FortiSASE Gains Momentum With Partners And Gartner Recognition

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is no longer just a concept. It is becoming a competitive advantage. Fortinet’s placement as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms signals how far the company’s unified platform has progressed. Landon Scott, vice president of channel sales at Fortinet, speaks with CRNtv host Sydney Neely to discuss the impact of that recognition, what it means for partners and why FortiSASE is becoming a go-to solution in the channel.

Sydney: FortiSASE has been in the market for a while, but recently it feels like the conversation has shifted. What’s changed, and why are more partners leaning in now?

Landon: It has shifted and really the conversation has enlarged. Originally, it was a predominantly cross-sell opportunity in our install base, and it’s really grown to include our ability to aggressively go after competition and non-Fortinet customers. That’s become possible due to the rapid feature development, including our new third-party VPN support.

But also, partners can now go into any customer and tell a Fortinet Unified SASE story that can meet the customer where they are.

To double down on that opportunity, many customers that were early SSE adopters are coming back into the market for a refresh, and that’s opening up a lot of conversations for SASE. Naturally, when partners present the comprehensive unified SASE story, we’re seeing those opportunities grow from simple SSE replacements into full-blown SD-WAN-inclusive SASE opportunities.

Sydney: Can you share a real-world example where a partner led with FortiSASE and helped solve a major customer challenge?

Landon: We had a partner down in Florida with a recent really big win with a leading global customer success or customer service provider with the intent to help them on their digital transformation journey from their own data center infrastructure into a hybrid cloud environment.

With thousands of remote users, they started with a user experience concern in mind that they wouldn’t be able to make that migration and preserve their user experience with their applications.

Our partner was able to help them accomplish that goal with FortiSASE, which not only preserved but improved their application response times. During that engagement, the partner was able to uncover an opportunity to simultaneously replace the expensive MPLS environment with a very cost-effective SD-WAN solution from Fortinet that was fully integrated with the SASE solution. That’s only possible because of the one operating system that spans the SD-WAN and SASE solution.

Sydney: ROI is always top of mind. From a cost-benefit perspective, how should partners be positioning SASE with customers? And what’s the long-term value for the partner?

Landon: For customers and ROI, it’s really about ease of management and application enablement. They get to consolidate tools and manage vendor sprawl.

It’s also a natural expansion for existing customers to add to the Fortinet fabric by adopting the FortiSASE solution for their mobile users and branch offices. In addition, we have the unified management platform across the customer environment, which allows them to seamlessly create policies that will travel along with the users no matter where they are.

For the partners, you know, there’s obviously the immediate value of implementation and design upfront, but it’s a subscription service. So, it also generates an ARR stream for the partners. And for those who want to take that next step, it’s perfectly capable to build managed services wrapped around the Fortinet SASE solution, which provides a lot of stickiness and long-term value for the partner.

Sydney: And for partners who haven’t jumped into the SASE conversation yet, what would you say to them?

Landon: I would say to them, the time is now. Customers are driving the demand, and if partners aren’t answering the call, somebody else is.

Like I said, the solution’s really matured quickly, and our recent Leader position in the Magic Quadrant, I think, is a testament to that. We have very quick feature releases and a growing user base, which is really driving even more development and expanded use cases as we grow.

The investments we’ve made in the Fortinet POP infrastructure to support the SASE environment, as well as recent acquisitions that add DLP and browser security features, have really set us up to capture the market together with partners. This is the most cost-effective and comprehensive unified SASE solution.

Learn more about the Fortinet SASE platform at: Fortinet.com/unifiedsase