Fortinet Expands SD-WAN Service Provider Menagerie

Fortinet added four new managed service providers to its SD-WAN menagerie today, announcing partnerships with Commandlink, DNA, Syringa Networks, and Telecom Italia. Fortinet added four new managed service providers to its SD-WAN menagerie today, announcing partnerships with Commandlink, DNA, Syringa Networks, and Telecom Italia. “With these partnerships, Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution will be extended geographically around the world as service providers are able to grow their businesses and revenue margins with the creation of managed SD-WAN and security services,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison said in a statement. Fortinet has steadily expanded its service provider and channel partnerships over the past few years as the company’s SD-WAN and now secure access service edge (SASE) products have grown in popularity. Dell’Oro ranks Fortinet as the third-largest SD-WAN vendor by market share behind Cisco and VMware. Most recently, the vendor snagged AT&T as a customer to power the carrier’s fully-managed SASE offering. While Fortinet expanded its networking and security story to include SASE with the acquisition of cloud-security vendor Opaq last year, the partnerships announced today focus primarily on SD-WAN. Fortinet’s SD-WAN is available in multiple form factors including a virtual appliance. However, only the company’s physical appliances benefit from its internally-developed networking and security ASICs, which offer significant advantages over running the service on traditional x86 white-box hardware, including acceleration of next-generation firewall functionality. Additionally, these appliances can be equipped with integrated 4G LTE modems, built-in wireless LAN, and power-over-ethernet. These capabilities will be bundled into broader service offerings from Fortinet’s service provider partners. Syringa Networks plans to bundle Fortinet SD-WAN with voice, internet, redundant WAN, and IT security. Meanwhile, Antonio Morabito, head of marketing at Telecom Italia, sees the collaboration as a way to address post-pandemic challenges. “We believe that cloud, IoT, and hybrid working brought corporate networking at the edge of a huge transformation opportunity,” he said in a statement.