| Company follows Idetica's StreamShield with launch of unified threat management services.
U.S.-based antivirus firewall system business, Fortinet, said it has expanded its product range to include solutions that will enable carriers and ISPs to clean up Internet content before it hits users' PCs.
The company has launched the FortiGate 5000 series of antivirus firewalls, extending its FortiGate product family for Internet content protection for deployment in the network, at the edge or core, within large carriers, managed service providers and enterprises.
The move also represents the company's first foray into the carrier market.
"This is complete content processing," commented Adam Stein, vice president for corporate marketing at Fortinet. "It's unified threat management, for antivirus, firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention, all running in line on the same network, for real-time content processing without latency on the network."
Stein seemed unfazed by Detica's launch last week of subsidiary company StreamShield Networks, which is set to provide a similar service to Fortinet – that is, clean Internet content to U.K. service providers, mobile operators and carriers with its StreamShield Protector and StreamShield's Content Security Gateway products.
Stein said he believes StreamShield is using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in its products, which he claimed will not hack the pace of carrier and service provider traffic and requirements for scalability.
"FPGAs are programmable chips that are expensive. When you start adding to them, FPGAs will not hold up to the stress. I believe that is what StreamShield is doing."
But he added: "But you have to take all competition seriously; you can't fob it off."
With the FortiGate 5000 series, Fortinet has become the first security business to produce a product compliant with the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA) industry standard from Intel.
In line with this standard, the company has teamed with Alcatel, which will immediately begin reselling Fortinet's products and will one day make its future products ATCA-compliant, allowing further interoperability between the two businesses.
Meanwhile Fortinet is also ramping up its business outside the U.S.
Jonathan Mepsted, regional director for the U.K. and Germany, commented on the U.K. business: "In 18 months we now have 11 people in the U.K. We have strong relationships with NTT, Telecity and Mistral in the core plus other tier two service providers, and a large service provider and mobile operator that plans to use our products to clean the Internet for its MMS service, to prevent younger people downloading porn."
According to a report from IDC on Thursday, the unified threat management (UTM) segment of the Threat Management Appliance category is the fastest growing segment of the security market - exceeding $100 million in revenue in 2003 and growing 160% over 2002.
By 2008, IDC projects that the UTM security system category will account for 58% of a $3.45 billion market, outpacing the traditional firewall/VPN appliances sector.
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