Tokyo, JAPAN; May 20, 2005Sumisho Electronics Co., Ltd (SSE hereinafter; Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Eiichi Sakurai) and Fortinet Inc. (Fortinet hereinafter; Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA, Japan office: Tokyo; President: Yoshimitsu Okamoto) announced the signing of an agreement for SSE's primary distributorship of Fortinet's family of FortiGate™ integrated network security appliances and complimentary products and services.

Through this distributorship agreement with Fortinet, SSE begins its full-scale expansion into the promising United Threat Management (UTM) appliance market. With the signing of this agreement, SSE will provide full support to their clients with FortiGate series and "CarePlus", the maintenance support service structure of SSE covering nationwide, as well as solutions to a wide market, ranging from SME to large enterprises, with combinations of Fortinet's "FortiGate series" and various SSE security products, applications, and the high performing YAMAHA T router as a VPN router. The sales goal for the first year is 0.7 billion yen.

Firewall/VPN security appliance market continues to expand since last year due to the systems' impressively low cost of maintenance as well as easy introduction and operation. In addition, anti-virus, IDS/IDP, UL filtering and mail filtering are getting required recently. Based on this background, the major research firm IDC defined a new security appliance category, "Unified Threat Management" (UTM) last September. This noteworthy market is growing at a rate exceeding that of previous firewall/VPN products. The market is estimated to reach 3.45 billion dollars and account for 58% of the overall appliance market by 2008. IDC also announced that Fortinet is the top vendor of UTM security appliance market, holding the leading market share.

UTM security appliances can provide multiple security functions such as firewall, IDS, Gateway anti-virus, and spam-content filtering through a single hardware.

SSE focuses on this high growth market and achievements in the global market and uses Fortinet's product as its UTM security appliance. FortiGate series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls provide security functions such as anti-virus, content/mail filtering, firewall, VPN, IPS, anti-spam, and traffic shaping. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, SSL). SSE will develop the UTM security appliance market nationwide, taking advantage of its comprehensive strength including its "CarePlus" support service, in addition to the merit of FortiGate products.

Both SSE and Fortinet plan to go beyond the distributorship agreement and to collaborate on seminars, business shows, or sales activities.

SSE also plans to run a booth at NETWOLD+INTEOP2005 beginning from June 8th with FortiGate products.