Light Reading Names Fortinet Top IPO Candidate Finalist in 'Leading Lights' Awards Program

Light Reading Names Fortinet Top IPO Candidate Finalist in 'Leading Lights' Awards Program

Fortinet Recognized By Light Reading for Experienced Management, Unique Technology and Financial Growth

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortinet -- the confirmed market leader in Unified Threat Management and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection -- today announced that the company has been named a finalist in the "Top IPO category" of Light Reading's inaugural Leading Lights telecommunications industry awards program. Nominees for this Leading Light award include private companies that have the management, products and financial stability to launch a successful IPO or be acquired on its own terms within the next 12 months.

Fortinet's Leading Light award nomination highlights Fortinet's strengths in three core areas:

-- Products -- More than 80,000 Fortinet FortiGate(TM) systems have shipped to customers worldwide, demonstrating the significant and growing momentum for the company's ASIC-accelerated network security platforms. Fortinet also recently announced the FortiGate-5000 family, a network security platform for large enterprises, telecommunication carriers and managed security service providers (MSSPs).

-- Financial Stability -- Fortinet grew its 2003 revenues ten-fold year-over-year and raised significant capital to continue aggressive growth -- closing a $50 million mezzanine financing in March 2004 on top of a $30 million financing in August 2003 for a total of $93 million of venture capital funding since the company was founded in 2000.

-- Management Experience -- Fortinet has a strong and seasoned management team, lead by the former Founder of NetScreen Ken Xie and the former CFO of Adobe Hal Covert.

"We are pleased that Light Reading has recognized Fortinet as a Top IPO Candidate based on our product innovation, significant growth and successful execution," said Ken Xie, founder, president and CEO of Fortinet. "This nomination is a testament to Fortinet's security market innovation, business success and the strong momentum that Fortinet's products have garnered amongst more than 2,000 network security customers worldwide."

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, 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 Fortinet's FortiProtect(TM) Network, which delivers continuous and automatic "push" updates that ensure protection against the latest viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other threats -- around the clock, and around the world.

The Leading Light awards recognize top public and private companies and their executives for their outstanding achievements in the telecommunications industry. Nearly 300 companies submitted entries for this year's Leading Light awards, with finalists determined by the editors and analysts of Light Reading. The awards categories and judging criteria have been developed based on their five years of experience analyzing telecommunications, plus extensive feedback from both leading financial analysts and service providers. Winners of the Leading Light awards will be announced on December 15, 2004 in New York.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)

Fortinet is the confirmed leader of the Unified Threat Management market. Its award-winning FortiGate(TM) Series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year and the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from e-mail, Web and file transfer traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time -- without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.


Source: Fortinet, Inc.

CONTACT: Kelly LeBlanc, +1-408-486-7876, or kleblanc@fortinet.com, or
Michelle Spolver, +1-408-235-7700, or mspolver@fortinet.com, both of Fortinet,
Inc.

Web site: http://www.fortinet.com/


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