Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie forecasts cybersecurity will overtake the networking business to become the biggest market in the enterprise network space, as the convergence between networking and security is starting to happen.

“The bigger picture convergence is happening today and maybe a few trends have been keeping going this way, probably within the next 10, 20 years, security will overtake the network space and become the biggest one in the enterprise network,” Xie said during his Fortinet Accelerate 2022 keynote address.

The network security market grows much faster than the networking as most network companies are talking about security now, he noted, saying, “There's a big trend going on here.”

Fortinet had the idea of converging network and security more than 20 years ago when it was founded, Xie claimed, adding that it’s hard to predict when the convergence will complete. 

“When we started 22 years ago, we felt that maybe it would take five to 10 years. But after 22 years, since [it’s] still moving this way, maybe it will take 120 years,” he said. “But we definitely moved in the right direction.”

Another trend Xie saw in the industry is the consolidation among vendors and also within the company via technology integration. 

Fortinet’s FortiOS operating system (OS) is a good example of this integration trend, he touted. 

“During the last 22 years, we have kept building this integrated, consolidated OS,” Xie said. “Now we're starting to call it FortiOS everywhere, basically not only in our clients, in FortiGate using ASIC to accelerate but also in the cloud, also in different environments.”

There are almost 30 major functions of Fortinet’s platform already integrated into FortiOS, he added.

The vendor releases a new version of FortiOS every few months and a major update about every two years, Xie noted. “Every minor release makes sure we integrate better and we also make the functions work together better. And then the performance value will come from the Forti ASIC, [and] come from the economies of scale.”

Fortinet works with a manufacturer to custom make its ASIC chips, which power its FortiGate firewalls. “Within the next few quarters, we may see the new ASIC chips come in, helping drive the next generation of FortiGate and additional performance,” Xie said.

“At Fortinet, we want to keep a lot of long-term investment. We also want to make sure we keep the value to the customer, to the partner, and also work together to build the best cybersecurity technology company,” he concluded.