Fortinet today celebrated a successful first quarter of 2021 with two new appliances aimed at emerging 5G use cases along with a managed SD-WAN offering through BT.

“The big plus of 5G over 4G is business applications,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison said, in an interview with SDxCentral. “I don't think the big 5G infrastructure providers — you know the Ericssons, Nokias, and in certain countries the Huaweis — have got the security capability and so we're seeing a lot of opportunity there.”

The first of these appliances aims to address 5G packet core security. The FortiGate 7121F is, as Maddison explains, “a beast of a firewall,” and among Fortinet’s most powerful to date.

“The 7121F will enable 5G mobile network operators to secure multiple edges within the infrastructure and enable [managed service providers] to build up scallable security offerings,” Fortinet CEO Ken Xie said on Thursday’s earnings call.

The system is built around the vendor’s custom security processing unit ASIC, which can handle firewall throughputs up to 1.9 Tb/s, threat prevention and SSL inspection of more than 500 Gb/s, and as many as one billion sessions at any given time.

According to Maddison, the high throughputs and expanded perimeter of 5G infrastructure drove the development of the new firewall.

“Nokia and Ericsson and these people build radios, and they build radio access, and they build packet core pieces, but we're the only company to build out something like this of this scale from a security firewall perspective," Maddison said.

The firewall isn’t, however, limited to these kinds of environments, Maddison explained. “Yes, it can be used for 5G, but it also might be used by [managed security service providers] and they divide it up into virtual domains, or it can be used in the carrier networks.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the FortiExtender 511F-5, which when paired with a FortiGate appliance enables customers to utilize sub-6 GHz 5G connectivity as a WAN link.

“When 5G comes, it's possible that people will start using it as one of the primary connections because of the capacity, throughput, speed, and less latency,” Maddison said.

He doesn’t, however, expect 5G wireless WAN to be an overnight hit. “If I’ve got 1,000 stores, how many of those stores will have 5G available? I don’t know, 10%, 20%,” he said. “But when they can get it, they are absolutely interested in it because sometimes you can’t get broadband in those places.”

Maddison adds that the appliances are only the beginning of Fortinet’s push into the 5G space. “The 7121F or the 511F-5 are just the start, probably of a pretty big portfolio,” he added.

Alongside a push into the 5G space, Fortinet launched a managed secure SD-WAN offering from BT — formerly British Telecom — building on a decade-long partnership with the telecommunications service provider.

First announced in August last year, the new offering is based on Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls, which combine SD-WAN functionality with a next-generation firewall appliance.

Using the service, customers can address both branch connectivity and the expanded security perimeter resulting from increased reliance on cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, the company claimed.

Rounding out an eventful day for the security and networking vendor, Fortinet posted strong Q1 2021 revenues, which grew 23% year over year to $710.3 million. Meanwhile, net incomes grew 2.5% to $107 million during the space period.

“Strong and consistent billings and revenue performance over the past several years is testament to our geographic and customer diversity,” CFO Keith Jensen said on Thursday's earnings call. “The growing success with a single integrated security platform strategy and our ASIC advantage, which enables a shared operating system across the security fabric platform, drives our price to performance advantage, increasing the capacity to add features and functions while maintaining price points.”

Fortinet is somewhat unique in that it is one of the few firewall vendors designing and building its own ASICs to accelerate security and SD-WAN workloads.

Xie also touted strong growth in the company’s secure SD-WAN platform, which accounted for 14% of total billings during the quarter, with 15 of those deals worth more than $1 million.

Looking to the second quarter of 2021, Fortinet is projecting revenues in the range of $733 million to $747 million. The company now expects to post full-year revenues of $3.08 billion to $3.13 billion.