 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here's your host, Lisa Martin. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are SiliconANGLE's flagship live streaming program where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we bring it right to you. We are in beautiful Las Vegas with Fortinet. Today, or this week, is their Accelerate 2017 event, and we've been excited to be chatting with a lot of their folks and technology partners today. We are joined by two gentlemen from Fortinet. First, we have John Madison. You are the Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions. Indeed. Hey John, thanks for joining us. We've got Joe Secor, who is the Vice President of America's Channel. Thanks, Lisa. So guys, a lot of exciting stuff going on today. I just wanted to give the viewers here, we haven't had a chance to meet you guys yet. What you're both doing. John, you have a veteran. You are a veteran of over 20 years of experience in telecom, at least 20 in IT infrastructure, security, industries. You've lived in Europe and Asia and the US have worked in those. Joe, you oversee quite a big channel of over 7,400 America's partners and the entire channel strategy. So you guys are kind of busy. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Joe, you're probably pretty proud of this. You were named in 2015 by CRN as one of the 50 most influential channel chiefs. Yes, I was. Did you get like a button or a hat? No, I think it's a t-shirt. Oh, t-shirt, absolutely. Outstanding. So speaking of t-shirts, I have no segue there. Wanted to understand, we've been talking to a lot of your folks today, as I mentioned, we talked to your CEO who was talking about this third generation of security and kind of where we are today with that. And then we talked to Drew, the CFO, who was really talking about the criticalness of trusting data. With the announcement today, maybe John, I'll throw this to you, the announcement today of the new products and technologies, how are they going to continue to facilitate or enable your customers, direct or indirect, to be able to trust their data? Yeah, so we announced the fabric last year. Today we announced our operating system 5.6, which is an extension of the fabric. We also announced something called intent-based network security, which is the next generation of network security that Ken Zee, our founder, talks about. And then we also announced the third thing is our new security operation solution, which brings together several products for the InfoSec world. So I think all of these come together to make sure that we're continuing that effort to make sure our customers are safer, that they can integrate the fabric into their infrastructure, and obviously that's very important to their brand. That was going to be one of the things I was going to talk about is, are you seeing that you're making a difference in the brand of a customer? We were talking before we started today, and a lot of you are familiar with some of the big breaches. I mean, breaches are a common daily occurrence, but when they start happening in brands that the consumers know who aren't in technology becomes a suddenly can I trust this particular brand or I normally go in and buy household products? So it sounds like the announcements today are really next generation leading you guys to continue to be able to deliver not just that comfort level that your customers need in terms of we can trust our data, but also helping them improve their brand so that their customers trust their brand. Exactly, and so the fabric is expanded in that, we've expanded it across multiple now attack vectors. So what used to be really focused on the core network, we can now cover email, we can now cover the web endpoint, and also you can see some of our partners around here, we've also expanded our fabric ready. So the fabric has several APIs, multiple APIs that allow different partners to connect into it. And so we haven't announced it totally yet, but we've got six new partners, some big companies like Cisco and HPE actually joining our fabric ready program to be part of the fabric so we can cover the entire infrastructure of any company. Fantastic, so speaking, we'll get to that in a minute, but one of the topics that's also come up today is we're as we've seen the evolution of security from perimeter based security in the 90s to web security, cloud security, moving towards 2020 and the fact that it's 2017, a little scary, we're pretty close to that and we're seeing this explosion and proliferation of mobile devices, of IoT devices, a lot of lack of security there. As we get to that point, one of the other themes that we're hearing a lot about here today is that there is a gap in terms of resources. What is PortaNet doing to help bridge that gap that your customers are facing when it comes to specifically network security programs? So one of the programs we launched again a couple of years ago was the network security expert program, NSE. And in 2016, we had over 30,000 certificates issued on NSE, it's probably one of the largest security programs, because one of the big issues for customers and our partners is just the skills gap, cyber security, we also actually use a lot of those materials and assets and give them to universities who are starting to do their programs as well. And so that's really essential for our partners to be trained at the lowest level in terms of the basics but also we've had about 40 people take part in our network security eight architecture program. You can see them, these are the pins actually we have which are NSE one to seven, but the NSEA to the red ones. And there's about 40 now what we call security solution architects who can go into companies and look at their complete infrastructure and give them an update in terms of security. Excellent, so I want to touch on the channel for a moment, so Ken talked about the security fabric architecture. You mentioned that it was launched last year. What has been the reaction of the channel? No, it's been absolutely great. It's about mid-year last year is when we announced that embraced by the channel in fact CRN named it the security product of the year for 2016. So very proud of that. And that's actually the feedback of the channel partners. It resonates, it's creating new opportunities for our partners, combine that with the training that John just talked about. I mean, they're armed to really just go out there and help solve all those end user programs. What are some of the main pain points that you're hearing through the channel that customers are experiencing as we start to see, you know, big attacks that become more and more prevalent, the Dyn attack recently, DDOS being common types of attacks, as more and more things like critical infrastructures are becoming plugged into corporate networks and more mobile and more IoT, what are some of the pain points that your customers are experiencing and how are they looking to resolve and mitigate some of the challenges they have leveraging the security fabric architecture? Sure, well the attacks are going to happen, right? We know they're going to happen. It's how fast can you react to those attacks? And the fabric actually enarms our partners to just have intelligence on what is actionable, what's not actionable. So we're trying to automate that, some of the future stuff that we're going to be doing later in the year is going to even enable them more. But it's all about simplifying it for our partners to react to what needs to be reacted to. Are you seeing from an industry perspective, we were talking with Derek Mankey, about healthcare being really at the top of the at risk from an industry perspective. But in the general session today, there was a CISO panel and there was Verizon was there, Levi's was there, as well as Lazard. We saw Telefonica throughout the event today, the Steelers. Are you seeing through the channel, and maybe this is a question for both of you, are you seeing particular industries at more risk coming to you through your customers' needs, or is it fairly agnostic from a security perspective? Yeah, I think on the channel side, obviously everyone's at risk, right? So I think it's the value of those, of the incidences is really more highlighted. So when Derek talks about healthcare, for example, dealing with people's lives is important, and along with your health records. So that's much more valuable than say, at the Steelers, right? Not being able to get on the guest Wi-Fi. So I think everyone's at risk. All of our channel partners have different verticals that they go after, and it's all the same. It really is. Yeah, I would say the risk is pretty broad across every vertical. I mean, yes, healthcare, the healthcare records, they're extremely valuable, but also the financial industry. You've also got industrial control systems, for example. You've also got retail, and so I think every vertical, every industry is taking security very seriously. And back to your previous question about, how's the fabric helping partners, I think previously they had to kind of stitch together a lot of point solutions themselves. I think with the fabric, it gives them an architectural framework. It could be mostly 40 net gear. It could be 40 net, plus some of their other partners. It helps them put that in place across the entire infrastructure. You bring up a good point, John, that was brought up a number of times today, and that is the role of the CISO now being, you know, and kind of think, is that guy or girl at the lead of the digital army that person is inheriting, we were seeing a couple of different reports, north of 25 different security technology, really kind of a patchwork environment, in that kind of situation where now security is a board level conversation, how is Fortinet direct and through the channel helping that CISO, is that a key buyer for you that you're helping to figure out, I've got this patchwork here, how do I build it into a fabric or a fabric around it? Yeah, what we've seen in the, what I've experienced in the last 10 plus years in security is I'd often go into a room and there'll be the network security people on one side of the table and the security people on the other side of the table with the CISO and the CIO. And I think that gradually over the last three years I've seen more cooperation, so now when we have briefings with customers and partners, you'll see both teams together. You'll see a new role inside customers called the security architect that's looking holistically longer term over the security architecture. And one of our announcements today around the security operations center is to just do that, bring together the SOC, the infosec world, together with the network security world. We did a demo today on stage showing that, bringing together a 40 SIM or 40 Analyzer with our fabric to bring those two worlds together because as Joe says, you know, there's a report done by Verizon on the breach report that says, within 60 seconds you can be compromised. You've got basically 60 seconds to stop that threat and so speed is very important. So giving our partners this ability to bring together a fabric with 40 net gear, with our partners gear, provides very fast protection and is very important. Excellent. One of the things too that I found interesting today was learning about what 40 Guard Labs is doing and I read over the weekend what Derek Mankey's team published the 2017 predictions really quite frightening and he was on the show earlier in saying that they're already seeing a number of these things already in play, that how much more intelligent malware is getting and the pervasiveness of the threats there. How are some of the new technologies announced today be enhancing or what Fortalabs is doing from a threat intelligence perspective? Is that something that was part of? That's a really important area going forward. I think the vendor community needs to do better in sharing the threat intelligence. I think today is in pockets but I think long term it's absolutely essential that threat intelligence gets shared across the whole community because with some of the new threats coming and the machine to machine threats, the scale and the speed is going to be even more. We saw the Dynatac last year on DDoS. That's going to be small compared to some things coming up. So I think long term, the fabric across the infrastructure and then the security vendors getting together and sharing that threat intelligence so you've got a bigger view of the attack surface is absolutely essential to stop the new type of threats. Exactly and as that attack surface is growing by the day. So last question before we wrap up here, giving you guys both a chance to answer. At the beginning of your fiscal year here we are in January, what are you most excited about for the channel in 2017, for example? Sure, opportunity, right? For our channel partners, we've got probably one of the strongest channel partners, just the overall. We're aligning, realigning with our field team. So just the resources that all of these partners have. I think the opportunity is great, the market's great. Like you said, you open up anything now and you see, okay, it's been infiltrated, it's been hacked. So I think we're all going to have a really good 2017. Fantastic, John, what about you? What are you most excited for? I was most excited about this interview actually. That's what I was looking for. Wow, fantastic. We'll close it. Someone said I had to save it. No, I think it's obviously rolling out more of our technology, integrators are more of our partners, training more of our partners and helping them with their customers. Fantastic, well the buzz and the momentum here and also the passion for both yourselves and your roles and your peers and your colleagues is really palpable. So I want to thank you both for joining us on theCUBE today. Thank you. And we wish you the best of luck at the rest of the event. Thanks Lisa. All right, for John and Joe, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE, but stick around, we'll be right back.