Fortinet adds to the chemistry with Secure Elements

Fortinet has been making noise about moving beyond the UTM space for some time. Today they took a very tangible step in that direction with the announcement that they have acquired Secure Elements. For those of you not familiar with Secure Elements, they were a DC-area based vulnerability management solutions provider. Their C5 platform started out as a run of the mill vulnerability scanning tool. I think they used the Nessus scanner and than started importing other scanner data.  Over time they morphed more to configuration management solution.

Secure Elements was virtually unknown outside of the Federal Government space.  I would bet 90+% of their customer base was in the Fed space.  They were one of the leaders in the FDCC and S-CAP requirements that NIST recently put out.  Their founders and pedigree had a long history of working in friendly confines of the DC Beltway. 

Fortinet on the other hand, while trying hard did not have a ton of success in the Federal space.  Is the fact that much of their development and design happens in Asia and China specifically represent a reason for this? Perhaps it did. Also beyond UTM what technology did they have. They recently announced an endpoint based agent for security that sounded suspiciously like a McAfee or Symantec type of play.  They had been making noises around doing vulnerability scanning and management as well.  Now the other shoe drops and we see where that comes from.

So what is Fortinet's end game.  Well certainly if the public markets were not in the sad state they are in, they would be a good candidate for an IPO. But beyond financial goals, what do they want to be when they grow up?  I think it is becoming clear.  They want to take on Symantec, McAfee, Checkpoint and others as providers of a full spectrum of security solutions. They want to use their base as an ASIC based UTM and move to the endpoint and beyond.  With the kinds of units they sell in UTM they certainly have the revenue to fund it.

My final question is:  How long until Fortinet offers a NAC solution?  If they are interested I know a company that is pretty good at OEM'ing their NAC solution to others.  You know how to reach me ;-)

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