Fortinet Leapfrogs Cisco With 21,000 SD-WAN Customers

Fortinet says its FortiGate Secure SD-WAN technology has been adopted by 21,000 customers, leapfrogging Cisco by about 1,000 businesses. Fortinet says its FortiGate Secure SD-WAN technology has been adopted by 21,000 customers, leapfrogging Cisco by about 1,000 businesses. “Customers continue to recognize the importance of integrated security and SD-WAN as they select Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution to reduce complexity and enhance their organization’s security posture,” said John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet, in a statement. “As a leading SD-WAN vendor, Fortinet empowers organizations to achieve optimal user experience, visibility, and security at their WAN edge to enable digital innovation.” The company’s customer count lines up with the findings of Gartner’s latest magic quadrant WAN edge report, which estimated Fortinet had approximately 21,000 WAN edge customers. However, the report suggested that these customers were primarily leveraging the company’s next-generation firewall (NGFW) or unified threat management (UTM) capabilities. But the company’s customer count reflects organizations that have specifically deployed the company’s SD-WAN technology, according to Nirav Shah, senior director of products and solutions at Fortinet. “We have a number of customers in distributed enterprise just using us for next-generation firewall functionality, but 21,000 customers are leveraging FortiGate for Secure SD-WAN,” he wrote in an email to SDxCentral. Fortinet’s claim places the rising SD-WAN vendor ahead of Cisco, which by some metrics is considered to be the market leader in the SD-WAN space. Late last month Cisco announced it had 20,000 SD-WAN customers spread across its Viptela and Meraki SD-WAN platforms. Fortinet’s SD-WAN has enjoyed steady growth over the past year as the company earned service provider contracts at a regular clip, including lucrative contracts with Telenor Sweden, SoftBank and Orange Business Services. The company has also announced several enhancements to its security and SD-WAN offerings, including the launch of its fourth-generation security processor in November, and the acquisition of security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform provider CyberSponse earlier this month. During 2019, Fortinet also delivered a slew of integrations with leading public cloud providers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and most recently Google Cloud Platform to bolster its cloud capabilities. And it seems the company’s efforts are paying off with Fortinet rapidly gaining market share to become one of the leading SD-WAN vendors. The latest research from Gartner and IHS Markit ranked the SD-WAN vendor in the No. 3 and No. 4 spots, respectively.