 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here are your hosts, Lisa Martin and Peter Burris. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's flagship show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Today, we are in Las Vegas. I'm your host Lisa Martin joined by my co-host, Peter Burris. We are with Fortinet at their Accelerate 2017 event, and we're very excited to be joined by one of the keynotes today, Patrice Perche. You are the Senior Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Support. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. You've got a very interesting background. You've got over 20 years of experience in the IT security industry. You manage Fortinet's global sales and support organizations. As the leader of this, you've talked about this morning in the keynote, where 700 partners are here and users here as well. Fortinet is in 93 countries. The theme of the event, No Limits. What does that mean to you? What does that mean to your partner and your channel community? Well, definitely this event is critical for us and for our partners. You can see on the background there's a lot of people. So we have a strong representation across the world. So the theme of this event is about the new challenge that we're all facing due to the digital economy, the rise of the IoT, the rise of the virtualization, the cloud, whatever is public or private. So all those new promise for the digital economy need to be secure. So security become a big enabler for the future of the digital economy. Which means for our partners and also for customers, security need to be embraced at a very high level to be able to evolve their business. So that's really a critical point. So we see that the overall network security and the cyber security came to an inflection point where during the last 15 years, they've been built by adding, in fact, point solution reacting to threats which led to a very complex environment. And we have also another major challenges which is the skills shortage worldwide. So they cannot just face about this new technical challenge. So they have to find a solution where we can automate the protection and the defense and also with the more collaboration between the community. That's all about the theme of non-limit and also the launch of our security fabric which provide this strong coverage so it's really broad, we can cover all aspects, whether it's IoT, virtualization and of course network security. It's also feed by cyber security intelligence because you need to have those information put back to the device to be able to react on time to new threats. And this information, it's also very valuable for the business because they can be turned on business value. And we know that digital age will be all about data. So I think it's really a very exciting moment for partners and we have seen that they're growing from last year. I think we added about roughly 16,000 partners worldwide. So we have a big, big number now. And I think it's really the time to reduce the complexity, automate, leverage of course the knowledge due to the skill shortage we have that partners has as well and be able to enable the next age of the digital economy. You had a panel on the general session stage this morning of CISOs from AT&T Lazard and Levi's. And one of the things that that panel was talking about was you talked about reducing complexity is really we need to talk about, we need to talk about the complexity, right? This is a really critical to protect these critical infrastructures. So from a complexity perspective, Peter, I'd love to get kind of your thoughts on what you've heard today so far and what Fortinet is doing with the security fabric to address that complexity. Well, there's a couple of things that I think we need to focus on with relative complexity and that is that there are the business is complex but then the individual elements that are intended to make business possible are themselves individually complex. And I think one of the things that Fortinet's trying to do is say, let's reduce the complexity of the security so that that does not become a problem or a barrier to the business. Because today we have data complexity and application complexity and security complexity and organizational complexity and financial complexity and we need to find strategic and targeted ways to reduce the complexity of individual elements of that so that we can focus more on the complexity of servicing the customer. And I think that that's a key message of what Fortinet's trying to bring is what can we do to reduce security complexity or networking security complexity and data security complexity so that we can liberate more talent to focus on the business opportunities. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's definitely the case. We see that as soon as we were able to reduce this complexity, we will add value to the business. So, and if you look from any large organization on the IT, of course, the responsibility of cyber security is becoming very important at sea level. And often they try to go down to the people inside but you cannot blame the people at the level or whatever they click to an email where there's an attachment so because they have to do that anyway. So it's so the complexity and the pressure that I've been putting inside the organization has to be reduced and that's the purpose of building a system with people, knowledge, data that can react on real time. And that's really the value of the security fabric we are building. So it used to be that, you know, as an ex-IT guy, it used to be that the security team was the office of no. Yeah. No, you can't do that. No, we won't let you do that. No, that, and there used to be the strong trade-off between was the initiative going to be secure and how long did it take to actually execute? What I hear you saying, I want to just confirm this, is that now we're working on how we can collapse the time between opportunity and execution by making security go away as a barrier. If I got that right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think that the behavior or some of the people in charge of security in the past, during the last 10 years was they have to face a new problem, new threats and then typically they have bought the phone solution and then we learned it with like, almost like a 35 different vendor into the security environment and they are not talking it all together. And in fact, that's just increased the complexity and they learned it to a situation where they recognize it doesn't work anymore and that's in fact increased potentially the risk because there is so much hold on the system. So, and I think the fact that the knowledge that they had in fact is becoming a little more spread across the entire organization is also a big evolution in terms of the mentality. Well, let's build on that, Trees, because today most of the threats are take a long time to develop. They're very sophisticated. So someone will access or will acquire access to a particular system that may not be very valuable but they'll use that to get access to another system and they'll use that to get access to another system and if the business doesn't have a fabric as you say that's cognizant or aware of how all of these different elements play together then you are facilitating someone being able to move through not detect as they try to move and that increases the likelihood that a company has a problem. So it sounds as though it's increasingly important that you think in terms of a fabric that is capable of observing how people are getting in here, trying to get in there and has awareness of how the different security infrastructures actually work together. Yeah, definitely. I think one of the critical points about security is knowing. So you have to know whatever the people, you have to know whatever can devise where they are because we know today that it's just not limited to a country, cyber security is about world attack. So we see a lot of attack coming from front country. And you have to build a system that can collect those information, react on time and I think the different component they are working together because often the threats can come from email attachment and can be different approach or IPS attacks or DDoS attack, but because those threats are always combined in the system so you cannot detect at the email. So potentially they will be going through the system and result with a system that communicate all together and you can don't know that this IP address has been already flagged as potential problems or why the email is going through. So it's all about having the system that are automated and be able to have this global view. I think it's a very important aspect because it's not just US soundtrack attack and be able to quickly provide the value to the addition maker because we have also less people on the security operation center due to the lack of the skill shortage. So the information has to go to these people in a very efficient way and already highlight the importance of the attacks or whatever the. So that's how we can really reduce the time to detect and reduce the time to act. You both mentioned the skill shortage and that was actually mentioned in the keynote at the general session this morning. Is it the expectation that of Fortinet and your partners that it has to be technology that's going to solve for that skill shortage? Yeah, well, I think we participate also to try to resolve part of the skill shortage. We have launched, we call the NSE program which is a certification that we launched and we had about 60,000 right now certified engineer in the world and it has been grown. In fact, just last year we had about 34,000 so it has been growing fast and we see there is a big requirement about acquiring this knowledge which is becoming very complex because every, I would say, months you have a new system in attack so you have to be trained almost ongoing and the level of the expertise is very high so it's not like 20 years ago where a firework just like a blocking a system so easy to understand, easy for engineers to understand like people doing networking, you know, management, security is much more complex. That's required is ongoing training and knowledge transfer to keep the people at the highest level. So one of the things Peter, you and I were talking about is it's the security conversation is a board level, board room conversation from a partner community perspective are you seeing within the partner and the customer base that there is now an expectation that we're already compromised, we've got to now limit damage. Is that kind of a broad expectation that most companies and industries have today? Yeah, definitely. I think the people and company recognize that anyway they have been attacked, there is an issue. They are, and the role of the CISO inside the company is becoming very important. They have to talk to, it's a kind of business enabled. So it's not just like a compliance is answer where before there was, there was there just to check in fact the box on whatever socks, compliances or scatter. So it's not, they have to help the other business unit manager to run the company and to transform the company to the digital age. Yeah, let me build on a couple of points that will be made here very quickly. So the first off going back to the question of this technology crucial, the digital business means that there will be greater demands on the security capabilities of the business. We cannot expect most business people to become smart about security because this is very technical, hard stuff. We have to therefore make that capability more productive and the only way to do it is through technology. And that's, and that has become, the board is now aware of that. That the board recognizes, most boards recognize that security in a digital world is a strategic business capability. It's tied to your brand, it's tied to your products, it's tied to the promises you're making to the marketplace. And that if you, and to your point Lisa, they also recognize that they are constantly under attack, that they are being, that there are intrusions and then the need is to limit those intrusions by taking a system approach to it. And so this notion of a platform is really, really crucial to delivering on what the board needs, a set of realistic, strategic security capabilities that the business can count on. Yeah, definitely. And I think you may have learned this morning one of our customer, big financial bar in the US which he implemented in fact, or the fabric in fact and he has been able to measure the reduction of internal threats, which was one of the auditors to say, wow, what's happened? So your system's not working. In fact, it was the benefit of implementing the fabric. So definitely they recognize there is ongoing problem inside the network because as we also say last year, it's no longer just the, you have to protect the perimeter. The threats come from inside, can be from employees. So we also, with the fabric, we are able to create we call internal segmentation. So try to protect the data where they are as the closest and then also look about who is accessing to the data and then fly to the driven people if there is anomaly and I would say a normal activity around those access of the data because as this evolution, the value is all about the data. So we have to protect the data and that's the challenge of the system. So it's complex. That's also required collaboration. So we do collaborate with third company. So we exchange, we also the Alliance founder for the cyber threats community and we also expand our fabric because we feel that the security fabric will be at the heart of the security strategy and then because security has to talk about application about networks, you go inside all the system. So we build this fabric ready program and on board a lot of other vendors and that's the value for our customers as well because then we can automate the security and potentially the rules that need to be permitted after an attack going to the potentially the network device. So it's just a team effort. I don't think that fortunate by themselves we can resolve problems. It's combination of knowledge, people, other peers in the industry and then we can really try to go against the threat that we know will have always to chase. So here we are, last word giving Patrice to you at Accelerate 2017, great buzzer. You can hear it and see it behind us. 700 partners here, end users. The announcement that came out today, what excites you most about this new year, this 2017 for Fortinet and being able to help customers truly transform to a digital business and trust their data. What's most exciting to you? Well, I think it's definitely we all, there is a lot of feedback where we feel that what we built in the last 16 years in terms of technology came to a very strong valuable position today. And that's moving so fast and there is only few vendor, in fact, on this industry, they can do it. In fact, we feel that we are the only one on the security space. That's the echo I got from all the end user, but as well as the partner, you can see they are growing fast. So yes, good promise for 2017. And as a sales leader, of course, we expect you to do it as well. Excellent. Patrice, thank you so much for joining. Peter, thank you for joining as well. We thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at Fortinet's Accelerate 2017 and we'll be right back.