Fortinet, Inc. lineage

Four years before Fortinet, Ken Xie founded NetScreen with Yan Ke and Feng Deng. He built the first ASIC-based firewall and VPN appliance that year, and the company was later acquired by Juniper Networks for $4B in stock. Ken Xie left in 2000, taking the silicon idea with him.

FoundedYan Ke, Ken Xie and Feng Deng

• 2002 OneSecure (by NetScreen) $40-45M in stock — The first intrusion prevention system, sitting behind the firewall to check that permitted packets were not malicious. It became NetScreen's core IPS technology. Founded by Nir Zuk and Rakesh Loonkar - Zuk had been one of Check Point's first employees.
• 2004 NetScreen (by Juniper Networks) $4B in stock — Juniper bought the company. Nir Zuk stayed, left in 2005, and founded Palo Alto Networks; Yan Ke and Feng Deng also left in 2005 and started Northern Light Venture Capital.

Became: Fortinet - founded that same year with his brother Michael Xie, on the same architectural bet. The FortiASIC is not a Fortinet original idea so much as a second attempt at one that had already worked.

Included as prehistory rather than an acquisition, and labelled as such. NetScreen is a separate company that Fortinet never bought - the connection is a person.

Application delivery controllers and server load balancing.

Became: FortiADC, and the beginning of a portfolio that reached beyond the firewall.

A publicly traded enterprise Wi-Fi company with a distinctive single-channel architecture.

• 2002 Meru Networks is founded — A single-channel wireless architecture that treated the whole WLAN as one radio cell - a genuinely different approach to the industry standard, and the reason Meru had its own following.

Became: The enterprise wireless line that became FortiWLC alongside the existing FortiAP. Reported as Fortinet's largest acquisition by disclosed price.

Closed 8 July 2015.

Security information and event management, plus IT monitoring and analytics.

Became: FortiSIEM. The product a great many NSE candidates meet as if it were built in-house.

Network access control and IoT device visibility.

Became: FortiNAC.

Insider-threat analytics from Edinburgh, watching user activity for data exfiltration.

Became: Behavioural analytics inside the fabric.

Endpoint detection and response, with automated post-breach containment.

Became: FortiEDR, and later the basis of the extended detection story.

Security orchestration, automation and response - playbooks for the SOC.

Became: FortiSOAR.

A cloud-delivered zero-trust network access and SASE platform.

Became: The cloud half of the SASE offering, well before SASE was a checkbox on every RFP.

SaaS infrastructure monitoring and automated remediation across servers, containers, applications and cloud.

Became: FortiMonitor.

Announced 9 December 2020.

Cloud-native micro-segmentation and east-west inspection.

Became: Cloud workload protection within the fabric.

Continuous application security testing in the development pipeline.

Became: The shift-left strand of the application security story.

Cloud-native application protection - workload security and cloud posture.

Became: The cloud security portfolio. Worth stating plainly: Lacework had raised more than $1.3B in venture capital, so at the estimated price its investors are unlikely to have seen a return. Forrester characterised it as a fire sale.

Terms were not disclosed. The $200-230M figure is Forrester's estimate and is presented as an estimate rather than a reported price.

Cloud-based data loss prevention.

Became: The DLP capability across the fabric.

Email and collaboration security - the channel most attacks still arrive through.

Became: Email and workspace protection.

High-density venue Wi-Fi from Everest, and full ownership of Linksys after holding a partial stake.

Became: Wireless for stadiums and large venues, plus a consumer and small-business brand - a return to the wireless market Meru opened a decade earlier.