Daily High-Tech Security News

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Fortinet Enhances Its Executive Management Team

Fortinet Enhances Its Executive Management Team

Appoints Chris Roeckl as Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Todd Nelson as Vice President of Legal and General Counsel

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortinet -- the pioneer and market leader in Unified Threat Management and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based multi-threat security systems for real-time network protection -- today announced it has enhanced its management team with the additions of Chris Roeckl as vice president of corporate marketing and Todd Nelson as vice president of legal and general counsel. In their respective roles, Roeckl will accelerate Fortinet's marketing efforts -- which span brand awareness, product and channel marketing, public relations and marketing communications -- emphasizing the company's market and technical leadership in the network security market. Nelson, who joined Fortinet in late June, is responsible for overseeing all of Fortinet's legal matters, including corporate governance, intellectual property, contracts and corporate transactions.

Fortinet Vice President of Corporate Marketing Chris Roeckl is an established marketing veteran with nearly 20 years of experience in the security and networking sectors. He comes to Fortinet from Infoblox, a developer of network identity infrastructure (NII) systems, where he was most recently senior director of product and technical marketing. Before that, Roeckl spent more than four years at NetScreen (acquired by Juniper Networks), where he was the company's first director of product marketing and alliances and first director of corporate marketing. During his tenure at NetScreen, Roeckl significantly elevated NetScreen's presence and position in the network security sector by driving corporate and product messaging strategies and managing the development of all corporate and product-level sales tools and outbound marketing materials. Roeckl has also held editorial, marketing management and research positions at CMP Publications, Inverse Network Technology Inc. and The Robert Frances Group, an industry analyst firm. He received a B.A. degree in journalism with a minor in business administration from Humboldt State University.

Fortinet Vice President of Legal and General Counsel Todd Nelson has more than 20 years of Silicon Valley legal and technology industry experience. Prior to joining Fortinet, Nelson was an attorney for law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, specializing in the representation of technology and emerging growth companies with a broad focus on intellectual property matters, representing numerous technology incumbents and start-ups. Prior to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, he held engineering and engineering management positions with companies such as Siemens/Pyramid Technology, Amdahl Corporation, MAXIM Technologies, GenRad and National Semiconductor. Nelson holds a L.L.M. degree from The Yale Law School, a J.D. degree from Santa Clara University School of Law and is a member of the State Bar of California. He also received a M.S. degree in Computer Science with honors from San Jose State University and a B.S. in Economics with honors from University of California at Davis.

"Chris and Todd each bring to Fortinet vast experience and noted success in the security and broader technology arenas and I am pleased to welcome them both to my team," said Ken Xie, founder, president and CEO of Fortinet. "As Fortinet continues its path of impressive growth and market leadership, Chris and Todd will be instrumental in taking the company to the next level by elevating and strengthening our brand across key market segments and overseeing all legal and corporate counsel matters."

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)

Fortinet is the confirmed leader of the Unified Threat Management market. The company's award-winning FortiGate(TM) series of ASIC-accelerated multi- threat security systems, winner of the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine and the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from e-mail and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time -- without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are certified five times over by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, SSL, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.

Source: Fortinet, Inc.

CONTACT: Michelle Spolver, +1-408-486-7837, or mspolver@fortinet.com, or
Kelly LeBlanc, +1-408-486-7876, or kleblanc@fortinet.com, both of Fortinet,
Inc.

Web site: http://www.fortinet.com/

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