Fortinet’s program is designed for partners to succeed in today’s security market

Vishak Raman
Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia - Fortinet 

“Fortinet Partner Specializations is designed to help gain the knowledge and skills necessary to become a partner of distinction in one of several high-business demand areas. Once Specialized, partners will receive a badge, official recognition on the Partner Locator and exclusive access to events”

In a competitive market, Fortinet partners build out offerings that help differentiate them from their competitors. Fortinet provides additional enablement at the technical level, including channel sales engineers (SEs) who are responsible for technical enablement with its partners, with the goal of helping them maximize opportunities and building revenue-generating solutions. Fortinet provides an integrated solution which is fundamental to continued growth and success of a partner business. Integrated solutions provide multiple technologies that work together, enabling long-term scalability. For example, a partner may start by providing solutions for security operations center (SOC), then look to add SD-WAN or extended detection and response (XDR) in the future.
 

A well-coordinated partner program
Fortinet works with partners closely to ensure their margins are secured in any business deal. Fortinet’s partner program is designed to better prepare partners to effectively engage and succeed in today’s security market. This program is based on three basic concepts – Engagement, Business model and Specialisation. The mission of these Partner Programs is to help partners at any level to build a profitable practice through technology and service differentiation that leverages the industry’s best solutions. The Fortinet Engage Partner Program helps partners develop the expertise needed to deliver digital transformation through customizable programs with business opportunity as well as the infrastructure in place to accelerate their growth. Partners are provided flexibility to engage on three business levels - Integrator, MSSP, or Cloud, which provides multiple opportunities to grow different segments of their business, as well as multiple ways to differentiate their offerings with specializations. For those partners with a mature and established professional services practice, the Engage Preferred Services Partner (EPSP) program provides direct vendor support and additional accreditation to increase service sales and delivery excellence.
Fortinet has created more entry points to make it easier for partners interested in joining the Engage Partner Program and adopting the MSSP business model. Select partners, for example, are no longer required to have a SOC in place. For those Select-level partners who have completed the MSSP Business Model’s NSE certification requirements, Fortinet will now provide a free FortiCloud premium license so these partners can more efficiently deliver essential managed services.