https://ift.tt/xia5eR1
Cyber security vendor Fortinet’s local partner network has grown by around 15 per cent over the last year, with 33 new partners added to its local ecosystem.
As well as managed service providers, among the 248 local partners who have built services on top of Fortinet are most of New Zealand’s largest integrators, including the likes of Spark, Datacom, 2degrees, Kordia and One NZ, said Nick Frantzen, Fortinet’s New Zealand service creation manager.
That is obviously not a standard job title: Frantzen’s role exists to help service providers with product creation from conception through to delivery. He is matched by a second role of “go to market lead”, held by Justine Martins.
“Fortinet operates on a channel-only model, which includes both a reseller structure and distribution structure,” Frantzen told Reseller News. “Every Fortinet opportunity involves both a distributor and a partner.”
Ingram Micro and Exclusive Networks are the company’s local distributors.
“These partners form a rich ecosystem of capability, ranging from large telcos to regional partners that are closely integrated with local businesses,” Frantzen said.
While Fortinet has spent many years helping managed service providers deliver reliable and scalable managed offerings to market, there was also an active route to market through traditional system integration.
The company had also seen significant growth in end users investing in the in-house skills required to deploy and manage a Fortinet environment, Frantzen said.
Boasting a New Zealand team of 27, the vendor had also seen “aggressive” adoption by the operational technology (OT) community over the past two to three years.
Operational technology includes system that interact with the physical world, such as industrial equipment.
“The OT community is often responsible for mission-critical operations and, once their technology needs are met, their primary concerns are reliability and having strong local support in New Zealand,” Frantzen said.
Service providers looked to the past to assess how vendors supported them in times of need, he said. A disruption to a managed service platform doesn’t just affect one customer, it could impact hundreds.
They were also seeking platforms that could deliver ongoing innovation without costly retooling.
Application programming interfaces within the Fortinet platform were not just designed for third-party integrations, such as to ConnectWise and Kaseya, but were also there to be used internally to automate processes.
“There is a significant expense associated with productising an offering and service providers want to choose a platform that is scalable and can evolve over time,” Frantzen said.
Fortinet’s approach to technology innovation typically involved adding new capabilities to existing platforms, he said. This helped providers pivot into new areas, such as converging security and networking, without extensive re-engineering.