What does the increasingly challenging field of cybersecurity with 3.5 million unfilled jobs need? On the one hand, it needs innovators who aren’t refurbishing the same old, failing technologies. It also needs educators to continually inject new skills into professionals struggling to keep abreast of new developments.

This is the leadership position to which security technology provider Fortinet Inc. is appointing itself, having recognized the massive skills shortage in the cybersecurity job market. It is tackling the increasing complexity of the cybersecurity domain and its skills shortage. “Fortinet is punching above their weight in terms of how they’re influencing the directions of the industry,” said Peter Burris (@plburris), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. 

Fortinet is taking on new security challenges with original research and development. It is particularly interested in innovations that give users some control of underlying hardware for security purposes. “They’re generating … three times as many patents in the segment that they’re operating in as anybody else,” Burris said.

Fortinet is building a base with its technology around which an ecosystem is building new functionality and products. “The ecosystem is growing faster, even in many respects, than Fortinet is in terms of the amount of invention and innovation that’s happening,” he added.

Burris and co-host Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) spoke during the Fortinet Accelerate event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Fortinet’s emerging leadership role and the growing importance of security in digital business (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Security gets star treatment in digital business

Constant efforts by hackers to break through security make the field uniquely vexing. Fortinet realized that it was both altruistic and practical to marshal education initiatives, according to Burris. “It allows you to have your partner network connect independent of you to create solutions independent of you — still based on your technology and based on your capabilities and services — but to engage customers in faster ways that may not necessarily involve you,” he said.

Fortinet put up a couple of charts showing how the World Economic Forum in Davos is spotlighting the importance of cybersecurity. It sees it as central to a lot of new economic activity associated with digital business.

“Education, ecosystem, technology — those are the three pillars that were discussed at Davos as being essential components for safe and secure digital transformation,” Martin said.

Fortinet is barreling forward in all three areas. It is actively educating the channel, helping value-added resellers progress to  managed services providers, etc.

In the future, Burris would like to see more customer experiences integrated into Fortinet’s story. Real-life customer accounts of how security impacts business drive home its importance, he explained. “The market needs that. It’s not clear to a lot of people what really is the relationship between investment in cybersecurity and how that translates into new classes of business value that are going to have a long-term implication on how markets operate,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Fortinet Accelerate event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Fortinet Accelerate 2019. Neither Fortinet Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Drew Martig