Fortinet targets double-digit growth for Malaysian business
Financial Daily, The Edge - 24 September 2007
KUALA LUMPUR: US network security firm Fortinet Inc is targeting a double-digit growth for its Malaysian business over the next year after enjoying four consecutive years of 30% year-on-year (y-o-y) growth.
In a recent interview with The Edge Financial Daily, Benjamin Teh, Fortinet’s sales director for South Asia, said that the company had enjoyed an annual growth of 30% since it set up operations in Malaysia back in 2003.
Teh expects most of this growth to come from its existing customer base, the majority of which are large corporations and the public sector, followed by small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).
“About 65% of our Malaysian customers comprise large corporations and the public sector and the remaining 35% SMBs,” Teh said, adding that the Malaysian business contributed about 30% of the firm’s Southeast Asian revenues.
Elaborating on Fortinet’s plans for the Malaysian market, Teh said one of the segments the company wanted to pay more attention to was telco sector.
“We could do a lot more with telcos; we are already working with two of the telcos, and we still have scope for growth (in this segment),” he said, adding that the company planned to introduce its mobile security solutions under its FortiClient Mobile banner to telcos here.
As for the SMB segment, the company plans to maintain its existing strategy. “If we’re successful in the enterprise segment, the SME market will follow,” Teh said, adding that the company wanted to grow its existing distributor / reseller network of 40 in Malaysia via a new partnership programme.
He did not share details of the programme, as it is still too early. However, he said that the programme should be implemented in the Southeast Asian region within the span of a year.
Teh also claimed that Fortinet is currently the market leader for unified threat management (UTM) solutions in Malaysia, serving segments that include financial institutions, telecommunications operators, educational institutions and government agencies.
UTM is a concept describing a security product that tackles multiple security threats, often incorporating a firewall, antivirus software, content filtering and a spam filter in a single package.
Fortinet, whose competitors include Secure Computing Corporation and Symantec, was ranked by research firm International Data Corporation in June as the number one in terms of worldwide UTM revenue.
Meanwhile, Fortinet was recently named a quadrant leader in Gartner Inc’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewall Magic Quadrant, 2H07 report. According to the global research firm, the leading vendors “provide a path to more inspection and blocking capabilities at higher speeds and at lower price points.”
Commenting on the firm’s position in the quadrant, Fortinet founder, president and chief executive officer Ken Xie said in a statement: “We consider our placement in the leaders quadrant by Gartner a testament to our success in meeting the unique needs of large enterprises as well as the advanced network firewall capabilities found in our multi-threat security systems.”
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace depicting the research firm’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for the marketplace.
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