Fortinet Hires Network Security Luminary Richard Stiennon as Chief Marketing Officer
Former Gartner Security Analyst and "One of 50 Most Powerful People in Networking" Joins Market Leader of Multi-Threat Security Solutions
Sunnyvale, Calif. - Nov. 28, 2006 - Fortinet, the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, today announced that Richard Stiennon, a widely acclaimed and acknowledged security industry luminary, has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). In this newly-created position, Stiennon will be responsible for driving the company's branding and go-to-market strategies and working directly with high-end enterprise, carrier and managed service provider customers to broaden awareness for and adoption of Fortinet solutions.
Named "One of 50 Most Powerful People in Networking," Stiennon is perhaps best known for his tenure as vice president of research for Gartner's Security and Privacy group. While at Gartner, his thought-provoking industry analysis and daily strategic counsel to Global 2000 CIOs earned him Gartner's Thought Leadership Award for 2003 and garnered him the ranking of one of Gartner's most in-demand analysts in terms of total calls and on-site visits for four years running.
"Richard Stiennon is a rare talent and one of the most sought after analytical thoroughbreds in the security industry," said Fortinet Founder, President and CEO Ken Xie. "Having provided hands-on business and technical consultation on a wide range of security issues with numerous Global 2000 companies, he has a true understanding of customer requirements and will play a vital role in accelerating awareness for and adoption of Fortinet solutions. This is a recruiting coup that will provide Fortinet with an enormous competitive advantage."
In addition to Stiennon's impressive career as a Gartner analyst, he's been a successful entrepreneur, most recently as founder and chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, Inc., where he set strategic direction and editorial coverage for the independent information technology research firm. Previously, he was vice president of threat research for Webroot Software, the leading commercial anti-spyware solution.
Stiennon was a regular columnist for DarkReading, CIO Update and Network World Magazine, and a prolific author of insightful blogs addressing security issues at ZDNet. Stiennon received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and is the holder of several patents.
"For the past six years, I've been touting the value of full content inspection gateway security devices and have sadly watched security vendor after security vendor fail to innovate and execute as the market, and their customers, required," said Stiennon. "Fortinet is the one company that from the start has heeded the call for firewalls to do more than just block ports. By joining a team that is already executing on my long-held vision, I have a hands-on opportunity to impact the progress of network security from the inside out."
About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the pioneer and market-leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management systems, 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, Web content filtering, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam--providing customers a way to protect multiple threats as well as blended threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified eight times over by the ICSA (firewall, antivirus, IPSec, SSL, IDS, client antivirus detection, cleaning and antispyware). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.
Media Contacts:
Jennifer Leggio
Fortinet
+1 408-486-7876
jleggio@fortinet.com
Jennifer Manning
Cohesive Communications
+44 (0)1291 626200
jenniferm@cohesive.uk.com
