Lan 1 expands security line-up

Lan 1 has become a distributor of Fortinet’s range of FortiGate antivirus firewalls in an effort to round out its security portfolio.

Fortinet’s flagship FortiGate product is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) microchip-accelerated anti-virus firewall, that offers VPN, intrusion detection/prevention, traffic shaping and content filtering.

Lan 1 also distributes SonicWall’s gateway security appliances, however, according to managing director of Lan 1, Daniel Lee, the distributor wants to add a gateway appliance with inherent antivirus capabilities to its arsenal.

“SonicWall was quite uncomfortable with it [the Fortinet partnership] in the beginning,” Lee said. “But SonicWall don’t do antivirus gateway, and that’s what we needed.”

He said Lan 1 decided to add the FortiGate products to it current offering to meet the demand from resellers for an antivirus gateway product and because the antivirus software market was saturated.

“We’ve received a lot of requests from the channel for an antivirus gateway product," he said. "Fortinet was the first security company to develop a solution that could block viruses at the entrance of a network. It’s still a young, growing company and provides us with a great opportunity to expand the business nationally.”

Lee said he would encourage resellers that supplied antivirus software solutions to also offer FortiGate products as a hardware-based alternative.

He said that gateway security appliance market was fast becoming a hotspot.

“Whoever own the gateway is going to own the market in the future," Lee said.

Lan 1 would differentiate itself from Fortinet’s other Australian distributor, Dovetail Distribution, by offering design, installation and configuration services through its channel partners if they require it, he said.

As a national distributor, Lan 1 had a greater market reach than Sydney and Melbourne-based Dovetail, Lee said.

In the first 12 months, Lee expects to generate $3.5 million in FortiGate sales.