Fortinet will next month release its new unified threat management (UTM) security appliance, FortiGate 310B solution, designed to offer greater flexibility and more security options to the mid-size enterprise space.
Jason Wright, senior product marketing manager at Fortinet, said UTM helps protect users by accelerating security inspection modules by using a single standalone appliance. Fortinet’s new FortiGate 310B solution, he said, consolidates several technologies and security services such as firewall, VPN (virtual private network), IPS (intrusion prevention systems), anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware and Web filtering and traffic monitoring all into a single box. By offering this solution to mid-size businesses, Wright said partners only need to deploy and install one product, and work with one vendor, which in turn simplifies the overall sales cycle process for them.
“We have low-end devices for remote and small offices,” Wright said. “We also have high-end large enterprise devices with more capabilities. Our new solution for mid-range offices offers better and faster performance over more ports and throughput.”
Jon Crotty, security research analyst at IDC, said the UTM industry has become a very competitive and hot market right now. Fortinet, he mentions, was noted by IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker last year as being the top vendor in UTM revenue with $176 million. Its next closest competitors were SonicWALL, coming in at $125 million, followed then by Cisco, which achieved $120 million in total revenue last year.
“The UTM market in general has seen a lot of success in the SMB space,” Crotty said. “This is a sweet spot for Fortinet’s competitors who are trying to gain market share because Fortinet is a strong force in this space. With FortiGate 310B, Fortinet is keeping the price down and is improving the performance to kill more birds with one stone. People don’t want to have to manage multiple boxes.”
Wright relates Fortinet’s new UTM solution to unified communications (UC) practices and says when it comes to VoIP technology, partners can bring FortiGate 310B to the table.
“Security inspection over VoIP is very important,” Wright said. “What usually happens is the newer the application and technology, the more risk is associated with it. UTM helps to prevent disruptions in traffic flow and is an opportunity for partners in this space,” he added.
Wright says smaller businesses will appreciate that FortiGate 310B will also allow them to segment security bits in their internal network to offer users increased security protection. This capability, he adds, would work especially well in vertical sectors in the Canadian market such as higher education, where he says the network can be segregated and secured to permit certain access.
From a throughput perspective, Wright said the FortiGate 310B base model comes with 8 Gbps of firewall throughput and its VPN throughput runs at speeds of 6Gbps. Partners, he said, can also sell AMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) expansion modules to go along with the solution to function at faster speeds and to add on additional ports to the base model, which comes available with 10 ports.
The ability to increase the number of ports on the appliance, Wright said, provides mid-sized businesses with an easier and more cost-effective option to scale to meet their business needs.
“FortiGate 310B is designed to be a very sellable product,” Wright said. “By doing things like internal security segmentation, the channel doesn’t have to work as hard to sell the products since our products are fairly straight-forward. The products pretty much sell themselves and in fact, we’ve already had some customers calling our partners asking how to get a hold of the product,” he added.
The starting price for the FortiGate 310B base model is listed at $6,995 U.S. and will be available to the channel beginning next month.