Fortinet has made four changes to its Engage partner program aimed at increasing its footprint among security service providers, with a particular emphasis on managed and cloud service providers.
A new Enterprise Agreement program, for example, allows MSPs to pay for Fortinet licenses through quarterly fees more closely aligned with recurring revenue business models than earlier purchasing options.
“We’re giving them more predictability around cost,” says Jon Bove, Fortinet’s vice president of channel sales.
Enterprise Agreement subscribers can also pay in arrears for licenses added between invoices through a quarterly true-up process. “There’s more flexibility to expand without having to go through our traditional licensing programs,” Bove says. “They can go and expand their estate of licenses under management, and then we can bill them on a quarterly basis after they’ve gone out and implemented, as opposed to the model today, where they’ve got to go to distribution [and] order those licenses,” Bove says.
Enterprise Agreements are available to Fortinet partners in the U.S. immediately, with global availability to follow.
A new “growth path” also announced today seeks to make partnering with Fortinet simpler for MSSPs by eliminating a rule that previously required them to have an in-house security operations center in order to qualify for membership at the entry-level Select tier. Select partners also now receive a free FortiCloud premium license as soon as they complete MSSP Network Security Engineer certification requirements.
“It’s really about ease of doing business,” Bove says.
Fortinet has also introduced two “cloud productivity kits” offering internal use rights to pre-selected combinations of products in the integrated Fortinet Security Fabric.
The Starter Kit includes Fortinet’s FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiCASB, FortiWeb, and FortiMail solutions. The Enterprise Kit offers FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiCASB, FortiWeb, FortiMail, and FortiSandbox. Available through a member’s channel account manager at 80% off list price, both offerings are designed to attract more “born in the cloud” service providers with expertise helping businesses move workloads online.
“We’re trying to seed those partners by giving them access to the Security Fabric so they can start incorporating a secure application framework as they’re working on these migrations,” Bove says.
To help the most mature providers of professional services distinguish themselves from less experienced peers, Fortinet has also introduced a new Engage Preferred Services Partner (EPSP) program. Members who qualify receive access to specialized training and direct assistance from Fortinet professional support experts.
“There’s a lot of value for our customers, and also for our sales teams, to go and engage with partners that have got skills around consultative implementation and managed services,” Bove says. The EPSP designation aims to make identifying such partners easier.
EPSP status is limited at present to Engage members in the top-tier Expert level, as well as distributors.
All of the updates unveiled today reflect the rising importance in the security market of services generally and subscription-priced cloud and managed services specifically. Indeed, Analysys Mason expects worldwide spending by SMBs on remotely managed security and security product support services to climb from roughly $20 billion in 2020 to $34 billion in 2025.
“This is really a reaction to how customers are embracing technologies and how they’re acquiring solutions,” Bove says. “The better job our partners do of embracing services, the more profitable their business is.”
Launched some two years ago, Engage added resources for cloud and MSSP partners to a program previously oriented toward old-school resellers, and standardized rules and benefits worldwide. It also helped partners call attention to differentiating capabilities by earning specializations in SD-WAN, adaptive cloud security, data center, LAN edge and SD-branch, zero-trust access, operational technology, and security operations.
Recent product-related news from Fortinet includes the release in April of FortiOS 7.2, a new edition of the Fortinet Security Fabric’s underlying operating system with some 300 new or enhanced features. Weeks later the company also jointly launched a solution with Masergy and Ingram Micro designed to help channel pros with limited in-house expertise bring SD-WAN services to SMB customers.
