Victoria University of Wellington Chooses New Fortinet FortiGate™ 5000 Platform to Secure Campus Network

Wellington, NEW ZEALAND, Sept. 29, 2004 - Fortinet, Inc., the confirmed market leader in Unified Threat Management and only provider of ASIC-accelerated network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection, today announced that Victoria University of Wellington, a leading Australasian university in New Zealand, has selected Fortinet to provide network security to its campus networks.

Victoria University of Wellington is one of the largest research institutions in New Zealand, and is recognized as one of the country's top three research universities, with a track record of using innovative information technology solutions. The University operates from four locations in Kelburn, Te Aro, Pipitea and Karori. In 2003, enrollments reached a record 18,158 students, including 2,580 international students.

"Network security is always an ongoing endeavor, and we are continually looking at providing an infrastructure that meets best practice with regard to security and reliability," Alan Dempster, Director of the University's Information Technology Services said. "The primary key feature that influenced our decision to go with Fortinet was the anti-virus protection, which is ICSA lab certified. This provides a level of assurance that the security capabilities are truly best-of-breed, and this has been proven by our own experiences. Within just the first two weeks of operation, the FortiGate system's firewall stopped about 52,000 infected emails."

Victoria University has a range of Fortinet products deployed on its campuses, including the new carrier-class FortiGate-5020 antivirus firewall system, which is designed to handle very high traffic networks. The deployment began in December 2003, when the University decided to standardize on a platform to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and management overheads, and has delivered results that have met and exceeded expectations.

Mr. Dempster commented: "We evaluated security solutions from other vendors, and what impressed us about Fortinet's products was that they provide many of the features required to protect the University's assets in a single hardware implementation, including IDS/IPS, anti-virus, automated push updates, and firewall functions. The Fortinet solution was also more cost effective, because solutions from other vendors required costly licensing of applications and updates to augment their functionality. We expect to increase the number of Fortinet products deployed in our network, and we are currently evaluating the FortiReporter™ and FortiManager™ products as well."

Jens Andreassen, Fortinet's vice president of international sales said: "We are seeing an increase in popularity for integrated security solutions across all sections of the network security market, but especially so for universities and educational institutions. The cost benefits and simplified manageability are key drivers, and result directly from Fortinet's unique technology. Victoria University's reputation as a leading research institution is an important endorsement for our solutions."

About Victoria University of Wellington (www.vuw.ac.nz)
Victoria University of Wellington is New Zealand's Capital City University, and a leading Australasian university. Founded to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, it began teaching and research in 1899 and today offers close to 100 subjects. In 2003, Victoria enrolled a record 18,158 students, an increase of 9.2% on the year before. Those students included 2,580 international students from more than 70 countries. Victoria University has a strong research culture and has been recognized by the New Zealand Government as one of New Zealand's top three research-led universities. It also hosts a Government-funded Centre of Research Excellence, the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials & Nanotechnology.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the confirmed leader of the Unified Threat Management market. The company's award-winning FortiGate™ series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine and 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 e-mail and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time - without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.