 Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18, brought to you by Fortinet. Hi, welcome back to Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube. We're excited to be here for our second year. I'm joined by Peter Burris from The Cube as well, and we're very excited to be joined by our next guest, John Bobe, the Vice President of America's Channels at Fortinet. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you, thank you for having us. So, it's exciting for us to be here. I, as a marketer, geek out on taglines. So, I would love for you to kind of tell our viewers strength and numbers as the title of the event. What does that mean? Well, it's really about the depth and breadth of what Fortinet's doing in the marketplace. You know, bringing the security fabric, not only to our customers, but to enable our partner community, right? So, Accelerate is a collection. We have about almost 3,000 attendees here, about 2,300 of those. There are carrier partners, resale partners, managed security service providers, and also our fabric-ready alliance partners, right? So, the security fabric has allowed us to incorporate some additional third-party technologies, right? And it's really, we're creating a really strong culture around integration and openness. Before we get into the technology, let's talk about pivot on that culture for a second. Sure. Because one of the things that was evident from the keynotes this morning that Kenzie talked about was really this long-standing partner-driven culture that Fortinet has. You've recently come back to Fortinet. Tell us about being a boomerang. What excites you about coming back? But also, how has that culture of really being partner-focused and maybe partner-first evolved? Well, the channel-first culture at Fortinet makes my job really easy, right? And the reason that I came back was here with the company for six years. We experienced a tremendous, you know, run of revenue. And to have the opportunity to lead the, you know, the America's Channel Organization is a great privilege. But it really comes from the culture within the company of being a channel leverage and a channel-first company. I think, you know, in Patrice's keynote this morning and Ken's keynote as well, they really talked about the channel program and the channel partners. You know, the partners are the fabric of what we do as an organization, you know, and we're delivering the security fabric to something that they can build a business around. So as you think about what the type of, or the nature of the changes that are taking place in all business, digital business, and as we've heard today, the rapidity with which change is happening in the security world. That, I got to believe, is putting a fair amount of stress on your partners because they have to come up to speed very, very rapidly on new things, even as they demonstrate that they can sustain operational excellence for old things. What is the role that education's playing, or cultivating your partners to a new network, or a new approach to doing things? How is that leading to a better set of capabilities for your customers? Sure, well I think the one change in this digital transformation era is change, right? We're seeing customers consume technologies much differently than they ever have before, and so our partners have to be in a situation to be able to deliver those technologies. We're seeing the threat landscape continue to widen and be very broad in nature, and so existing postures and existing deployments are not necessarily going to be able to protect those customers, and quite frankly, from a partner standpoint, the way that they look at their business and build their business needs to be different today than it was due to the change that digital transformation is driving. So in terms of your sort of symbiosis with the channel, we talked with Phil Quaid just a minute ago. We talked about how are CISOs looking to him to say, how are you guys doing this at Fortinet in terms of security? Tell me about the symbiotic relationship with your partners. What information are they bringing to you from the front lines from the customers, whether it's education, Fed, Sled, healthcare, that is helping to evolve Fortinet's technologies? I mean, at the end of the day, security is a very noisy space right now, right? And we depend upon our partners not only to ensure that our programs and how we go deliver value to them, but also in what the customers are telling them and what they're seeing in the marketplace today. We're really focused on service enablement and the service delivery because the transactional type of business that we've seen in the past is no longer the route to market for success for the broad base channel organizations, right? So we have a responsibility as a company to ensure that our partners have the capabilities to deliver services in ways that customers want to consume. IoT is a marketplace that's been created, right? OT is opportunistic for the bad actors, right? The move of workloads to public clouds and SaaS-based applications. And the fabric is really resonating with those partners in terms of being able to meet those customers' changing needs. And you guys have had to do a partner advisory council. How long has that been going on? And what are some of the things that accept you about it? Yeah, so over 10 years, we've had a partner advisory council. And it's industry leaders that are business owners and business drivers that really kind of keep us honest about what we're doing internally. They have access to our executive staff. They have access to product roadmaps as well. And with the creation of the fabric and what we're doing with our alliance partnerships, they're kind of helping fill some of those holes as to what we're seeing in the marketplace today. I think today we announced 11 additional fabric alliance partners today. Organizations like Phantom for orchestration and automation, right? Integration is truly the new best of breed, but the ability to react when things occur and to orchestrate and to automate those controls are really important. And the company's done a great job and we attribute a lot of that guidance to our partner advisory council. As Fortnett grows and expands its footprint, puts in place new types of arrangements like the CTA and other types of things, its ecosystem continues to expand in a way that Fortnett is moving towards the center, more of a focus, at least a low side within the ecosystem. What does that mean from your ability to get partners to influence partner behavior and customers and get more pull through out of the entire ecosystem? And how's that going to shape the way Fortnett competes, the way Fortnett serves its customers over the next few years? I think simply put, the tailwinds we have behind us, we're on the precipice of $2 billion in revenue, we've got now a line of sight to three and four here pretty quickly. We definitely think that the fabric is going to allow us to continue to scale and grow through that partner community. But quite frankly, I am amazed just in my time here, how partners have embraced and really wrapped a business practice and the service's first business practice around that fabric. So we're really excited about the opportunity that we have at hand. I think the fabric is going to continue to change the game, right? It's not about products, it's about delivering an integrated solution. Speaking of the fabric, I was kind of thinking of pivoting on what you were saying, Peter, about differentiation. When partners have choices of companies to work with, you guys have been in this space for a very long time. But besides the fabric, what are some of the, maybe the other top two differentiators where a partner may be coming into the program and goes, I get it. For, with this partnership with Fortinet, we can go and really revolutionize customers in any industry. You know, we're really unique in the market because we serve from the S&B to the mid-market, to the enterprise and some of the largest service provider brands. And that affords our partner community to be extremely diverse. And we want to be very easy to work with. So I think more than anything, my goal is to be simple and predictable in nature and ensure that we're driving a very margin-rich solution. You know, a lot of companies in the market will be enterprise-focused or mid-market-focused. And so, you know, we're really keen on establishing clear routes to market with our partner community, aligning and investing where they fit, and then taking advantage of some of the even vertical opportunities that the partners present based on those capabilities. We were chatting a little bit earlier about education and that was one of the things I was reading that in some articles that some of your guys did. And it's been a while since I've been in college and it's just, it's so remarkable how, you know, smart classrooms and it's BYOD and how vulnerable school districts are for obvious reasons that we won't go into for political reasons. But even from a security perspective, I'm curious if there's any kind of maybe favorite example that you have of a partner customer through the channel in education that has really been able to facilitate a digital business transformation with the underpinning of security, security transformation. I actually was just in a partner meeting and we were talking about that very topic. And they had established with one of the top five largest school districts in the United States, a fully deployed wireless mesh network that they, once that was deployed, then they were really able to underpin it with, you know, the FortiGate, FortiOS and really be able to deliver the security posture back through that wireless infrastructure. You know, you make a really good point. We're seeing more and more internet connected devices. A lot of those internet connected devices are very low end in terms of their overall price point. And so these organizations are not necessarily pushing out vulnerabilities to it and patches and remediation. And that's why IoT security is so important in that kind of K through 12 example, right? Leveraging FortiOS, connecting to both LAN and wireless LAN capabilities, and it really, that's a great use case of how the fabric can impact a customer. So as you imagine, the role the partners are going to play in the future, will they be more purveyors of hardware, purveyors of software, purveyors of services? How do you think the ecosystem's going to evolve as Fortinet expands its footprint? That's a really good question. And quite frankly, I spend a lot of my time thinking about that, right? I truly feel like we have an obligation and a responsibility to help our partners through this digital transformation into where we think things are going to go. Things are moving towards security as a service. Things are moving towards on demand, pay as you go, consumption modeling, right? And we have to put our partners in a situation to be able to deliver goods and services to our customer base the way they want to buy and make sure that they're driving value and after the transaction. Because selling to the transaction is probably going to be a dying breed. It's really important that partners have the capabilities to install, deploy, and support on the ongoing basis in which is really becoming a best practice in the security space. And one of the other interesting things about digital business is that historically, businesses have been aligned by the arrangement of their assets. So you could look at a transportation company and say, oh, that company is transportation assets or financial services company and say, oh, that company is financial services assets, but digital business starts changing that because when you bring programmability and digital orientation to a lot of these assets, you reduce the specificity of those assets which increases mobility across businesses. How do you think the opportunity of helping partners transform in this digital business way is going to increase the noise or complexity or the interconnectedness and the potential conflicts within partners as they go after, as their expertise and their relationships becomes more fungible? That's a really, I mean, that's a really good point. We deal and we want to ensure that we've got a programmatic way to handle channel conflict, right? I mean, at the end of the day, partner brings us- But also channel opportunity. And channel opportunity, that's right. So it's really about being consistent in how you treat the partner community and having really set rules. But digital transformation, if anything else, the thing that makes Fortinet so unique is we are an engineering company. Security is very complicated. And the good news is that at the heart of what we do is technology. The feedback we continue to get from our partners is that our technology is second to none. So we win on the technology side. And now with the momentum that we're seeing with the Fabric Ready Alliance programs, the momentum that we're seeing in the marketplace and really kind of being prepared for the shift of technology by introducing the Fabric concept, you know, we're really excited about the opportunity for our partners and the role they're going to play in the coming years. So as we kind of, you know, wrap things up here, I'll go back to where we started off with John and talking about the strength in numbers and some things that I wrote down that I think Patrice shared this morning, nearly 18,000 new customers acquired in 2017. That's right. What are your, as the channel chief, what are your hopes and dreams for what that number will look like by the end of 2018? I mean, at the end of the day, I want to be able to drive an enabled channel organization to go take advantage of the tailwinds in the market, right? We want to go continue to drive market share in the SMB, that's going to be partner led. We want to go expand in the fabric, you know, within the mid market. And we want to be very opportunistic in the enterprise to go knock down some of the largest logos. You know, mostly, you know, the opportunity we have in the US alone is really quite significant. And we're really excited to see, you know, as we just exceeded the half a billion dollar mark in Q4 for the first time as a company. And so as we start, you know, planning in future quarters, it's really exciting to be a part of the momentum we have here at Fortinet. And I think the momentum is tangible. You can feel it here. You can hear it behind us in the expo. So, we thank you so much, John, for stopping by the Q. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Absolutely, sharing your insights and how the, I'm feeling another tagline with the fabric of our lives, but I think somebody else beat you guys to it. Cotton, maybe? Anyway, thanks so much, John, for sharing what's going on in the channel. And we wish you a great show. Thank you. Thank you very much. And for my co-host, Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.