 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering Fortinet Security Summit. Brought to you by Fortinet. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here, live in Napa Valley at the Fortinet Championship. This is exciting kickoff to the 2021-22 FedEx Cup regular series. We're here with Fortinet and we're here with one of our distinguished alumni, John Madison, the CMO and EVP of products. John, it's great to see you in person. Yes, Lisa, it's been a while. It has been a while. Good to be back here live. I know, you're not on Zoom. You're actually right six feet across from me. Yeah, look, yes, definitely physical. It does. Talk to me about the PGA in Fortinet. What are some of the synergies? There's a lot. I think one of the biggest ones is the culture of the two companies. So, I mean, PGA Tour, I think they've donated almost $3 billion to charities over the last 15 years, 20 years. And we're the same. We definitely want to give back to the community. We want to make sure we're providing training and education. We're trying to reskill some of the veterans, for example, over 2000. Also, women in technology, you may have heard one of the key notes today about that, attempts from an education and training perspective. So, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA Tour and Fortinet from a cultural perspective. I love that. Cultural synergy is so important, but also some of the initiatives, women in tech, STEM, STEAM, those are fantastic. Give our audience a little overview of what's going on here. We've got over 300 partners and customers here. What are some of the key themes being discussed today? Yeah, we're going to try and keep it small at this event. We don't want 10,000, 20,000 people. We'll keep it smaller. So, we have about 300 customers and partners. And what we want to do is bring together the top people in cybersecurity, in networking. We want to bring customers so they can network with each other. We want to bring the partners here. And so, what you're going to see is you can see the tech expo behind you there where people are talking technology. Some of the keynotes focus on areas like ransomware, for example, and cybersecurity in different industries. So, definitely it's a smaller gathering, but I think it's very focused on cybersecurity and networking. Well, that's such an important topic these days. You and I have spoken a number of times this summer by Zoom and talking about the threat landscape and the changes and the work from anywhere. When you and I spoke, I think it was in June, you said 25% we expect are going to go back to the office, 25% permanently remote, and the other 50 sort of transient. Do you still think, given where we are now in September, that it's still... I'm going to modify my prediction a bit. I think it's going to be hybrid for some time. And I don't think it's just, yes, at home or not at home or at work or not at work. I think it's going to be maybe one or two days or maybe three days versus five days. And so, we definitely see the hybrid mode of about 50% for the next couple of years at least. I think the ransomware has been in the news a lot. We saw the colonial, the ransomware has increased. We did a threat report recently. Showed about a 10x increase in ransomware. So, I think customers are very aware of the cybersecurity threats. The damage now is not just sucking information out on IP. It's causing damage to the infrastructure. So, definitely the attack surface has increased when people work from home versus in the office. And then you've got the threat landscape really, really focused on that ransomware piece. Yeah, ransomware becoming a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that is and talking about the nearly 11x increase in what was that, the first half of 2021? Yeah, over the last 12 months. And I think what's also happened is ransomware used to be a broad attack. So, let me send out and see if I can find a thousand companies. Again, we saw with the colonial attack, it's very targeted now as well. So, you've got both targeted and broad ransomware campaigns going on. And a lot of companies are just rethinking their cybersecurity strategy to defend against that. And that work from home component is another attack surface. So, a lot of companies that were operational technology companies that had air gaps and people would come to work, now that you can remotely get into the network, it's again, you can attack people at home back into the network. Is that a direct correlation that you saw in the last year in terms of that increase in ransomware and this sudden shift to working from home? Well, I also think there's other components. And so, I think the ransomware organizations, the gangs, could use crypto more easily than checks and dollars and stuff like that so they could get the money out. It became very profitable versus trying to sell credit card data on the dark web. So, you saw that component. You also saw, as I said, the attack surface be larger for companies. And so, those two things unfortunately come together and I've really seen an exponential rise in the tax. Perfect storm. Let's talk about some of your customer conversations and how they've changed and evolved in the last 18 months. Give me a snapshot of when you're talking with customers. What are some of the things that they're coming to you for help looking for the most guidance? Yeah, well, I think the digital innovation transformation has almost accelerated the cause of COVID. They've accelerated those programs, especially in industries like retail where it becomes almost essential now to have digital connectivity. So, they can't stop those programs. They need to accelerate those programs. But as they move those programs faster, again, they expand their attack surface. And so, what I'm definitely seeing is a convergence of traditional kind of networking, connectivity and cybersecurity teams like the CIO and the CISO, working on projects jointly. So, whether it be the WAN connectivity or whether it be Endpoint or whether it be Cloud, both teams are working much more closely going forward. Synergies there that are absolutely essential. Talk to me about what you guys announced with Linksys yesterday, speaking of work from home and how that has transformed every industry. Talk to us about the homework solution powered by 49. Yeah, well, we definitely say work from home being there for some time. So, the question is, what do you do there? So, I think initially 18 months ago, what happened was companies turned on what they call their VPN which gives them an encrypted access. And they went from 5% to 100% people on the VPN. I speak to customers now and they're saying that was kind of a temporary solution. Maybe put some Endpoint security there. It was kind of temporary and now I need a long-term solution because I can see this at least 50% for the next two years being this hybrid work from home. And so they're saying, well, let's look at something. Let's try and take the best of enterprise networking and security and then try and match that with an easy to set up Wi-Fi routing system. So, the two companies have come together with this joint venture. We're taking Linksys technology from an ease of use at home. It's very simple to set up. You can do it on an app or whatever. And then we integrate the 49 technology inside there from a security and enterprise networking. The enterprises can manage it themselves. The enterprise component and the consumer can manage their piece. What's very important is that separation as well. So the privacy of your home network and then to make sure the enterprise piece is secure. And then also introducing some simple, what we call quality of service. So for a business person, things like Teams or Zoom as preference over some of the gaming and downloads of the family. So I think it brings the best of both worlds. Easy of use and enterprise security to get. I'm sure the kids won't like that that it's not optimized for gaming but it is optimized for things like video conferencing which in the last year we've been dependent on for collaboration and communication. Tell me a little bit about the tuning for video conferencing and collaboration. Yeah, so we announced both Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Probably the two biggest apps which I use from a work from home business perspective. And definitely if you've got a normal system at home and your kids are even downloading something, a new game or something like that, they can just take the whole bandwidth. And so the ability to kind of scale up back and make sure the Zoom meeting or the Teams meeting as first priority, I think is very important to get that connectivity and that quality of service but also have that security component as well. Yeah, a security component. Component is increasingly important. Talk to me about why length this. Was COVID the catalyst for this partnership? Well, I think we looked at it and we have our own work from home solutions as well. I mean, our own gear. But we definitely wanted to find something where we could integrate into more of a ease of use solution set. And just so happened we were speaking to Linksys on some other things. And as soon as we started talking, it was very, very clear that this would be a great relationship and joint venture. So we made the investment. Just not just, here's some of our code. We made a substantial investment in Linksys and yeah, we see some other things coming in the future as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about what the go-to market will be? How can enterprises and consumers get this? Yeah, so it's more of an enterprise sale. I know some people think Linksys, they think consumer straight away. For us, this is a sale to the enterprises. So the enterprises buy it. It's a subscription service. So they just pay a monthly fee and they can have different levels of service inside there as well. They will get, for each employee, they'll get one, two, or three nodes. And then so the enterprise is paying for it which I think will help a bit and they will manage it through their system. But the consumer will get this kind of a gain. It's very easy to use. Very high-speed connectivity, mesh technology. So yes, Linksys will sell some of it as well but I think actually Fortinet will be the major go-to market because of our 500,000 business customers we have out there. Right, and your huge partner network. Yes. So let's talk about, give me a little bit of a view in terms of the benefit that IT will get leveraging the Linksys homework solution. I imagine that centralized visibility of all the devices connected to the corporate network even though wherever the devices are. Yeah, it actually extends the corporate network. So not in this initial release, in the second release, in the first release they can go to a cloud portal and they can manage what they can manage from an enterprise perspective. The employee can go to the same portal but gets a different view, can manage their piece. In the second release we'll actually have support in our management system. So if you're an existing Fortinet customer and you've got our management systems and say you've got, I don't know, 250 sites and you're managing some of our firewalls or SD-WAN systems, you're able to see all the employees' Linksys systems as well in that same management system. But again, there's a separation of duty and privacy where they can just manage the enterprise components. Not they can't see the traffic from the employee's side from the non-business transactions. Do you think that's, in a perfect world, would help quiet down some of the perfect storm that we're seeing with ransomware and this explosion, this work from anywhere, work from home, going to be persisting. Technology's like what you're doing with Linksys is going to help make a dent in that spike. I think it's a component. So for us, the long-term strategy for users and endpoints, this kind of Linksys component is an element. We also feel like there needs to be a transition or VPN technology into zero trust. So you're limiting access to applications versus the network. And then definitely the third component would be technology like EDR, which is more behavioral-based versus signature-based. And so you bring all those three together, absolutely will make a dent in ransomware because you're just reducing the attack surface greatly but also scanning the technology to make sure if you see something, you can act straight away. And then pair that with what you guys are doing and the investment that Fortinet's been making for a while in training and helping to fill that cybersecurity skills gap, which is growing year on year. Yeah, I speak to a lot of CSOs and CIOs and they can, oh, what's the latest technology? What can you do next to say, well, the most important thing you can do is train your people. Train them not to click on that phishing link. Because still our numbers are around 6% of employees click on things and it doesn't matter what company you are. And so the education and the training is what I call the most basic step. We're introducing what we call an IT awareness program as part of NSC, which allows companies to download some tools and they'll try some phishing emails that go out there, they'll see the response, see how they can do it. So I always say that the people, the social engineering is the first step to try and fix and reduce. That's the biggest attack surface you have. It's getting so sophisticated and so personalized. I mean, I've seen examples with training that I've done for various companies where you really have to look two, three, four times at it and have the awareness alone to know that this might not be legitimate. Yeah, especially when people are just clicking on more things because they're going to more places and so you have to be very careful. You can stop a bunch of that with some rule sets to have the systems, but if they're faking the domain, spear phishing where they know exactly the context of the emails coming out, it's hard, but you're just going to be very, very careful. If in doubt, don't click on it. I agree. If in doubt, don't click it. Well, Joan, it's always great talking to you. Exciting to hear the growth of Fortinet, what you're doing with PGA tour, the synergies there, the cultural synergies and the growth in customers and partners. Lots of stuff to come. Can't wait to our next conversation, which I hope is also in person. Yes, yes, yes. For sure. I think this is a great venue in that it's, as you can see, it's open. We're outside. Which helps a lot. It's not far from headquarters, just down the road there. We've committed to this event for six to seven years and so this is our first time, but definitely we're hoping to get out a bit more as we go forward. Excellent. I'm glad to see Fortinet taking the lead and you look like you're dressed for golf. You said you have meetings, but I'm going to let you go because you probably have to get to that. I have a few more meetings. I wish they would leave a little gap, some golf. I'll try and work one as we go forward. Yeah. Anyway, Joan, thank you for joining me. Great to see you. For John Madison, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from the Fortinet Championship Security Summit in Napa.