
has changed and video calls, like this one,
instead of face-to-face, which certainly
had some bumps along the way for mass
adoption, I think. But the high-level strategy
and plan remains the same and that focus
with our enterprise partners.
What are the nuances and regional
trends you see across the Middle
East, and how does that affect
your approach?
Relationship is certainly important in the
region, which suits my personal style. I’ve
always had authentic and transparent
relationships at the centre of my approach
to everything, and that’s what works at
Fortinet. And so, as it becomes easier to
do face-to-face meetings – I’m certainly
enjoying meeting all of our partners face-toface
and not just on video calls.
On the solution front, the first thing I
see is faster adoption of security in the
OT environment, versus adoption in some
European markets, where I’ve come from.
This plays to Fortinet’s position really well.
We’ve been investing in OT security for
over a decade – long before the current
explosion of interest in demand, meaning
that we’re very mature in our ability to
help customers evolve in this critical area.
So, this means that we’re partnering
heavily across the region with OT vendors
and our own partners that have expertise
in that area.
The second is slower adoption of
public cloud and solutions where data
and management sit in the cloud, such as
most EDR solutions. And again, Fortinet’s
approach is particularly suited here. So,
our aim is to enable the widest flexibility
of hybrid cloud for our customers so they
can move at their own pace and provide
them fully on-prem solutions such as our
EDR solutions – where they want them, and
where those solutions are needed.
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