Fortinet’s CEO Ken Xie Presents On Major Shifts In Network Security Marketplace at Needham Growth Conference

NEW YORK -- Jan. 08, 2004 – Addressing a capacity audience at the annual Needham Growth Conference yesterday in New York City, Fortinet President Ken Xie laid out the evolving landscape of network security for attendees. Xie discussed the growing need for real-time content security at the edge of networks, the evolution of modern threats to both enterprises and consumers, and the shortcomings of many of today’s existing security technologies. Of the more than 350 companies scheduled to present at the conference, Fortinet was one of only15 privately held companies that were hand picked to participate in the invitation-only event. More than 2,000 investors were in attendance at this year’s conference.

As a key part of his speech to investors, Xie warned of the growing threat of sophisticated content-based attacks on global networks. Modern worms, viruses, Trojans and other malware have been growing in number and complexity, and yet may represent only modest threats in comparison to the advanced, multi-threaded attacks that loom on the horizon. Xie noted that one of the major challenges enterprises and service providers face is the fact that many so-called deep packet inspection products are really only scratching the surface of identifying and thwarting attacks.

Commenting on his observations from the conference, Joseph Craigen, vice president, equity research at Needham & Company, and lead research analyst covering the information security market, noted, “Two of the major trends we see in today’s security marketplace are the move towards multi-function suites and a shift to hardware-based platforms. Fortinet is at the vanguard of both waves with a proprietary ASIC-based design that delivers antivirus, firewall, virtual private network, intrusion prevention and intrusion detection, and content filtering capabilities. The result is an integrated security
platform with compelling price/performance metrics.”

Joseph continued, “We enjoy having the opportunity to highlight a small number of privately-held companies that are emerging leaders in their markets, and Fortinet is certainly proving to be one of those companies.”

Founded in 2000 under Xie’s leadership, Fortinet has rapidly climbed the ladder to become one of the fastest growing companies in the network security industry. Fortinet is addressing a broad range of issues in the evolving information security market. Over the past six quarters, the company has delivered 50-100 percent quarter-on-quarter growth and offers a compelling business model that combines products and recurring revenue.

The company’s FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls are based on a groundbreaking architecture designed specifically to deliver application-layer security and content processing services, in addition to network-layer services, in real time, to ward off the most advanced threats. Rather than relying on standard computing platforms and collections of third party applications, the FortiGate product family employs Fortinet’s unique FortiASIC™ content processing chip and the powerful, secure, FortiOS™ operating system to achieve breakthrough price/performance. The unique ASIC-based architecture analyzes content and behavior in real time, and delivers a combination of services and performance that cannot be matched using conventional networking and server technologies.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet's award-winning FortiGate™ series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time – without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems, the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the “Visionaries” category in the 2003 Gartner Enterprise Firewall Magic Quadrant, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.