Fortinet
More info
- Creator
- Ken Xie, Michael Xie
- Released
- 2000
- Type
- Security company
The firewall vendor that bet on custom silicon and sold one all-in-one box to offices that couldn't afford five separate ones.
Ken Xie had already co-founded NetScreen when he started Fortinet in Sunnyvale in 2000 with his brother Michael. Its FortiGate appliance rolled firewall, VPN, antivirus, intrusion prevention and web filtering into a single device — what the industry came to call UTM, unified threat management. The differentiator was FortiASIC, purpose-built chips that offload pattern matching and encryption, so a cheap box can still keep up with inspecting traffic.
The IPO came in 2009. Owning both the chip family and the operating system, FortiOS, has made Fortinet one of the largest firewall vendors by units shipped. The downside: through the 2020s, FortiGate's SSL VPN has become one of attackers' favourite targets, with a steady stream of critical vulnerabilities.