Last November, Fortinet unveiled its strategic pivot to focus on secure access service edge (SASE) and security operations (SecOps), two sectors experiencing rapid growth within the cybersecurity industry. Just one quarter into this strategic shift, Fortinet has already seen notable early success and expansion in these areas, leading to an increase in both revenue and billings for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023.

“In Q4, total billing grew 8.5% to $1.9 billion, driven by the increased focus on secure ops [SecOps], SASE and improved execution for our sales team,” Ken Xie, founder, chairman and CEO at Fortinet, said during the company's Q4 2023 earnings call.

This billing growth was underpinned by the closing of six deals that were over $10 million across various industry verticals, with SecOps and SASE combined accounting for over 20% of these large transitions, Fortinet CFO Keith Jensen said.

During the quarter, Fortinet’s SecOps billings grew 44%, accounting for 11% of its total billing, with strong performances from several products including endpoint detection and response (EDR), security information and event management (SIEM), email security, network detection and response (network detection and response (NDR)) and automatic threat detection, investigation and response, according to Xie.

Large enterprises provided about 55% of Fortinet’s SecOps business, while the mid-sized enterprise is the fastest-growing segment as these companies respond to the cybersecurity labor shortage and look to reduce complexity, Jensen noted.

“Importantly, 94% of our SecOps business was from existing customers, as companies looked to execute their vendor consolidation strategy with Fortinet,” he added.

On the other hand, the billings of its single-vendor SASE solution increased 19% and accounted for 21% of the total billings. In addition, SD-WAN customers represented 37% of Fortinet’s new SASE customers, while the small and midsize businesses (SMBs) were the largest segment at 55% of the business, up eight points quarter over quarter, according to Jensen.

“I think the read-through to that is all about consolidation, where you're really going to have successes, and it ties into the mix of repeat customers (i.e., firewall customers are now buying the SecOps product) being very, very high. And that's what we would expect from both of those business segments,” Jensen said.

Xie touted that Fortinet’s single-vendor SASE solution is supported by a single operating system (OS) — FortiOS — its custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and its large SD-WAN customer base and over half of the global firewall deployments.

“We believe Fortinet is the only company with a unified SASE solution, all integrated into a single FortiOS, that includes a full networking and security stack,” he said. “We see that's a huge opportunity for SASE. It's not just SASE using the traditional cloud approach, but also on-premises SASE, the private SASE.”

Fortinet's SASE solution includes standard capabilities such as secure web gateways (SWGs), firewall-as-a-service for secure internet access, zero trust network access (ZTNA) and SD-WAN from the security vendor’s points of presence (PoPs), secure private access, cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and data loss protection. These integrate with its security operations center (SOC) (SOC)-as-a-service and FortiClient, which provide a customer with endpoint protection and vulnerability scanning, Jensen claims.

Fortinet added 40 new features to its SASE in Q4, including support for over 150 global PoPs. The vendor partnered with Google Cloud to tap into the cloud provider’s extensive network of global locations for its expansion of SASE PoPs.

The vendor also closed its first eight-figure SASE deal for 350,000 user deployments with a top U.S. school district to provide a safe learning environment for on-campus and remote students, according to Xie and Jensen.