Fortinet Is ‘Only Leader’ In Sovereign SASE Market: CEO Ken Xie

The vendor’s sovereign SASE offering—which lets organizations deploy FortiSASE in their own data centers—helped to fuel a surge in unified SASE billings during Fortinet’s most recent quarter, Xie said Thursday.

Fortinet is seeing a surge in customer demand for its SASE (secure access service edge) platform, driven by unique capabilities including a sovereign SASE version of the offering, according to Fortinet Co-founder and CEO Ken Xie.

The vendor’s sovereign SASE offering allows organizations to deploy FortiSASE in their own data centers as a way to meet data privacy, sovereignty and compliance requirements, Xie said during the company’s quarterly call with analysts Thursday.

“That’s a huge market opportunity,” he said. “We believe we’re the only leader in the space for sovereign SASE.”

The comments from Xie came as the cybersecurity giant reported financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025, ended Dec. 31, which surpassed Wall Street expectations for both revenue and earnings.

In after-hours trading Thursday, Fortinet’s stock price climbed 2 percent to reach $80.56 a share, following a day that saw a major tech sell-off during regular trading.

Fortinet’s fourth-quarter revenue rose 15 percent from the same period a year earlier to $1.91 billion, coming in $50 million higher than the analyst consensus estimate. The company also reported non-GAAP earnings of 81 cents per share, beating the Wall Street estimate by 7 cents.

The results from Fortinet’s SASE business were among the highlights of the quarter, executives said during the call Thursday. Unified SASE billings jumped 40 percent, year over year, during the fourth quarter, the company reported.

The surge was driven by several factors including Fortinet’s differentiated position in sovereign SASE, Xie said.

“We are seeing strong demand in sovereign SASE. And none of our major SASE competitors offer a sovereign SASE solution, making Fortinet’s total unified SASE addressable market significantly greater than our peers,” he said during the call with analysts.

Ultimately, “I believe the sovereign SASE market [is] probably even bigger than the current public SASE [market],” Xie said.

And while Fortinet has plenty of competitors in the public SASE market, “we don’t see any of them trying to [expand into] sovereign SASE or having the function to support sovereign SASE,” he said.

At least one other well-known vendor in the segment, Versa Networks, does in fact offer a sovereign SASE version of its platform. But Fortinet did introduce its sovereign SASE offering at an earlier point—in August 2024—several months ahead of Versa’s respective launch in February 2025.

In July 2025, Fortinet ascended into the “leaders” category for Gartner’s SASE Magic Quadrant, joining Palo Alto Networks, Netskope and Cato Networks in gaining the sought-after top ranking.