Fortinet and Riverbed secures WAN optimisation

Riverbed Technology and Fortinet have signed an agreement that allows the two companies to deliver complementary security and application acceleration solutions to enterprise customers for managing their distributed workforces.

Fortinet’s and Riverbed’s channel partners can immediately provide security and wireless distribution system solutions for remote offices, data centres and mobile workers that are functionally superior to those of competing alternatives.

According to Charles Cote, Fortinet's country manager for Australia and New Zealand, Riverbed has no added security in its portfolio and Fortinet has no WAN acceleration.

Cote told CRN the 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 across the globe.

“This will allow us to provide content security with any WAN acceleration needs. [The partnership] is a beautiful thing because we don’t have any overlapping products,” he said.

Cote said both Riverbed and Fortinet share the same distributor in Australia – Distribution Central

“This has a lot of good benefits for our resellers, now they can offer customers end to end product. It opens a lot of new doors for us and new channel partners from Riverbed,” said Cote.

The partnership announcement comes off the back of Fortinet’s implementation of its UTM product to Holmesglen Institute of TAFE in Victoria and South Australia.

The implementation was done through Fortinet’s reseller partner Perfeketcom. The project was kicked off in October 2007, with Perfeketcom designing and deploying Fortinet’s UTM product.