Fortinet

Fortinet is based in Sunnyvale. FortiGate appliances and virtual machines inspect branch and data-center traffic, and FortiGuard subscriptions supply threat updates that make the hardware useful after the initial purchase.

Mid-sized enterprises and distributed retailers are the core customers, because the ASIC-based price per gigabit fits a branch refresh. Palo Alto Networks competes higher in the large enterprise, Check Point overlaps the installed firewall base, and Cisco sells security next to its switching.

A FortiOS configuration, with its address objects, VPN tunnels, and policies, is not an export that another vendor imports cleanly. Support and subscription renewals therefore follow the hardware, and a SASE project is the moment a customer might shift inspection to Zscaler or to Palo Alto's Prisma Access instead of buying the next FortiGate.

Branch firewall refreshes replace FortiGate with FortiGate unless security architecture is being redesigned.

FortiGuard and support subscriptions are the recurring attach on shipped appliances.

SASE projects are the competitive opening for Zscaler, Netskope, and Palo Alto to bypass the box.

Network teams with years of FortiOS policy treat a conversion as a risk to every site's VPN.

Retailers with hundreds of branches feel a firewall choice as a truck-roll program, not a software download.