 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 19, brought to you by Fortinet. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2019. Live from Orlando, Florida, I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris. Peter, it's great to be with you. Our third year co-hosting Accelerate together. Indeed, Lisa. So we moved from, they've moved from Vegas to Orlando, hence we did. So we had a little bit of a longer flight to get here. Just came from the keynote session. We were talking about the loud music, kind of getting the energy going. I appreciated that as part of my caffeination energy this morning, but a lot of numbers shared from Fortinet Accelerate. 4,000 or so attendees here today from 40 different countries. They gave a lot of information about how strong their revenue has been, 1.8 billion, up 20% year on year. Lots of customers added. What were some of the takeaways from you from this morning's keynote session? I think it's, I got three things, I think Lisa. Number one is that you've heard the expression skating to where the puck's going to go. Fortinet is one of those companies that has succeeded in skating to where the puck is going to go. Clearly, cloud is not a architecture or strategy for centralizing computing. It's a strategy for, in a controlled, coherent way, greater distribution of computing, including all the way out to the edge. There's going to be a magnificent number of new kinds of architectures created, but the central feature of all of them is going to be high performance, highly flexible, software-defined networking that has to have security built into it, and Fortinet's at the vanguard of that. The second thing I'd say is that the, we talk a lot about software-defined wide area networking and software-defined networking and software-defined infrastructure, and that's great, but it ultimately has to run on some type of hardware if it's going to work, and one of the advantages of introducing advanced ASICs is that you can boost up the amount of performance that your stuff can run in. And I find it interesting that there's a clear relationship between Fortinet's ability to bring out more powerful hardware and its ability to add additional functionality within its own stack, but also grow the size of its ecosystem. And I think it's going to be very interesting over the next few years to discover where that tension is going to go between having access to more hardware because you've designed it and the whole concept of scale. My guess is that Fortinet's growth and Fortinet's footprint is going to be more than big enough to sustain its hardware so that it can continue to drive that kind of an advantage. And the last thing that I'd say is that the prevalence and centrality of networking within cloud computing ultimately means that there's going to be a broad class of audiences who are going to be paying close attention to it. And in the keynotes this morning, we heard a lot of great talk that was really hitting the network professional and the people that serve that network professional and the security professional. But Fortinet's going to have to expand its conversation out to business people and explain why digital business is inherently a deeply networked structure and also to application developers. Fortinet is talking about how the network and security are going to come together which has a lot of institutional and other implications but ultimately that combination of resources is going to be very attractive to developers in the long run who don't necessarily like security and therefore security has always been a bolt on. So if Fortinet can start attracting developers into that vision and into that fold so the network that combined network security platform becomes more developer friendly we may see some fascinating new classes of applications emerge as a consequence of Fortinet's hardware, market and innovation leadership. One of the things that they talked about this morning was some of the tenants that were discussed at Davos 2019 just 10 weeks ago, they talked about education, ecosystem and technology and then showed a slide, Patrice Perche, the executive senior vice president of sales said, hey, we were talking about this last year, they talked about education and what they're doing to not only address the major skills gap in cybersecurity, what they're doing even to help veterans but from an education perspective rather from an ecosystem perspective this open ecosystem, they talked about this massive expansion of fabric ready partners and technology connector partners as well as of course the technology in which Ken Z, CEO and founder of Fortinet was the speaker at Davos they really talked about sort of hey, last year here we were talking about these three pillars of cybersecurity at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution and look where we are now so they sort of set themselves up as being I wouldn't say predictors of what's happening but certainly at the leading edge and then as you were talking about a minute ago from a competitive perspective talked a lot this morning about where they are positioned in the market against their competitors even down from the number of patents that they have to the number of St. Gartner Magic Quadrants that they've participated in so they clearly are positioning themselves as a leader and from the vibe that I got was a lot of confidence in that competitive positioning. Yeah and I think it's well deserved so you mentioned the skills gap they mentioned, Fortinet mentioned that there's three and a half million more open positions for cybersecurity experts and other people to fulfill it and they're talking about how they're training the NSC's at the rate of about or they're going to have trained 300,000 by the end of the year so they're clearly taking, putting their money where their mouth is on that front. It's interesting that people, all of us tend to talk about AI as a foregone conclusion without recognizing the deep interrelationship between people and technology and how people ultimately will gate the adoption of technology and that's really what's innovations about is how fast you embed it in a business, in a community so that they change their behaviors and so the need for greater cybersecurity numbers of cybersecurity people is going to be a major barrier it's going to be a major constraint on how fast a lot of new technologies get introduced and Fortinet clearly has recognized that as of other network players who are seeing that their total addressable market is going to be shaped strongly in the future by how fast security becomes embedded within the core infrastructure so that more applications, more complex processes, more institutions and businesses can be built in that network. There is one thing I think that we're going to, I think we need to listen to today because the, well, Fortinet has been at the vanguard of a lot of these trends that are having that hardware that opens up additional footprint that they can put more software and software function into there still is a lot of new technology coming in the cloud when we start talking about containers and Kubernetes those are not just going to be technologies that operate at the cluster level they're also going to be embedded down into system software as well so to bring that kind of cloud operating model so that you have, you can just install the software that you need and it's going to be interesting to see how Fortinet over the next few years I don't want to say skinny's up but targets some of its core software functionality so that it becomes more cloud like in how it's managed its implementations how it's updated how fast patches and fixes are handled that's going to be a major source of pressure and a major source of tension in the entire software defined marketplace but especially in the software defined networking marketplace One of the things Kenzie talked about was cloud versus edge and actually said kind of edge will eat the cloud. We have, we live every business lives in this hybrid multi-cloud world with millions of IoT devices and mobile and operational technology that's taking advantage of being connected over IP and from your perspective kind of dig into what Kenzie was talking about with edge eating cloud and companies having to push security out not just I shouldn't say push it out to the edge but as you were saying earlier and they say it needs to be embedded everywhere what are your thoughts on that? Well I think, I would say I had some disagreements with him on some of that but I also think he extended the conversation greatly and the disagreements are mainly kind of nitpicky things so let me explain what I mean by that. The, there's some analysts somewhere some venture capital somewhere that coined the term that the edge is going to eat the cloud and you know that's one of those that's one of those false dichotomies and it's a ridiculous statement there's no reason to say that kind of stuff the edge is going to reshape the cloud the cloud is going to move to the edge the notion of fog computing is ridiculous because you need clarity incredible clarity at the edge and I think that's what Ken was trying to get to the idea that the edge has to be more clear that the same concepts of security the same notions of security discovery, visibility has to be absolutely clear at the edge there can be no fog it must be clear and the cloud is going to move there the cloud operating model is going to move there and networking is absolutely going to be a central feature of how that happens now one of the things that I'm not sure if it was Ken or if it was the pet of products who said it but the notion of the edge becoming defined in part by different zones of trust is I think very very interesting we think at Wikibon we think that there will be this notion of what we call a data zone where we will have edge computing defined by what data needs to be proximate to whatever action is being supported at the edge and it is an action that is the central feature of that but related to that is what trust is required for that action to be competent and by that I mean not only worrying about what resources have access to it but can we actually say that is a competent action that is a trustworthy action that is an that agency that sense of agency is acceptable to the business so this notion of trust as being one of the defining characteristics that differentiates different classes of edge I think is very interesting and very smart and it's going to become one of the key issues that businesses have to think about when they think about their overall edge architectures but to come back to your core point we can call it we can say that the edge is going to going to eat the cloud if we want to I mean who cares I'd rather say that if software is going to eat the world it's going to eat it at the edge and where we put software we need to put trust and we need to put networking that can handle that level of trust and with high performance security in place and I think that's very consistent with what we heard this morning So you brought up AI a minute ago and one of the things that now the keynote is still going on I think there's a panel that's happening right now with their CISO AI is something that we talk about at every event there are many angles to look at AI the good, the bad, the ugly, the in-between I wanted to get your perspective on we talked about the skills gap a minute ago how do you think that companies like Fortinet and other customers in every industry can leverage AI to help mitigate some of the concerns with you mentioned the 3.5 million open positions Well, there's an enormous number of use cases of AI obviously there is AI and machine learning being used to identify patterns of behavior that then can feed a system that has a very, very simple monitor, action, response kind of a interaction kind of a feedback move so that's definitely going to be an important element of how the edge evolves in the future having greater the ability to model more complex environmental issues more complex, you know, intrinsic issues so that you get the right action from some of these devices from some of these sensors from some of these actuators so that's going to be important and even there we still need to make sure that we are appropriately as we talked about defining that trust zone and recognizing that we can't have disconnected security capabilities if we have connected resources and devices the second thing is the whole notion of augmented AI which is the AI being used to limit the number of options that a human being faces as they make a decision so that instead of thinking about AI taking action we instead think of AI or taking action and that's it we think of AI as taking an action limiting the number of options that a person or a group of people face to try to streamline the rate at which the decision and subsequent action could get taken and there too the ability to understand access controls who has visibility into it how we sustain the data how we are able to audit things over time is going to be crucially important now, will that find itself into how networking works? Absolutely because in many network operating centers at least say five, six years ago you'd have a room full of people sitting at computer terminals looking at these enormous screens and watching these events go by and the effort to correlate when there was a problem often took hours and now we can start to see AI being increasingly embedded at the machine learning and other types of algorithms level to try to limit the complexity that a person faces so you can get better response more accurate response and more auditable response to potential problems and Fortinet is clearly taking advantage of that now, the whole FortiGuard labs and their ability to have they've put a lot of devices out there all those devices run very fast they have a little bit of additional performance so they can monitor things a little bit more richly send it back and then do phenomenal analysis on how their customer base is being engaged by good and bad traffic and that leads to Fortinet becoming an active participant not just in an AI level but also at a human being level to help their customers to help shape their customer responses to challenges that are network based and that's a key there that the human interaction because as we know that humans are the biggest security breach starting from basic passwords being one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine well Peter- You shouldn't do that. You know, put an exclamation point at the end you'll be fine. Peter and I have a great day coming ahead we've got guests from Fortinet we've got their CEO Kenzie their CISO Phil Quaid is going to be on Derek Mankey with FortiGuard labs talking about the 100 billion events that they're analyzing and helping their customers to use that data we've got customers from Siemens and some of their partners including one of their newest Alliance partners, Symantec so stick around Peter and I will be covering Fortinet Accelerate 19 all day here from Orlando, Florida for Peter Burris I'm Lisa Martin Thanks for watching theCUBE