 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Accelerate 18, brought to you by Fortinet. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin here in Las Vegas with my co-host Peter Burrs, and we're excited to welcome a CUBE alumni back to theCUBE. Please welcome Eric Cole, the VP of Advanced Solutions from Ingram Micro. Welcome back. Thank you, thanks for having me back. I'm excited to be here. Yes, we're very excited. So tell us what's new. We talked to you last year at this event. What's new at Ingram? Tell us about your role there and the things that are all exciting, Ingram Micro. Yeah, brand new for me. I'm in my 20th year at Ingram Micro. I lead our security practice for Ingram Micro US, and I have responsibility for sales, vendor management, strategy, and execution on behalf of our manufacturer partners. It's an ever-evolving space. It's such a great space to be in. I love watching the news every day. You know there's going to be some big logo, but just as much fun as I have watching those, it's some of these small breaches that you don't hear about. And it's just fascinating. So much more exciting than virtualization. Isn't it? Some might argue with that. So tell us about the partnership that you guys have with Fortinet. How has that evolved over your time? So I've been at Ingram for 10 and I've been working with Fortinet for, I'm sorry, I've been at Ingram for 20 and been with Fortinet for over 10, back to when we signed the contract together. Just a very great partnership. They were our security partner of the year last year. Good friends, excited to see John Bove back leading channels, back to Fortinet. And you know we both invest in each other's success. And so I think that's pretty unique. Huge investment for them here. Having an event like this, not every company does it, but to bring everybody together where you can have security conversations, get on the same page, it's extremely valuable. Huge investment and we're proud to be a sponsor. I'd love to chat about a little bit of the evolution that you've seen at Fortinet in the last 10 years. As we look at, you mentioned breaches. I mean, there were some very notable things that happened in 2017. How have you seen the evolution from them on a security transformation standpoint as it relates to your customers and digital transformation? Yeah, so I mean, it's something that we see every day from, as you know, we sell to and through partners, but one thing obviously is their breadth of solutions has expanded. But also things that partners are asking us today is how is this technology being consumed? And in the face of digital transformation, that's a huge value point because ultimately we want to help our partners to architect, recommend the right technology to solve that business problem. And then how do you want to consume it? How does your client want to consume that? So I think that's one of the biggest trends that we're seeing right now. So as you think about where you've come from to where you are, and we'll talk a little bit about where you think it might go, what were the stories you told about security 10 years ago? And how are they different from the stories you're telling about security today? I would say it's changed from my perspective because at Ingram, we have never ever been a services company like we are today. And so what I mean by that is we wrap our services, partner services around the Fortinet solution to make it stronger. 10 years ago, I would say we were living more in the traditional distribution role of, hey, how do we get a box from here to there? Certainly channel enablement, we've been doing that for a long time, but our offering of services to help drive demand is incredibly strong. We work with Fortinet, for example, on their threat assessment program, and we have an engineer that can go and help our partners understand to do that. It's a huge partner ecosystem, and so we've got to help them with all those channel enablement efforts. What are some of the biggest security challenges that you're hearing, say in the last year or so, through the channel that your partnership with Fortinet can help address? You know, it's all around complexity, and as you have likely heard, the shortage of folks that can get out and do some of these services implementations. There's incredibly high demand for services. We're serving a channel ecosystem of roughly 12,000 companies that are buying security technology from us, all with varying degrees of capability, and so we've really got to help them understand, hey, how can we help you deploy these services, et cetera? So as you imagine then, the steps associated with helping the customer, the roles and relationships between Fortinet, Ingram, and your partners also must be evolving. So how is, as a person responsible for ensuring that that stays bound together in a coherent way for customers, how are you seeing that changing? Well, you know, look, it's a three-legged stool, you know, it's us, it's Fortinet, and it's our partner community, and we're reliant on each other to go and be successful in the market. Look, we couldn't be as great as we are working with our Fortinet channel ecosystem if we didn't have the support of Fortinet, the investments they make, the team that they have wrapped around our business, the team we've put in place wrapped around their business. So that's kind of what I'm seeing there. They shared a lot of momentum, not only in the keynotes this morning, but also a number of the guests that we've had on the show today, in terms of what Fortinet achieved last year, 1.8 billion and billing, nearly 18,000 new customers acquired, a lot of momentum, a lot of numbers. I love that theme of the event today. So if we look at some of the things that were shared by Kenzie this morning, for example, like I mentioned the customer numbers, and even talking about what they're doing to protect 90% of customers in the global S&P 100, and they showed some big brands there, tell us a little bit about the partnership and how you're leveraging the momentum of what Fortinet is able to do in terms of capturing customers. How does that momentum translate and really kind of maybe fuel anger in what you're able to do? Well, look, I mean, there's incredible demand in security today. There was a slide that they showed this morning and I think it was the perfect storm. I like to call the security space a beautiful disaster. It's a mess, it's complicated, it's scary, the threat attacks are new and different and they're never going to stop, but it again comes back to, hey, how do we work together to kind of harness this? How do we go? And there's a great partner community here, lots of our friends are here, but they can't all be here. So we want to be able to help take that message out to our channel partners that we're not here. Things like that, yeah. What are some, oh, sorry, go ahead, Peter. No, I was going to say, so Ingram itself has changed. You said you now are now introducing security or you're now introducing more services. Right. So how is that, how is security leading that charge to move from more of a product and a distributor to now services? Is security one of the reasons why Ingram's going in that direction? It's one of them, I joked on virtualization, but there's a lot of services that we can wrap around. And I think, obviously there's a high demand of services and we will lead with Fortinet services and solutions where we can. We want our partners to lead with theirs, but really we've hired people to go out and do assessments. We have a partner ecosystem where, hey, I can't get down to New Mexico to do an install. We have a partner network where they can tap into that and make sure that everything is installed correctly. All the features are turned on. You think about all these breaches that happen in the news. It's not that they didn't have the technology. They missed an alert or they didn't have it all deployed. We want to be able to help our partners solve for that. Along the partnership front, what are some of the things that excite you about the Fabric Ready Partner Program and the announcements they've made today? Yeah, love it. Look, Fortinet has built comprehensive end-to-end solutions within their Fortinet, I'm sorry, their Fabric ecosystem, but they've also recognized that they can't do it all alone and so they've introduced a lot of partners into that. And so what's exciting for me, leading our security category, is hey, how do we bring new partners into our ecosystem too, because it is a differentiator for Ingram to be able to provide multi-vendor solutions, to have somebody you can go to to say, how does Sentinel-1 work with Fortinet Fabric? Those types of things, those conversations are happening all the time. Another thing that was announced today was what they're doing with AI. Tell us a little bit about that and how are you seeing what they're going to be able to do with AI as an advantage for your partners and customers? Again, the artificial intelligence, machine learning, it all goes back to making the technology easier to use. I still think you think intelligence and I think back to the human factor. Some of these big breaches, look, the threat actors are going to get in, but how you recover from a breach, I think if we could inject some artificial intelligence into some of these companies that haven't figured out how to successfully pivot, paying your hacker $100,000 to keep quiet is not the answer, but I think that some of these machine learning things are going to make it easier. It's going to be easier to manage the alerts that are happening every day. So anything that helps eliminate, as they said today, the enemy of security is complexity, things that help to discover these threats and remediate against them, all good stuff for our partners. On the enablement side, we were talking with channel chief, John Bove, earlier today, and talking about sort of this long history of a partner-focused culture at Fortinet. Tell us about that in terms of the enablement that you're able to glean from them and then pass on to your channels in terms of selling strategies, marketing to, marketing through, what are some of the things that you really think about? Look, we have an amazing team, John Bove, Kurt Stratton, the folks that really spent so much time working with Ingram, and then we've built an amazing team. I think we have 12 people from our company here at this event to make sure we're making the most out of it, but if you're at the Cosmo, they have Secret Pizza. Have you been there? Have you heard about it? No, Secret Pizza. It's amazing. It's pretty good. Okay. You didn't bring any. I noticed that, but continue. I didn't, but it's secret not-so-secret pizza, but we have some secret not-so-secret weapons. Jenna Tambalesi is an NSE7. She's one of the highest certified engineers on the planet, and she works for Ingram Micro helping to technically enable some of our partners. We've got a guy by the name of Will the Thrill, Charlotte, and the thrill is out talking to partners every single day, helping them to be more profitable, trusted security advisors, helping them through anything you can imagine from a channel-enablement perspective, and then just huge teams of people that we go to serve this big market together. Are you seeing any vertical specificities? When Ken was sharing some slides this morning they were talking about, they were showing some verticals from a kind of market share perspective. But I'm curious, some of the verticals that kind of come to mind where security is concerned that maybe are a little bit more elevated than some of the others in terms of risk or healthcare, education, and financial services, maybe feds-led. Are you seeing any verticals in particular, maybe those that are really going to be kind of having to be leading edge where security transformation is concerned? They have to be. Think about healthcare and when their big ransomware attack hit last year, there's guys on CNN saying they had to postpone my surgery because ransomware hit. I mean, that's life and death stuff there. But I don't think there's any vertical that's immune to what's going on today. So I think regardless of your vertical, you have to be prepared. You have to choose the right technology and choose the right partner to help you implement it. If you imagine where Ingram is going to go with this relationship, what kinds of things are you looking to be able to do as a consequence of great strong partnership with Fortinet? Look, the way that companies want to consume technology is changing in this face of digital transformation. Once we work with Fortinet and the partner to recommend the right technology, and I mentioned this, like how do you want to consume it? Is it public cloud? Is it AWS or Azure? We have an answer for that today. Is it, hey, it's on premise, but I need some creative financing to help close this deal, to solve a budget constraint. We have an answer for that. There's several variations of that, but however that technology wants to be consumed, we have an answer together. So I think that's a testament to the strength of our relationship. And I think one of the words that I saw in at least one of the press releases was adaptability. Adaptability is some of the technologies. And even John Madison was kind of talking about how customers can go, I've got 20 plus security products. How do I start this babreg? And that word adaptability kind of jumped out at me is how do you enable adaptability when your customers through the channel have so many technologies in place and how does Fortinet help that adaptation? I would say they're placing bets like we are on top partners that are going to lead with that technology. They've got to go be the experts in that field and really start driving that. Events like this help get everybody on the same page, understand the new offerings. I mentioned Jenna. She was locked in a room all day yesterday, all excited about all these things. She's been running around all day, but look, we've just got to help the channel understand what the new technologies are, what are the new offerings, and hey, how do we go solve that customer problem together? So are there any particular new approaches or tactics or techniques that you're using to get the channels to understand better? I don't think that there's anything necessarily new. We're all driving towards the same common goal. Having a security conversation today is easier than ever before. So I think we're going to continue doing what we've been doing. It's been very successful for us, but yeah. What are some of the things kind of wrapping up here that you're looking forward to throughout the rest of 2018? We're kind of been still in the first quarter calendar. Some big announcements from your partner here today. What are some of the things that except you at Ingram about this year of 2018? Look, it's a market that's really ripe right now, and I think that when you talk about their new technologies, when you talk about the machine learning, there's a lot of these things happening out there. It's just, look, we've got a huge market. The potential is unlimited. And I think one area where we're really going to drill down this year is down market, down SMB and mid market, because they need enterprise grade technology, and Fortinet delivers that, and has a history of delivering that. So I think we're going to double click down there together this year, and John and his team have been great around putting some programs together for us to go and tackle that together. Excellent. Well, we thank you so much, Eric, for stopping by theCUBE again. Thank you. Yes, I'll bring pizza next time. Please do. Yes, and maybe some beverages so we don't have to drive it. Of course, yes. So we wish you and Ingram the best of luck in this next year. We look forward to talking to you next year Not sooner. Sounds good, great, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. For Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. After the short break, we will be right back.