Lots of moving and shaking so far in 2008, and here’s yet another “love-in” announcement, this time from Fortinet (lesser known security vendor currently partnered with HP on the ProCurve line) and Riverbed, who we’re all getting to know as the darling of Wall Street, the WAN acceleration vendor that sells solutions that can even put Cisco to shame (my opinion, not my employer’s of course).
From the press release:
“San Francisco – February 19, 2008 – Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), and Fortinet, a pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, today announced an alliance that enables the two companies to deliver complementary best-of-breed security and application acceleration solutions to enterprise customers for managing their distributed workforces.
Through Fortinet’s Elite-level membership in the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA), Fortinet, Riverbed®, and their channel partners can immediately provide security and WDS solutions for remote offices, data centers, and mobile workers that are functionally superior to those of competing alternatives.
“Together, Riverbed and Fortinet address the need that enterprises have to secure their data; accelerate the performance of applications running on wide area networks (WANs); and reduce IT infrastructure complexity and costs,” said Mark Williams, principal architect for enterprise infrastructure at Mercury Insurance. “Implementation of two market-leading technologies such as WDS solutions from Riverbed and Fortinet’s ASIC-accelerated integrated security appliances should meet this need while instilling confidence in enterprise companies of all scales.”
This partnership takes advantage of the complementary capabilities of the companies’ two product lines and the ability to cross-sell to their broad global customer bases. Riverbed and Fortinet combined have nearly 30,000 customers, spanning enterprise vertical markets and service providers, and approximately 2,000 distributors and resellers who can benefit from the comprehensive solutions that this partnership will produce.
“As a provider of comprehensive IT solutions for global enterprise customers, HP Network Services certainly sees the need for unified security and application acceleration solutions to improve network security, performance, and total cost of ownership,” said Dan Socci, vice president of HP Network Services. “We’ve already had a successful partnership with Riverbed and Fortinet in delivering these services to customers in EMEA and look forward to expanding our relationship to other parts of the world.”
Delivering Security and High-Performance
Enterprises across all industries are more geographically distributed and increasingly face the challenge of managing and delivering services to branch offices, telecommuters, and other mobile workers. At the same time, IT is more decentralized than ever, creating performance and security issues. Reconciling these competing demands while at the same time delivering secure, high-performance applications and data over WANs is a challenge that many IT organizations currently face.
Fortinet, the confirmed worldwide UTM market leader according to IDC, provides ASIC-accelerated integrated security appliances, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection – including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, Web filtering, spyware prevention, and anti-spam – designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Delivered via its flagship FortiGateâ„¢ family of appliances, Fortinet provides a flexible and extensible platform of security applications and services that enable customers to deploy and centrally-manage the same comprehensive level of protection at remote locations as they have for headquarters and data center environments. In addition, Fortinet’s virtualized network security allows enterprises to virtualize, or “divide” multi-threat security appliances into multiple, separately provisioned and managed instances through integrated virtual domain, or VDOM. Now, with this partnership with Riverbed, a distributed network topography no longer means making compromises in network security or performance.
“This alliance marks the coming together of two industry visionaries and leaders – Riverbed and Fortinet – to address enterprise requirements for keeping bad traffic out of the network and accelerating and securing known good traffic and applications,” said Michael Rivers, vice president of corporate development for Fortinet. “Our approach of consolidating critical network security applications and services onto a single high-performance platform has proven successful in the market because it reduces the complexity and cost of securing a network. Our partnership with Riverbed offers a very complementary approach to addressing another key network requirement – acceleration of applications and data over the WAN.”
WDS solutions from Riverbed accelerate applications and data for remote offices, data centers, and mobile workers across WANs, making them run up to 100 times faster. The speed delivered by Riverbed WDS solutions allows organizations to be more nimble, flexible, and competitive by enabling IT consolidation without sacrificing user performance, allowing higher productivity for remote offices, eliminating end user frustration caused by slow applications, dramatically shortening backup and replication times, reducing traffic on WANs, and even enabling mobile workers to be significantly more productive. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
“More than 3500 customers have chosen Riverbed,” said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing and alliances at Riverbed. “We deliver the industry’s best-performing WDS solutions for the applications that are important to business. And, we deliver that market-leading speed in a broad set of scalable solutions that integrate simply and easily into existing IT infrastructure, from the data centers at the world’s largest companies, down to single individuals using laptops. When our customers require a comprehensive security solution, we recommend that they select a best-of-breed solution such as Fortinet. By partnering with Fortinet, we are able to provide our existing and new customers a broad and more comprehensive solution versus our competitors.”
Both Riverbed and Fortinet have received industry-wide recognition from numerous analysts and product awards. The Riverbed Steelhead® appliances and the Steelhead Mobile client software were most recently recognized by InfoWorld as a “Technology of the Year” for the best WAN Accelerator for the fourth consecutive year. Fortinet was declared the UTM market leader by IDC for all of 2006 and continues to lead the market as of the third quarter of 2007. Both companies continue to add successful customer implementations to their roster and showcase stellar competitive win rates. And, Gartner has named both Riverbed and Fortinet to the leader quadrant in their respective industry reports – the WAN Optimization Controllers Magic Quadrant, 2007 and the Enterprise Network Firewall Magic Quadrant, 2H07.”
This year is already shaping up to be quite interesting.
From this announcement, as solution is coming to mind – hub and spoke networks using Checkpoint, Juniper or SonicWALLs, HP ProCurve switches, Riverbed Steelheads, and Fortinet devices to secure internal networks at the head office.
What do you think?