Fortinet is a private company that is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that specializes in consolidated network security appliances. Fortinet’s flagship product line is sold under the brand name of FortiGate.
Fortinet was founded in 2000 by Ken Xie, the founder and former president and CEO of NetScreen (later sold to Juniper for more than $3.5 billion) and is led by a seasoned management team with deep experience in the networking and security arenas. Fortinet's position as the leading privately-held network security company and the revenue leader in Unified Threat Management (UTM) has been validated by IDC several times over.

The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with customer support, development and sales facilities throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Fortinet sells its systems and subscription service products through a network of 1,500 channel partners worldwide. Fortinet also has relationships with manufacturers, consulting firms, service providers and integrators, such as Alcatel-Lucent, HP ProCurve, ArcSight, Citrix Systems, Unisys, Orange Business Services, Riverbed, AlterPoint and ExaProtect.
Fortinet has raised $100 million in five rounds of venture capital investment from Acorn Campus, DEFTA Partners, DCM-Doll Capital Management, Fortunetech Partners, LLC., Forval Creative Inc., Meritech Capital Partners and Redpoint Ventures.
The FortiGate family of multi-threat security appliances are ASIC-accelerated, security hardened and has integrated network-based Firewalls, Antivirus, Intrusion-prevention system, VPN (IPSec and SSL), Web filtering, Antispam and other security features. The FortiGate series of ASIC-accelerated multi-threat security appliances won the SC Magazine 2007 award (see external links) for reader’s trust in the Integrated Security and Intrusion Prevention categories. Fortinet’s antivirus technology has been awarded the Virus Bulletin VB100 award, for four years running (2005 – 2008). In 2004 the FortiGate product won the Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing magazine and the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, and has been reviewed by PC Magazine .

The FortiGate series product line currently includes models FortiGate-50B, FortiGate-60B, FortiGate-100A, FortiGate-200A, FortiGate 300-A, FortiGate-310B, FortiGate-400A, FortiGate-500A, FortiGate-800, FortiGate-1000A, FortiGate-3600A, FortiGate 3810A, FortiGate 3016B and FortiGate-5000 series. Two additional products called the FortiWifi series provides additional wireless networking security features in a similar form-factor to the low-end FortiGate series including the models FortiWifi-50B and FortiWifi-60B.

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Fortinet also has a line of email security products called FortiMail, a management product called FortiManager and a log and analysis product called FortiAnalyzer.
Patents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded Fortinet eight patents for networking inventions. The patents are part of the intellectual property Fortinet acquired from CoSine Communications, Inc., in May 2006. The patents strengthen Fortinet's intellectual property portfolio, and provide the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical management, storage, measurement and network performance needs of the enterprise and managed service provider markets. Fortinet now holds 11 patents and has more than 80 pending patent applications.

Host-Based Security

In addition to hardware Fortinet has FortiClient End Point Security, a host-based security solution, which runs on desktop and mobile platforms. FortiClient PC combines personal firewall, IPSec VPN client, antivirus, web filtering, antispam and intrusion detection security modules into a single application for Windows desktops. FortiClient Mobile combines personal firewall, antivirus and SMS Filtering/Antispam for Windows Mobile/CE and Symbian OS devices.

Security Research

Fortinet also delivers five primary security subscription services under the "FortiGuard" brand. These include Antivirus, intrusion-prevention system, Antispam, VPN, "Analysis & Management" and content-control software.

Controversies

According to the OpenNet Initiative , FortiGuard is used by the dictatorship of Myanmar to block communications critical of the regime carried over the internet, a system known as the Myanmar Wide Web . Fortinet has promised to investigate the allegations, and the implied violation of US Government sanctions against the regime, noting that the software may have been sold to the regime by a third party ; meanwhile, the Myanmar government features its adoption of the Fortinet firewall on its official website with other photos showing a Fortinet sales director presenting a gift to the Myanmar Prime Minister during a ceremony . In 2005, after becoming aware that its product may have reached Myanmar, Fortinet conducted an exhaustive review of channel partners and their compliance with import/export controls. The company implemented additional back-end controls which now render a product useless if it is diverted without appropriate authorizations to a party located in a U.S. sanctioned country .

In 2005, the gpl-violations.org project uncovered evidence that Fortinet had used GPL code in its products against the terms of the license, and used cryptographic tools to conceal the violation. The violation was alleged to have occurred in the FortiOS system, which the gpl-violations.org project said contained elements of the linux kernel. In response, a Munich court granted a temporary injunction against the company, preventing it from selling products until they were in compliance with the necessary license terms ; Fortinet was forced to make their FortiOS available free in compliance with GPL licensing .Also in 2005 Fortinet was found guilty of Patent infringement against Trend Micro regarding AntiVirus code . Fortinet later settled out of court .