Fortinet Leads With Security at Forti-Field Day

You are the reason
I’ve been FortiWaiting for so long
Some FortiThing holds the key
And I’m FortiWasted
And I can’t FortiFind my way home

(Apologies to Steve Winwood there.) Having watched Fortinet do their thing at Mobility Field Day 6 as a delegate at the event, I was struck by a handful of realizations:

1. Fortinet faithfully gets their message of security-at-every-level out with each presentation. On this point they are remarkably consistent and articulate.
2. They have a product line that is expansive beyond what I tend to think I know of the company- from hardware, software, monitoring, and performance measurement, they are generally on par with anyone else in the game.
3. The company continues to buck the trend of licensing the living shit out of EVERYTHING, like their competitors tend to do. In this regard, Fortinet has not flushed their customer empathy chip down the toilet as others have, and their execs aren’t out writing BS-blogs explaining to customers how being gouged with endless micro-subscriptions is somehow innovative.
4. They overplay the Forti-prefix to the point of FortiDistracting from the FortiMessage. I personally FortiStruggle to FortiFocus during the FortiPresentations. That may just be me, but I’m guessing it’s not, for whatever that is FortiWorth… (hmmm… reminds me of a George Straight song- Does FortiWorth Ever Cross Your Mind?)

Where Fortinet can be FortiFrigginExhausting in their FortiSpeak, I cannot say the same about their security messaging- the company does a solid job of weaving their security priorities through the product narrative without overplaying it. You’ll see the focus on security in all their MFD6 presentations. Given the daily spate of network breeches in the media these days, you’d be a FortiChump not to listen.

For their bits and pieces, I like this slide that summarizes their various network building FortiBlocks:

FortiStuff

Without even watching any of their presentations, this graphic gives the un-FortiFamiliar a sense of the robustness of their offerings. But there’s a heck of a lot more to the FortiStory, so I do recommend watching the presentations.

Having seen a couple of other vendors present before Fortinet, I realized when the FortiAiOps session unfolded that the notion of “AI Ops” is one of those “all the cool kids are doing it” things that every vendor has to have to compete. That’s not to throw dirt in any way, it’s more of a statement on where the industry is right now- AI has become a fact of life as an important underpinning of various solutions, but is still new enough to be held up to the light as if Zeus himself gave birth to it. I’m glad Fortinet has a hand in the AI card game, too.

We all have our own frames of reference, and to me Fortinet is still somewhat exotic in that I don’t see a lot of their wireless gear in my own corner of the world. I do know colleagues in other areas that use Fortinet, and also truly appreciate several Fortinet employees as just awesome people. With the likes of Wi-Fi 6/6E, AI in the house, and many customers considering how to evolve their WLANs (and frequently being tired of the incumbent vendor) all potentially catalyzing market shifts, perhaps we’ll see more Fortinet in more places in the days to come. They certainly are equipped to compete and do have interesting differentiators, from what I can see.

Forti-much to Appreciate at Mobility Field Day 4

About a month has gone by since I sat in a conference room at Fortinet HQ out in Sunnyvale during Mobility Field Day 4. As I review the presentations my fellow delagates and I saw first hand, I realize just how much information Fortinet’s Chris Hinsz put in front of us. Though the this was Mobility Field Day, it’s getting harder to cleanly slice off just the wireless parts from almost anyone’s product lines. With Fortinet, we not only saw the whole enchilada,  but were treated to the entire Big Hombre Combo Platter.

Fortinet is always an interesting visit, for me. The company’s networking product line and architecture always piques my interest, never having been a Fortinet customer. It’s not uncommon to sit at the competition’s offices and sometime just feel utterly smothered by market-speak, licensing paradigms, and gratuitous complexity.  I never get that vibe at Fortinet. At the same time, the Fortinet offerings feel complete, well thought-out, robust, and not lacking in anything- like they figured out a way to do what the other guys are doing without feeling the need to puff it up in all the wrong places. They must be doing something right as even though we didn’t talk much about it, Fortinet is growing and building a new HQ.

Back to the Mobility part of this Field Day event. We did get a look at Fortinet’s starting 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points:

And we learned of their radio flexibility:

There’s a lot more here to consider as well as Fortinet looks towards the 802.11ax world that is coming soon. We got into new multi-gig FortiSwitches to connect those APs to, various management and control options, and a tiny taste of hundreds of features added to the latest FortiOS version. Then there is IoT Security, RF Management, SD WAN and sooooooo much more.

Fortinet is and always has been about security, so it wasn’t surprising to hear about a couple of innovative new tools in the mix to round out an alrady impressive solution set:

And the story just gets bigger. There is way too much to capture in a single blog, and so I recommend watching the recorded presentations from MFD4.

On a personal note- if you ever get a chance to talk with Chris Hinsz, make sure you take the opportunity. He’s just a genuine, wonderful guy to spend a little time with. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking technology or life in general, you can’t not feel good after hanging with Chris. 

 

Figuring Out What Bothers Me About Wi-Fi and “Analytics”

I’ve been to the well, my friends. And I have drank the water. 

I was most fortunate in being a participant in the by-invitation Mobility Field Day 3 event, this past week. Few events get you this close to so many primary WLAN industry companies and their technical big-guns, on such an intimate level and on their own turf. For months leading up to MFD3, something  has been bothering me about the discreet topic of “analytics” as collectively presented by the industry- but I haven’t been able to nail down my unease until this past week.

And with the help of an email I received on the trip back east after Mobility Field Day was over.

Email Subject Line: fixing the wifi sucks problem

That was the subject in the email, sent by an employee of one of the companies that presented on their analytics solution at MFD3 (Nyansa, Cisco, Aruba Networks, Fortinet, and Mist Systems all presented on their own analytics platforms). The sender of this email knew enough about me to do a little ego stroking, but not enough to know that only a matter of hours earlier I was interacting with his company’s top folks, or that I’ve already had an extensive eval with the product he’s pitching at my own site. No matter… a polite “no thanks” and I was on my way. But his email did ring a bell in my brain, and for that I owe this person a thank you.

The subject line in that email set several dominoes of realization falling for me. For example-  at least some in the WLAN industry are working hard to plant seeds in our minds that “your WLAN sucks. You NEED us.” Once that hook is set, their work in pushing the fruits of their labor gets easier. The problem is, all of our networks don’t suck. Why? These are just some of the reasons:

• Many of our wireless networks are well-designed by trained professionals
• Those trained professionals often have a lot of experience, and wide-ranging portfolios of successful examples of their work
• Many of our WLAN environments are well-instrumented with vendor-provided NMS systems, monitoring systems like Solar Winds and AKIPS, and log everything under the sun to syslog power-houses like Splunk
• We often have strong operational policies that help keep wireless operations humming right
• We use a wealth of metrics to monitor client satisfaction (and dis-satisfaction)

To put it another way: we’re not all just bumbling along like chuckleheads waiting for some Analytics Wizard in a Can to come along and scrape the dumbness off of our asses.

In all fairness, that’s not a global message that ALL vendors are conveying.  But it does make you do a double-take when you consider that a whole bunch of data science has gone into popping up a window that identifies a client that likely needs a driver update, when those of us who have been around awhile know how to identify a client that needs a driver update by alternate means.  Sure, “analytics” does a lot more, but it all comes as a trade-off (I’ll get into that in a minute) and can still leave you short on your biggest issues.

Like in my world, where the SINGLE BIGGEST problem since 2006, hands-down and frequently catastrophic, has been the buggy nature of my WLAN vendor’s code. Yet this vendor’s new analytics do nothing to identify when one of it’s own bugs has come to call. That intelligence would be a lot more useful than some of the other stuff “analytics” wants to show.

Trade-Offs Aplenty

I’m probably too deep into this article to say “I’m really not trying to be negative…” but I’ll hazard that offering anyways. Sitting in the conference rooms of Silicon Valley and hearing from many of the industry’s finest Analytics product’s management teams is impressive and its obvious that each believes passionately in their solutions. I’m not panning concepts like AI, machine learning, data mining, etc as being un-useful as I’d be an idiot to do so. But there is a lot of nuance to the whole paradigm to consider:

• Money spent on analytics solutions is money diverted from elsewhere in the budget
• Another information-rich dashboard to pour through takes time away from other taskings
• Much of the information presented won’t be actionable, and you likely could have found it in tools you already have (depending on what tools you have)
• Unlike RADIUS/NAC, DHCP/DNS, and other critical services, you don’t NEED Analytics. If you are so bad off that you do, you may want to audit who is doing your network and how

Despite being a bit on the pissy side here, I actually believe that any of the Analytics systems I saw this week could bring value to environments where they are used, in an “accessory” role.  My main concerns:

• Price and recurrent revenue models for something that is essentially an accessory
• How well these platforms scale in large, complicated environments
• False alarms, excessive notifications for non-actionable events and factors
• Being marketed at helpdesk environments where Tier 1 support staff have zero clue how to digest the alerts and everything becomes yet another frivolous trouble ticket
•  That a vendor may re-tool their overall WLAN product line and architecture so that Analytics is no longer an accessory but a mandatory part of operations- at a fat price
• Dollars spent on big analytics solutions might be better allocated to network design skills,  beefy syslog environments, or to writing RFPs to replace your current WLAN pain points once and for all
• If 3rd party analytics have a place in an industry where each WLAN vendor is developing their own

If all of that could be reconciled to my liking, much of my skepticism would boil off. I will say after this last week at MFD3, both Aruba and Fortinet did a good job of conveying that analytics plays a support role, and that it’s not the spotlight technology in a network environment.

Have a look for yourself at Arista,  Aruba, Cisco, Fortinet, Mist and Nyansa telling their analytics stories, linked to from the MFD3 website.

Thanks for reading.

About That Free Fortinet Access Point From WLPC… DON’T THROW THAT CARD OUT

I’ll get right to the point- I did something silly, but explainable- and hope to head off anyone else from doing the same. I THREW OUT MY CARD FOR A FREE FORTINET (Meru) ACCESS POINT.

Don’t you do the same!

Why did I trash the opportunity to get a free access point? The answer is simple, but flawed.

I’ve known Meru through the years as a competitor to Cisco, Aruba, etc. when it comes to wireless. Meru was bought by Fortinet back in 2015, and generally fell off of my own radar. Fast forward to WLPC 2018…

Fortiru graciously offered a free cloud-managed FAP-S313C AP to all WLPC attendees, all you need to do is send in the card that was in your swag bag. But in my mind I thought this:

I don’t want to register yet another free AP, license the thing for a year for free, then either renew the license at my cost (ain’t happening) or throw it on the pile with all of the others that have come before it… Meru competes with everyone else that all license the hell out of everything and therefor Fortiru must be license-happy as well.

Did any other conference attendees think this as well?

To my chagrin- and this is something that Fortinet ought to market the absolute hell out of- there are no licenses needed for APs in the Fortiverse. Start the cloud account for free, register the AP for free, and enjoy the goodness into perpetuity. That’s not only generous to WLPC attendees, it’s also a huge differentiator for marketing and TCO.

I had the pleasure of talking recently with long-time industry friend Chris Hinsz, now the Director of Product Marketing for Wireless at Fortinet, who set me straight on the no-license thing.

Now you know!