 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit. Brought to you by Fortinet. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Fortinet Championship, the PGA2R kickoff to the 2021 2022 FedEx Regular Season Cup. And this is so exciting to be here with Fortinet, to be at an in-person event and to be talking about a very important topic of cybersecurity. One of our alumni is back with me, Sandra Wheatley is here, the SVP of Marketing, Threat Intelligence and Influencer Communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you. You too, Lisa, thank you for having me. This is a great event. Yeah, it's awesome, yeah. Great to be outdoors, great to see people again. Absolutely. And great for Fortinet for being one of the first to come back to in-person events. One of the things I would love to understand is here we are at the PGA2R. What's the relationship with Fortinet and the PGA2R? Well, first of all, I think the PGA2R is an amazing brand. You just have to look around here and it's extremely exciting. But beyond the brand, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA2R and Fortinet CSR initiatives, particularly around STEM, diversity inclusion, as well as veterans reskilling. And so some of the proceeds from the Fortinet championship will go to benefit local non-profits and the local community. So that's something we're very excited about overall. Is this a new partnership? It is a new partnership and we will be the Fortinet championship sponsor for about the next five years. So we're looking forward to developing this partnership and this relationship and benefiting a lot of non-profits in the future. Excellent, that's a great cause. One of the things, when you and I last saw each other by Zoom earlier in the summer, we were talking about the cybersecurity skills gap and it's in its fifth consecutive year and you had said some good news on the front was that data show that instead of meeting four million professionals to fill that gap, it's down to three. And now there's even better news coming from Fortinet. Talk to me about the pledge that you just announced to train one million people in the next five years. Absolutely, yeah, we're very excited about this. Fortinet has been focused on reducing the skills gap for many years now. It continues to be one of the biggest issues for cybersecurity leaders. If you think about it, we still need about 3.1 million professionals to come into the industry. We have made progress, but the need is growing at about 400,000 a year. So it's something that public and private partnerships need to tackle. So last week, we did announce that we are committed to training a million professionals over the next five years. We're very excited about that. We're tackling this problem in many, many ways. And this really helps our customers and our partners. If you really think about it, in addition to the lack of skills, they're really tackling a cybersecurity surface that's constantly changing. In our most recent FortiGuard Threat Report, we saw that ransomware alone went up 10 times over the last year. So it's something that we all have to focus on going forward, and this is our way of helping the industry overall. It's a huge opportunity. I had the opportunity several times to speak with Derek Menke and John Madison over the summer and just looking at what happened in the first half of the Threat landscape. We spoke last year, looking at the second half, and ransomware is a service, the amount of money that's involved in that. The fact that we are in this, as FortiNet says, this work from anywhere environment, which is probably going to be somewhat persistent with the attack surface expanding devices on corporate networks out of the home, there's a huge opportunity for people to get educated, trained, and have a great job in cybersecurity. Absolutely, I like to say there's no job security like cybersecurity, and it is. I mean, I've only been in this industry about, I'm coming up on six years, and it's definitely the most dynamic industry of all of the IT areas that I've worked in. The opportunities are endless, which is why it's a little bit frustrating to see this big gap in skills, particularly around the area of women and minorities. Women make up about 20%, and minorities are even less, maybe about 3%. And so this is a huge focus of ours. And so through our training advancement agenda, our TAA initiative, we have several different pillars to attack this problem. And at the core of that is our network security expert training, or NSE training, and certification program. We made that freely available to everybody at the beginning of COVID. It was so successful. At one point we were seeing someone register every five minutes, and that was so successful, we extended that indefinitely. And so to date, we've had about almost 700,000 certifications. So it's just an amazing program. The other pillars are our security academy program, where we partner with nonprofits in academia to train young students. And we have something like 419 academies in 88 countries. And then the other area that's very important to us is our veterans program. We have about 250,000 veterans every year transfer out of the service, looking for other jobs in the private sector. And so not only do we provide our training free, but we do resume building, mentoring, all of these types of initiatives. And we've trained about 2,000 veterans and spouses. And about 350 of those have successfully got jobs. So that's something we'll continue to focus on. That's such a great effort as the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran that really just hits me right in the heart. But it's something that you guys have been dedicated for. This isn't something new. This isn't something that is coming out of a result of the recent executive order from the Biden administration. Fortinet has been focused on training and helping to close that gap for a while. That's exactly true. While we made the commitment to train a million people on the heels of the Biden administration at Cypress Security Summit about two weeks ago, we have been focused on this for many years. And actually a lot of the global companies that were part of that summit happened to be partners on this initiative with us. For example, we work with the World Economic Forum, IBM and Salesforce offer our NSC training on their training platforms. And this is an area that we think it's really important and we'll continue to partner with larger organizations over time. We're also working with a lot of universities, both in the Bay Area, local like Berkeley and Stanford and others, to train more people. So it's definitely a big commitment for us and has been for many years. It'll be exciting to see over the next few years the results of this program, which I'm sure will be successful. Talk to me a little bit about this event here. Fortinet is 100% partner driven company, 300 or so, more than 300 or so partners and customers here. Tell me a little bit about what some of the interesting topics are that are going to be discussed today. Sure, yeah, so we're delighted to bring our partners and customers together. They will be discussing some of the latest innovations in cybersecurity as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. We are seeing, you know, during COVID, we saw a lot of change with regards to cybersecurity, especially with remote working. So we'll discuss our partnership with Linksys that we just announced. We'll also be talking about some of the emerging technologies like CTNA, 5G, SASE, cloud, and really, you know, understanding how we can best help protect our customers and our partners. So it's very exciting. We have, in addition to our technology summit, we have a technology exhibition here with many of our big sponsors and partners. So it's definitely going to be a lot of dynamic conversation over the next few days. We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. That's just an understatement, but one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago, and we're all feeling this, is when we all had to shift to work from home, and here we are using corporate devices on home networks, we're using more devices, the edge is expanding, and that became a huge security challenge for enterprises to figure out how do we secure this? Because for some percentage, and I think John Madison mentioned a few months ago to me, at least 25% will probably stay remote. Enterprises have to figure out how to keep their data secure as people are often the weakest link. Tell me about what you guys announced with Linksys that will help facilitate that. Well, we're announcing an enterprise-grade security offering for people working remotely, and the nice thing about this offering is it's very easy to set up and implement, so consumers and others can easily set this up. It also provides a dashboard for the enterprise IT organization they can see who's on the network devices, everything else, so this should really help because we did see a big increase in attacks, really targeting remote workers as cyber criminals tried to use the home as a foothold into the enterprise. So we're very excited about this partnership and definitely see big demand for this going forward. What can you tell me about the go-to market for that, and where can enterprises and people get it? Well, we'll be, we're still working through that, and I know you'll talk with John later on, he'll have more details on that, but definitely we'll be targeting both of our different sets of customers and the channel for this, and I definitely think this is something that will, it's something that enterprises are definitely looking for, and there'll be more to come on this over the next few months. It's so needed, the threat landscape just exploded last year, and it's, suddenly you're home, maybe your kids are home, your spouse is working, you're distracted, ransomware, fishing emails, so legitimate, but a need for what you're doing with Linksys is absolutely essential these days. Yeah, these threats are so sophisticated, they're really difficult, and the other thing we did, in addition to Linksys was, as we got into COVID, we saw that the most successful organizations were really using this as an opportunity to invest with the long-term in cybersecurity. We also saw that, and this continues to be the case that the insider threat continues to be one of the biggest challenges, where an employee will accidentally hit on a fishing email, so we did roll out an InfoSec awareness training, and we made that free for all of our customers and partners, so we're trying to do everything we can to really help our customers through this demanding time. Right, what are some of the feedback that you're hearing from customers? I'm sure they're very appreciative of the education, the training, the focus effort from Fortinet. Absolutely, it's definitely huge, and more and more we're seeing partners who want to work with us and collaborate with us on these initiatives, or have had a really positive response from some of the companies that I mentioned earlier, some of the big global names, and we're very excited about that, so we feel like we have some key initiatives and pillars, and we'll continue to expand on those and bring more partners to work with us over time. Expansion as the business is growing amazingly well, tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, I think in our last quarter we announced our largest billing's growth for many, many years, and so Fortinet, we've been very fortunate over the last few years has continued to grow faster than the market. We now have half a million customers, and I think our platform approach to security is really being adopted heavily, and we continue to see a lot of momentum, especially around our solutions like SD-WAN. I think we're the only vendor who provides security and SD-WAN in one appliance, and so that's been a key differentiator for us. The other thing that's increasingly important, especially with the rollout of 5G is performance, and Fortinet from the very beginning created its own customized A6 or SPU, which really provides the best performance and security compute ratings in the industry. So all of this is really helping us with our growth, and we're very excited about the opportunities ahead. And last question on that front, what are some of the things that you're excited about as we wrap up 2021 calendar year and go into 2022? Well, this has been a very exciting year for Fortinet, and I think we're in a great position to take advantage of many of the different growth areas we're seeing in this new and changing space, and we're all on board and ready to take advantage of those opportunities and really fire ahead. Fire ahead, I like that, Sandra. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the commitment, the longstanding commitment that Fortinet has to training everybody from all ages, academia, veterans, to help close that cybersecurity skills gap, and such an interesting time that we've had. There's so much opportunity, and it's great to see how committed you are to helping provide those opportunities to people of all ages, races, you name it. Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. Likewise, for Sandra Wheatley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at the Fortinet Championship Security Summit.