Manila, The Philippines, March 8, 2007 - Fortinet® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions -today announced the appointment of MSI-ECS (Phils) Inc., as a distributor of its award-winning multi-threat security products and solutions in the Philippines.

MSI-ECS (Phils) Inc., founded in 1998 and headquartered in Manila, is a leading distributor of information technology products in the Philippines, representing such leading brands as HP, Oracle, EMC, Samsung, Genius, IBM, Lenovo, Acer, Apple, NEC, Autodesk, Veritas, APC, and now, Fortinet. The company has an extensive network of over 2000 resellers across the Philippines, and is also regionally allied to ECS Holdings Ltd., one of the top three ICT providers in Asia Pacific.

"We wanted to add a strong, stable and competitive security product to our existing impressive product portfolio. This appointment further reinforces our commitment to our resellers by giving them reliable and market-leading solutions to sell, and enriching their business with new opportunities. We did our research, and Fortinet was what we were looking for," said Ms. Cherry Ladringan-Centeno, Head, Commercial Technology Group, at MSI-ECS. "Fortinet is an established, stable company and its award-winning products are very competitive."

With regard to market strategy, Ms. Ladringan-Centeno explained that MSI-ECS would develop a network of skilled and competent partners who could provide and support a complete security solution to customers, and develop marketing programs educating businesses about network security.

"Philippine businesses are already conscious that they need to provide security for their valuable information, though they typically only deploy basic security systems such as firewalls and antivirus software. Thus, there is still a need to have more consumer awareness programs which would educate customers on the risks of blended threats and the solutions available," Ladringan-Centeno continued.

Michael Poyaoan, Fortinet country manager for the Philippines added: "Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness of Unified Threat Management and how this approach can help defeat blended threats. However, most businesses here require their OI on security to be quantified. We are very pleased to appoint MSI-ECS as our distributors because we believe that MSI-ECS, with their in-house technical expertise and wide reseller network, are very well positioned to educate businesses about the costs of network breaches, as well as provide both fulfillment and support of our products to their customers."

Fortinet's FortiGate series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls provide security functions such as anti-virus, content/mail filtering, firewall, VPN, IPS, anti-spam, and traffic shaping. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, SSL).