Accelerate 2024: Collaboration, Innovation, and Embracing the Platform Era

This year’s Accelerate was our largest event to date, with more than 4,600 registrants joining us in Las Vegas from all around the globe. This year’s theme, “Step Into the Platform Era,” focused on the continued convergence of networking and cybersecurity and the need for organizations to adopt a platform-centric approach to protect evolving networks and defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber adversaries.

The event included our FortiVillage, filled with hands-on demos of the latest Fortinet cybersecurity solutions and our FortiGuard Labs Security Operations Center, over 60 customer and technical sessions, 20+ workshops, the Ultimate Fabric Challenge, countless networking opportunities, and 10 sponsor-hosted theater sessions that were all standing-room only. In addition, we announced the latest version of our FortiOS operating system and other significant enhancements to our cybersecurity platform, the Fortinet Security Fabric. These included new Unified SASE innovations and GenAI offerings for security and networking operations. We also shared updates to our Fortinet Engage Partner Program and announced our Partner of the Year award winners.

The sold-out event began with a series of keynotes delivered to a room filled with Fortinet customers, partners, and employees. Below is a summary of those keynotes.

Matt Pley: Securing Users and Devices Everywhere

Matt Pley, Fortinet Executive Vice President of Sales for the Americas, kicked off the day by talking with Josh Matthews, Goldman Sachs's Managing Director for Infrastructure Strategy.

Pley asked Matthews about how his team makes decisions regarding cybersecurity investments, and Matthews stressed the need for securing users and devices everywhere. He noted that the “walled garden” many organizations once had is gone, making technologies like SASE vital for securing the business. Matthews also spoke about the importance of investing in observability, governance, guardrails, and analytics and the need for organizations to consolidate their cybersecurity vendor landscape.

When asked why Goldman Sachs chose Fortinet, Matthews replied, "You put your money where your mouth is. You engineered against our requirements and delivered. The ability to directly engage with many of the top people in the company, give feedback, and receive feedback—it's just a great partnership.”

Joe Sarno: Data Integrity and Scalable Trust

Next, Executive Vice President of International Sales Joe Sarno spoke with Olivier Convard, Vice President and Global Head of Digital Infrastructure at Roche Diagnostics. Acknowledging the healthcare industry's massive data generation, Convard said, "Data integrity for patients is vital. It’s part of patient safety.”

Convard also noted that as the healthcare industry at large adopts more digital solutions, "We need to make sure that trust is not only there but that it's reportable and scalable." He also stressed the need for transparency and interoperability. "We need to have a partner such as Fortinet that is ranked among the best in the world, providing full enterprise security solutions with state-of-the-art threat detection mechanisms.”

Ken Xie: The Fortinet Vision

Fortinet Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer Ken Xie took the stage next to share Fortinet’s vision to converge networking and security, which we have pursued since our inception 24 years ago. “Secure networking gives you a way to manage the content, the application, the data, the user, the device, which no pure networking solution can see,” Xie remarked.

Xie also discussed creating the industry's first ASIC and dedicated hardware systems for high-performance firewalls and virtual private networks. “Today, we’re still the only company designing its own ASIC chip,” he said, noting that our unique approach gives us “much better performance and much lower power consumption compared to any other solution.”

Xie talked about the advantages of using a single-platform cybersecurity solution, including greater automation, more integration, additional efficiencies, and faster processing times. Finally, he noted that many industry analyst reports validate our security and networking solutions, highlighting our placement in nine Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports.

John Whittle: A Focus on Teamwork and Innovation

Next, John Whittle, Chief Operating Officer at Fortinet, discussed our corporate culture. “Fortinet is built upon three core values: teamwork, innovation, and openness. These are all rooted in our mission of putting customers first. We’re very focused on protecting, serving, and securing our customers. That’s involved in everything we do,” Whittle said.

He also emphasized the importance of ongoing collaboration across our employee base, customers, partners, and the broader industry. Whittle noted that cybersecurity is much like a team sport—every organization has the same opponents, and the stakes are high—making collaboration at scale vital for our collective success in fighting cybercrime. “Fortinet has built teamwork at scale,” he noted. “We’re approaching 14,000 employees, have 100,000+ channel partners, serve 730,000+ end customers, and have 1,000+ technology and government partners.”

Lastly, he spoke about our ongoing commitment to innovation. “This is a significant differentiator because innovation is key to protecting our customers. Being founder-led means we move at an entrepreneur’s speed in a fast-changing environment.” He also spoke about our prioritization of organic innovation and strong engineering focus. “Our innovation, spirit, and culture are reflected in our patent portfolio,” he concluded, noting that we file 15 to 20 new patent applications every quarter.

John Maddison: The Shift to a Functional Cybersecurity Platform

Chief Marketing Officer John Maddison kicked off his keynote by addressing the most prevalent topic of discussion across the industry today: the platform era of cybersecurity. He noted that the concept of the cybersecurity platform is not new. “The debate, of course, is best-of-breed products versus the platform. And our belief is that everyone’s platform journey will be different. The important thing is to look under the covers of that platform because many platforms today are built by acquisition,” Maddison remarked.

Fortinet was founded over two decades ago on the principle of converging networking and security. Today, our Security Fabric platform comprises the most integrated, most open portfolio of products in the industry. “For us, our Fortinet Security Fabric platform is one operating system, one client, one management system, and one analytics engine. That’s very important,” Maddison remarked.

Malvin Eanes, Director of Hotel Security and Compliance and Business Information Security Officer at InterContinental Hotels Group, took to the stage to discuss the importance of having a single platform to drive security and networking and why this is vital to scaling business operations. “It's critical for us to understand how we can scale at an enterprise level because I have 6,000 hotels. It often feels like 6,000 different data centers,” Eanes remarked.

“One of the first things we're looking at is, as Ken mentioned, the convergence of networking and security. We can seamlessly take two disciplines and now effectively move them at the property level. What took two weeks—sometimes months—now takes seconds because we have that single-pane-of-glass view. We’re able to now push those policy sets seamlessly across our environment. We’re looking at that journey and [how it takes shape] in the future, and it all starts with a great partnership with Fortinet.”

Robert May: What’s New in the Fortinet Security Fabric Platform

Robert May, Fortinet Executive Vice President of Technology and Product Management, spoke to Accelerate attendees about the Fortinet Security Fabric platform. May highlighted many of the enhancements available in FortiOS 7.6, as well as new offerings in our broader product portfolio. He also walked the audience through a demo of FortiAI, showing how the solution helps security and networking teams address key operational hurdles.

“Fortinet has pursued a platform approach to cybersecurity for the last 24 years,” May said. “The Fortinet Security Fabric is well suited to solve many of the unique challenges—like the skills shortage—that organizations are dealing with today. A security platform with a single operating system enables innovation and scale, making it easier for teams to build and expand upon the critical use cases they need to support.”

Accelerate Takeaways

The biggest takeaway from each of the keynote sessions is that a platform-centric approach to cybersecurity is vital for effectively protecting today’s networks. While new point products will inevitably be invented to address new risks and opportunities, operating a disparate collection of best-of-breed technologies without any move toward convergence isn't sustainable.

Additionally, as networks grow increasingly complex and the threat landscape intensifies, AI and automation play a critical role in augmenting daily security operations but are only possible with a platform approach to cybersecurity.

Fortinet supports customers with a platform approach to cybersecurity via the Fortinet Security Fabric. This platform converges networking and security through one operating system (FortiOS), one unified agent (FortiClient), one management console (FortiManager), and one data lake (FortiAnalyzer) to integrate and protect the entire digital attack surface. Learn more about the Fortinet Security Fabric platform today.