Stiennon Interviews Fortinet CTO Michael Xie

July 13, 2009 by ADMIN

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By Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst, IT-Harvest

I was somewhat surprised by a position taken by Gartner at this past week’s Security Summit at the Gaylord in Washington DC.

My surprise started with a blog post by Adam Hils and responses to my comments by Greg Young.

From Gartner’s viewpoint which is admittedly from the perspective of late adapters, the “Next Generation Firewall” incorporates IPS into the traditional stateful inspection firewall.

That is a pretty low bar to set at this time.

My own involvement in 2003 was to push the firewall vendors to do “deep packet inspection”.

I even took all of the vendors out of the Leader’s Quadrant of the Gartner Enterprise Firewall Magic Quadrant (which I would reproduce here but the Gartner IP Police would be all over me!)

Not until Netscreen incorporated the IPS technology of OneSecure did I put a vendor back in to the Leader’s Quadrant.

Shortly after leaving Gartner I used this blog to publish my own vision of where network security was going. That was my concept of Secure Network Fabric.

One company, Fortinet, was so inline with my own predictions for the future of gateway security that I accepted a role there. I am on my own again but, as you will see from this interview with one of its founders, Fortinet is on to the right approach.

Michael Xie is CTO of Fortinet and drives all of their development of true “Next Generation” security appliances. Hear him describe his views on speeds and feeds, routing and switching in the firewall, and cost per secure megabit.

If you are not familiar with Fortinet you should be. They are the largest private security vendor and on my short list of security companies likely to file for an IPO in 2009.

Richard Stiennon, security expert and industry analyst, is known for shaking up the industry and providing actionable guidance to vendors and end users. He recently re-launched the security blog ThreatChaos.com and is the founder of IT-Harvest, an independent analyst firm that researches the 1,200 IT security vendors. He was Chief Marketing Officer for Fortinet, Inc. the leading UTM vendor. Prior to that he was VP Threat Research at Webroot Software. Before Webroot, Mr. Stiennon was VP Research at Gartner Inc. where he covered security topics including firewalls, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, security consulting, and managed security services for the Security and Privacy group. He is a holder of Gartner’s Thought Leadership award and was named “One of the 50 most powerful people in Networking” by NetworkWorld Magazine.

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