SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 19, 2009 - Fortinet^® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced that leading market research firm Butler Group, a Datamonitor company, has published a positive Technology Audit on Fortinet's FortiGate® family of multi-threat network security appliances, recognizing it as an unrivalled integrated network security solution.

Butler Group's industry-leading Technology Evaluation and Comparison eports deliver the organization's thought leadership, independent opinion and best practice through in-depth technical analysis supported by comprehensive Technology Audits, product comparisons and rankings.

Butler Group made the following observations about the FortiGate product line in its Technology Audit:

• Unlike most of its competitors, Fortinet delivers a completely home-grown and integrated set of hardware and software products
• A fully-featured set of eight security software applications are available (firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, web filtering, SSL & IPSec VPN, traffic shaping & application control, intrusion prevention)
• Virtualization is already catered for within the FortiGate offering
• The company retains a refreshingly strong technical product development ethos.

"Today many organizations are reviewing their current security commitments with a view to consolidating their efforts around a smaller, more integrated set of product and service providers," said Andrew Kellett, senior research analyst at Butler Group. "We find Fortinet's integrated network security strategy to be a relevant and effective security approach that is essential in the fight to provide cost-effective protection to enterprises and other business operations. It would be difficult to find a competing vendor whose range of secure and integrated hardware and software solutions could match the Fortinet portfolio."

In its Technology Audit, Butler Group validates the fact that FortiGate appliances are designed specifically to address the needs of high-performance, high-throughput operating environments by providing network security functions at multi-gigabit per second data rates. In support of the need for a dynamic throughput approach, Fortinet's FortiGate security platform embeds FortiASIC processors that provide content analysis and scanning capabilities, as well as acceleration for firewall and encryption/decryption.

Butler Group also reviewed Fortinet's security virtualization capabilities which add value in a number of different operating environments, specifically for service providers - Internet service providers (ISPs) and content service providers (CSPs). The report states that across its product portfolio, Fortinet's dynamic approach to virtualization supports the manageability of multiple domains and brings with it the scalability and performance to support literally thousands of virtual networks.

"Since our inception, Fortinet has developed our products with a vision for high-performance integrated multi-threat security to address the complexity of Internet threats and the strong requirements of our customers in terms of security, performance and TCO," said Ken Xie, founder, president and CEO of Fortinet. "Butler Group's Technology Audit further validates our product and sales strategy, recognizing our market leadership for integrated network security."

About Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com) Butler Group is Europe's leading independent IT esearch and Advisory organization. Its mission is to ensure that its clients are the most comprehensively informed IT and business managers on current, emerging, and future technology matters, and their impact on business - in short, "Analysis without compromise". Butler Group has established an enviable reputation for the impartiality and incisiveness of its research and opinions. This is evidenced by a client base encompassing over 40% of the top 100 companies in each of Butler Group's key markets.