Fortinet vs Others – Why Fortinet Prevails

Fortinet is a security vendor based in California. It offers FortiGate Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance models aimed at the small and midsize market. The security product portfolio, including tokens and host agents (FortiClient), is deisgned to appeal to Value Added Resellers as the route to Small Medium Business (SMB) sales. With two new models in 2012 (FortiGate-60D and FortiGate-100D), Fortinet continues to rely on its custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) architecture to provide a high price/performance ratio. The fifth major version of Fortinet’s OS brought a new set of features aimed at managing phones and tablets, trying to further expand the scope of UTM and to pressure competitors with advanced features.

Gartner Reports

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for UTM 2013
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for UTM 2012

Fortinet

+ Continues to have the highest visibility of UTM providers among clients, and is most frequently mentioned by vendors as a significant SMB competitive threat.
+ Designs and builds its own ASIC (FortiASIC), and uses little OEM software compared to most UTM vendors. Thus, providing a very aggressive price to performance proposition, which is important to SMBs that typically have limited security budgets.
+ Has a very large Research and Development team. Is viewed as setting the cadence in the UTM market, driving its compeititors to react.
+ Has a strong channel presence and provides local support in numerous countries.
+ Consistent leader in the marketplace, based on Gartner Magic Quadrant for UTM over the years.

Checkpoint

– Expensive
– Has 30 different software blades. Having so many options creates a overly complex pricing scheme.

Dell Sonicwall

– Surveys have shown that vendors often replace Dell Sonicwall.
– Gartner views Dell’s efforts to move towards the enterprise market as alienating the SMBs.

Juniper

– Road map and product strategies are not focused on SMBs.
– Has a limited dedicated channel focused on the UTM market.

WatchGuard

– Offers a large number of products and services which are similar. This is confusing to partners and buyers.
– Scored low as a significant UTM competitive threat by the vendors surveyed.