Fortinet® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – has announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company four additional patents for network virtualisation and security related inventions. These new patents strengthen Fortinet’s growing intellectual property portfolio, bringing Fortinet’s total awarded patents to 17.

Charles Cote, Fortinet Regional Director for Australia and New Zealand commented, “Security consolidation and virtualisation are key business trends for enterprise networks. Fortinet is the clear technology pioneer in the unified threat management space, with a long track record of innovation. Our security consolidation solutions based on these new virtualisation patents will help our customers build more efficient and easier to manage security systems.”

The four new patents reflect Fortinet’s focus, as a leading UTM vendor, on innovative methods for efficiently processing network data while applying various security-related filtration processes within a consolidated and accelerated platform.

Three of the newly awarded patents are directed to the routing and processing of data in virtualised environments. In addition to these four new patents, Fortinet has more than 80 patent-pending and in-process applications.

“These patents support Fortinet’s innovation and vision for an integrated, multi-threat and virtualised approach to network security – groundswell areas for the networking and security industries,” said Michael Xie, CTO and co-founder of Fortinet. “As we continue our strong research and development efforts, our growing patent portfolio provides momentum for accelerating the course of innovation we are undertaking.”

Integrated network and application security, together with virtualisation technologies, offer a powerful and synergistic approach for defending against an increasingly dangerous cyber-criminal environment. In combination with its extensive patent-pending applications and patents already granted, Fortinet’s newest patents address critical technologies that enable comprehensive network protection:

• U.S. Patent #7,333,430 – Systems and Methods for Passing Network Traffic Data – directed to efficiently processing network traffic data to facilitate policy enforcement, including content scanning, source/destination verification, virus scanning, content detection and intrusion detection;

• U.S. Patent #7,340,535 – System and Method for Controlling Routing in a Virtual Router System – directed to controlling the routing of network data, and providing efficient configuration of routing functionality and optimized use of available resources by applying functions to data packets in a virtual environment;

• U.S. Patent #7,376,125 – Service Processing Switch – directed to providing IP services and IP packet processing in a virtual router-based system using IP flow caches, virtual routing engines, virtual services engines and advanced security engines;

• U.S. Patent # 7,389,358 – Distributed Virtual System to Support Managed, Network-based Services – directed to a virtual routing system, which includes processing elements to manage and optimize IP traffic, useful for service provider switching functions at Internet point-of-presence (POP) locations.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com) Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection -- including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and anti-spam -- designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in seven programs by ICSA Labs (firewall, antivirus, IPSec, SSL, network IPS, anti-spyware and anti-spam). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California. ####

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Media Contact: Sebastian Rice, 02 9959 1991, seb@silverspan.com, www.silverspan.com