When I found out that Fortinet and Riverbed were forming an alliance to “uniquely” address security and acceleration, I immediately thought of Blue Coat, who has been taking this WAN-optimization and security approach for about two years now. The Fortinet/Riverbed alliance just validates the Blue Coat approach in my eyes. If you watch the Office, you know that people form alliances when they are scared of losing their jobs. Both companies need something to tell a prospect that points out the fact that Blue Coat does more for less. As far as I can tell, there is no integration between the two solutions at all. This alliance just tides both companies over until Riverbed can develop security software and Fortinet can develop WAN acceleration. The whole thing is basically a customer list swap combined with a joint marketing campaign. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Adrian // Mar 12, 2008 at 7:34 am
It does however give potential customers some reassurance that they don’t have to give up their current security or WAN acceleration appliances as someone else has done all the testing themselves. You could put almost any other WAN acceleration product into the same architecture but Fortinet have at least tested that there are no issues regarding tunneling and content inspection. The VDOM feature of the Fortigates is in my mind a much more vendor agnostic approach when compared to Checkpoint, Cisco or Juniper.
It would appear that they have also tested interoperability between the Riverbed software client and the Fortinet client which would be a big weight off the mind of anyone considering a combo of the two with a big deployment.
If you like both products and they offer what you are after, I see this alliance as a positive thing.
2 Jon Robinson // Mar 17, 2008 at 6:43 am
“reassurance” - if that is the reason for this alliance then Riverbed should want such an agreement with every firewall manufacturer. I have heard that you have to reconfigure firewalls to get them to work, but I would think it is in their best interest to work well with every firewall. I still think the alliance is more of a defensive move against Blue Coat and less an added value to the customer.
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