SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 5, 2005 - Fortinet - the pioneer and market leader of Unified Threat Management and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection- today announced a partnership with renowned Middle East IT Value Added Security distributors, Fusion Distribution. From May 2005 Fusion Distribution will offer the full range of Fortinet integrated network security systems to protect businesses in countries across the Middle East region, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen, against today's Internet security threats, such as computer viruses, malware and unwanted network intrusions. Today's announcement demonstrates Fortinet's commitment to meeting the network security challenges of customers in the Middle East, and forms part of an ongoing strategy to develop its presence in the region.

Patrice Perche, egional Director Southern Europe and Middle East, Fortinet said, "Our collaboration with Fusion Distribution, will enable us to benefit from their in-depth security knowledge and local market expertise as well as their reputable and broad reseller channel, to help us extend our outreach to Middle East and achieve our aim of becoming a leading security vendor across the region."

Helping Businesses in the Middle East Manage Internet Security Threats
Today's Internet security threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and more challenging to manage. Any long-term system downtime caused by viruses or other Internet security threats can cause significant disruption to businesses in the Middle East and around the world. According to the latest ICSA Virus Prevalence Survey (2004), the average server downtime following a virus incident is 23 hours, time enough to perturb daily operations. Fortinet's award winning ASIC-accelerated FortiGate™ systems deliver real-time complete content protection through the integration of a broad range of security functions - including antivirus, firewall, virtual private networking (VPN), intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering, traffic shaping, and anti-spam. All of Fortinet's FortiGate systems are ICSA-certified five times over, easy to manage and provide cost-effective network-level and content-level protection at the network edge. FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically through a range of FortiGuard™ services, which deliver continuous and automatic signature 'push' updates that ensure protection against the latest viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, spam and other intrusion threats around the clock, in the Middle East and around the world.

Tim Martin, Managing Director, Fusion Distribution said, "Fusion Distribution has been a major Value Added IT security Distributor across the Middle East since 1998 with some of the worlds best software manufacturers. It is our policy to continually update our product portfolio to offer customers the choice of the latest security technology. Fortinet offers an integrated approach to security and through our collaboration we can now offer businesses across the Middle East a unified security solution, to enable them to manage the myriad of today's threats through a single, easy-to-manage system."

Fusion Distribution offers the full range of Fortinet solutions, including its flagship FortiGate™ Antivirus Firewall family, FortiMail™, secure messaging platform, FortiManager™ management systems and FortiLog™ and Fortieporter™ logging and reporting solutions.

For more information on Fortinet, please visit: www.fortinet.com