About a month has gone by since I sat in a conference room at Fortinet HQ out in Sunnyvale during Mobility Field Day 4. As I review the presentations my fellow delagates and I saw first hand, I realize just how much information Fortinet’s Chris Hinsz put in front of us. Though the this was Mobility Field Day, it’s getting harder to cleanly slice off just the wireless parts from almost anyone’s product lines. With Fortinet, we not only saw the whole enchilada,  but were treated to the entire Big Hombre Combo Platter.

Fortinet is always an interesting visit, for me. The company’s networking product line and architecture always piques my interest, never having been a Fortinet customer. It’s not uncommon to sit at the competition’s offices and sometime just feel utterly smothered by market-speak, licensing paradigms, and gratuitous complexity.  I never get that vibe at Fortinet. At the same time, the Fortinet offerings feel complete, well thought-out, robust, and not lacking in anything- like they figured out a way to do what the other guys are doing without feeling the need to puff it up in all the wrong places. They must be doing something right as even though we didn’t talk much about it, Fortinet is growing and building a new HQ.

Back to the Mobility part of this Field Day event. We did get a look at Fortinet’s starting 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points:

And we learned of their radio flexibility:

There’s a lot more here to consider as well as Fortinet looks towards the 802.11ax world that is coming soon. We got into new multi-gig FortiSwitches to connect those APs to, various management and control options, and a tiny taste of hundreds of features added to the latest FortiOS version. Then there is IoT Security, RF Management, SD WAN and sooooooo much more.

Fortinet is and always has been about security, so it wasn’t surprising to hear about a couple of innovative new tools in the mix to round out an alrady impressive solution set:

And the story just gets bigger. There is way too much to capture in a single blog, and so I recommend watching the recorded presentations from MFD4.

On a personal note- if you ever get a chance to talk with Chris Hinsz, make sure you take the opportunity. He’s just a genuine, wonderful guy to spend a little time with. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking technology or life in general, you can’t not feel good after hanging with Chris.