 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 19, brought to you by Fortinet. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are at Fortinet Accelerate 2019 in Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris. We've been here all day talking with Fortinet executives, with partners, really understanding the evolution of cybersecurity and how they are helping customers to combat those challenges to be successful. We're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, one of our alumni, John Boe, the VP of North America's channel for Fortinet. John, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me. Great to see you both again. Likewise, so much going on today. Some news coming out. The keynote this morning started with a lot of electricity around Fortinet's industry leadership, product leadership. There was a lot of growth numbers shared. There's also a lot of people here about close to 4,000. Close to 4,000 people. And you saying that a good percentage of that is partners, 40 countries represented. What are some of the things from your perspective that you've observed today in terms of the reaction from the channel to all of this news coming out? Yeah, so first off, the heritage of this event really was a partner conference going back to its infancy. And as Fortinet continues to grow and our customer profile continues to move up market, we've now invited customers. So it's really great, the synergy that we have. We've got a number of partners with their customers coming to meetings and meeting with executives. And so it's really fantastic. Relative to the announcements about the partner program, we've seen really positive feedback. I think the program was introduced about a decade ago and it really was time for a refresh. And so what we've done is we want to bring a program to our partner community that allows them to engage with us and how they see fit. And then we want to build the go to market that's a little bit more in tune with the market that exists here as we're moving into the year 2020 and beyond. So we're really assimilating a reseller, MSSP and cloud as types of partner go to markets and organizing that all underneath the Fortinet partner program on umbrella. We'll also be introducing a consultancy track because we want to ensure that the assets within the network security expert program are available to those consultants that are working with customers on their journey to the cloud for instance or through this digital transformation. And then finally, we're introducing what we're calling competency focus. So as Fortinet continues to grow as a company, there's a number of competencies that we feel if we enable partners appropriately, they're going to be able to benefit from. They're going to build a stronger business around the Fortinet security fabric. So we're going to focus on SD-WAN. We're going to focus on fabric. We're going to focus on data center, operational technologies and then SOC because we do think SOC operations is an area as cybersecurity and the number of tool sets are introduced. It's an area that we need to grow into as a company as well. Lots going on. Lots going on, yes. So as you consider some of the challenges that your partners face, we talked a little bit about this with Patrice. Partners throughout the industry are hurting as they try to transition from a more traditional hardware to whatever is going to be the steady state. That's right. With the cloud and the edge, having such an impact. Education is crucial. You not just get your customers educated about how cybersecurity works, but your partners need to be increasingly educated so that they can find those opportunities, niches, stay in business, help you engage. How's that playing out? My number one initiative as the channel leader is to drive partner competency and preference. Going back to competency, if we can build partner competencies, they're going to build a healthier, more margin-rich business around the security fabric, which then selfishly is going to lead them to delivering more preference around Fortinet. But there's no doubt. It's a changing dynamics. Business models are changing on the fly. We're seeing an evolution of VAR to MSP and MSP to MSSP, and we are laser focused on capitalizing that. Our four to sim technology, for instance, is I really view as a beach head technology for us to go capitalize that MSP market in the mid-market. I think that the evolution of consumption to more of a consumption model away from a transactional acquisition also lends itself to new and innovative programs that need to be delivered. In fact, with our North America distributors in the past six months, we've introduced hardware as a service to position things as an operational expense, which may be more in tune with how customers are purchasing today. And we've introduced four to sim for MSSP. But again, so the evolution of VAR to a service provider can be very capital intensive. And so one of the things that we've done with our hardware as a service and four to sim for MSSP, we've really tried to reduce the cost of the entry point and drive more day one margin opportunity for those partners. Let me build on that if I may, Lisa. So Ken and Mike have done a pretty phenomenal job of steering Fortinet into the future and anticipating some of the big changes that have occurred. You guys therefore have pretty decent visibility into how things are going to play out and are now large enough that you're actually participating in making the future that everybody else is thinking about when you introduce a product, I mean, it takes a period of time for your partners to get educated, to upskill, to really set themselves up to succeed in this dynamic world. Are you introducing educational regimens, competency tests, providing advice and counsel about the new competencies that are going to need in anticipation of some of these, some of the roadmap to the future that you see? Yeah, so two things I'll touch on there is, you know, the NSC program has been, you know, a wildly successful program. What does NSC stand for? Network Security Expert. So it's training courseware for a partner and you got new team members coming on board. The NSC one through three really enables them of how to position Fortinet and what the challenges are in a network in a cybersecurity environment today, with the elements four through eight being more technical. We've seen over 200,000 certifications being adopted globally. And so I think part of the visionary capabilities that Michael and Ken have is they've incorporated the education piece of it. And so, you know, carrying that along. And so as we do introduce new products, it's built into the NSC modules. I'll point to one of the most successful things we did in 2018 was called FastTracks. And so we've basically taken the NSC content and put it into consumable two-hour hands-on technical labs for our partners and customers. You know, we had a goal in 2018 to hit about a thousand, you know, people going through the FastTrack program. We hit over 8,000 people. So we know that there is a thirst for knowledge out there. And the company's done a really good job through the NSC program, the network security expert program, through our network security academy program, and through our FastTracks to drive that necessary enablement. It's very exciting. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's a fantastic time to be at Fortinet. It's a fantastic time to be a Fortinet partner. And I think with the announcements that we made today, we're really trying to set our partners up for success and help them build a all-encompassing, you know, business around the security fabric. It's a very noisy industry out there. There's a lot of point-based solutions that lack the integration. And really, you need an integrated set of solutions in this, you know, expanding digital footprint that customers are faced with. So when we talk about education, and I'm glad that you guys brought that up, that was a big topic. It was a pillar that Ken talked about, that Patrice talked about as well. It was one of the core pillars that was talked about at the World Economic Forum at Davis just a couple of months ago. So as we talk about education and educating your partners, I'd like to kind of flip that and ask, how are your partners educating you on these are the trends and the concerns and the issues that we're seeing in the market today to help influence the direction of Fortinet's technology? Yep, you know, it's funny that you say that. I've been in partner meetings all day today and it's great, I get to spend, I don't think I've ever been this popular and definitely not in high school or college, but in spending time with partners and understanding their challenges, it's good to see that our focus on the competency and preference and providing consumption modeling fits to exactly the challenges that they're faced with because VARS will tell you that the transition from being a reseller to being an MSP can be very, very expensive. And so with Fortinet for MSP and the as-of-service offerings, we're reducing that and so they're resonating to that. The other thing is for the mid-market customer, the security fabric alleviates the need for the cyber skills gap, right? We can't hire fast enough and so by depending upon the broad integrated and automated posture that this Fortinet security fabric allows, it really allows partners and customers to overcome some of the challenges just from a headcount standpoint. And I think that the NSC program also does a very good job of filling that gap as well. So the partner used to mean these are the, for that group of customers who our direct sales organization can't make money on, we will give them to partners or the very, very large, for a very, very large company that's owned by Accenture or owned by Dimension Data or something like that, will work with them and deliver it. And that kind of middle was kind of lost. But even today, that low one, the idea of segmenting purely on the basis of how big they are is problematic because there's a lot of small companies happening because of this digital transformation, they're going to very rapidly grow into some very, very big footprints. So how is that line between what Fortinet does, what the partner does, what the customer does to achieve these outcomes starting to shift? We're going to be introducing an ecosystem-based approach. It's called partner to partner connect. And it is actually to do that very thing. For those partners that may be in the mid-market that need those expertise, we're going to allow partners to create almost a marketplace of service offering so they can fill their gaps and they can build meaningful practices leveraging what Fortinet is doing but also leveraging some of what some of our other partners are doing. We're seeing this immediately done with our distribution partners in North America and we're going to be introducing the partner to partner connect later this year and accessible through our partner portal. And those competencies that are associated with the NSE and the education then become part of those partner brands. Absolutely. Which makes it easy for the partners to be more trustworthy of whatever combinations they put together to serve customers. I'll give you an example. So we're also going to be announcing tomorrow afternoon in our North America breakout session a cloud channel initiative. And so our goal with this cloud channel initiative is to allow partners to build meaningful security and networking businesses in the public cloud. We're going to utilize blueprints for reference architectures. We're going to align with education and certification and then we're going to guide them through enablement to go to market. And so one of the things also we released this week was the NSE 7 for public and private cloud. So again, as we introduce new technologies and we introduce new opportunities we're also aligning that to education as well. So the partners can be self-service because the better job a partner does is developing that competency then the more services rich they're going to be able to deliver to the end customer themselves. What is your expectations in terms of FY19? I know it was the 20% year on your growth that Fortinet as a company achieved last year. I imagine a good amount of that was driven and influenced by the channel but as this momentum continues to grow as we saw this morning and we've heard throughout the show today what are some of your expectations about growing the number of partners in the programs that you talked about like by the end of this year? Yes, we recognize, first of all we appreciate our partner so much and we want to ensure that we're enabling their business but we're absolutely in active recruitment mode. We're currently going through recruitment and reactivation campaigns with partners that we want or maybe have done business with us before. We see we're coming off of a quarter in which we set a record for the most deal registrations and so that's really the metric in which we look for partner impact. They bring us an opportunity, we give them additional margin and we protect them. So Q1, fiscal Q1 for us was our largest deal registration quarter we've ever had and in 2018 we saw a 52% increase and closed opportunities through our deal registration program. So the impact of the North America channel is absolutely being felt and we're really excited about the new partner program and what it's going to allow us to do as we expand more into the MSP market, more into the cloud market and hopefully go enable that whole consultancy layer that's out there as well as to help customers on their journey. So in terms of your session tomorrow transforming your profitability with Fortinet's TaylorMade programs, you mentioned some of the new announcements. What are the top three takeaways that attendees from that session are going to walk away with? Well, it's going to be, we want to drive partner initiated revenue and we want to do that through competency development, through white space account penetration and through meaningful investments that allow our partners to scale their business. Lollimomentum, John, thank you so much for visiting with Peter and me on theCUBE this afternoon. We can't wait to hear what great news you have next year. I look forward to it. Thank you both. Excellent, our pleasure. For Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.