Press Release

Fortinet Boosts Presence in India with Investments in R&D, Customer Support and Business Expansion

Fortinet Innovation Centre in Bangalore will contribute to global WiFi security knowledge and standards

Bangalore, India, August 31, 2016 – Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in high-performance cybersecurity solutions, today announced that it is expanding its Indian operations to further drive the growth of the network security market and strengthen its position in enterprise/infrastructure WiFi solutions.

This year alone, Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015. The figure will hit 20.8 billion by 2020. While a majority of businesses is already leveraging the advantages of connected IoT (Internet of Things) devices, 92% of security professionals are concerned about the security challenges posed by these billions of devices.

Developing Global WiFi Technologies

The Fortinet Innovation Centre in Bangalore is the company’s largest R&D facility outside North America. Its R&D team has influenced WiFi standards, obtained multiple patents and conducted pivotal engineering work to develop Fortinet’s enterprise/infrastructure WiFi solutions. The team at the Fortinet Innovation Centre will develop state-of-the-art algorithms that secure large enterprise networks running mobile and IoT devices, and location-based services.  

Inaugurating the Innovation centre at Bangalore, Patrice Perche, senior executive vice president, Worldwide Sales and Support at Fortinet said, “Today, most connected devices use WiFi as their default connectivity standard. With the proliferation of IoT, seamlessly blending WiFi access with network protection  is an integral part of the Fortinet Security Fabric. With the WiFi industry growing at double-digit rates, the research activities carried out by this team are highly relevant not only in the Indian market but all over the world”.

Fortinet’s Security Fabric lets enterprises deploy innovative security strategies that are integrated from mobile devices to the infrastructure core to cloud networks, and enjoy comprehensive threat protection across the expanding attack surface.

“In Bangalore, we are building enterprise class WiFi systems that seamlessly onboard and switch customers between WiFi and LTE networks,” said Kishore Reddy, vice president of engineering & country manager, Fortinet Innovation Centre. “Our research team will also provide business intelligence to customers who have very large on-premise WiFi deployments. The investments to expand the R&D infrastructure here augment Fortinet’s plans to increase its share in the global wireless market.” 

The WiFi research facility adds to the vendor’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) R&D team in Hyderabad, which builds the hardware logic for its DDoS attack mitigation appliances.

India Technical Assistance Centre Extends Support to Europe, Middle East and Africa

Fortinet’s expanded team of highly skilled support engineers provide advanced support and professional services to customers in EMEA and SAARC. The Advanced Support Services team will provide post-sales support to customers through regular proactive activity reporting, and assignment of designated support engineers or service delivery managers to manage complex and critical deployments. With Fortinet Professional Services, customers can request the services of offsite or onsite consultants to design, install and migrate security platforms. With direct access to Fortinet’s developers and support, these engineers will ensure a timely and seamless service experience for customers.

Dedicated Vertical and Regional Teams

Fortinet is strengthening its presence in the Indian market with the appointment of domain specialists to provide network security expertise to every major industry – Government, Telecom, Healthcare, BFSI, Retail, Manufacturing and Education. In the longer term, Fortinet plans to conduct regionalised training and threat updates for customers and partners across the country.