There’s truth to strength in numbers: Fortinet Inc. acquired nearly 18,000 customers in 2017 alone. The network security company exceeded the half-billion-dollar mark in the fourth quarter of the same year and also announced 11 additional fabric alliance partners.

Jon Bove, vice president of channel sales at Fortinet Inc, attributes the success from its partnerships, saying, “We’re creating a strong culture around integration and openness.”

Bove spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Fortinet Accelerate event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Fortinet’s partner community and business strategy.

New business models

The “channel-first” company strategy has been the driving force behind its security fabric. Fortinet is offering on-demand and pay-as-you-go options, centering the business strategy on integrating the solution, according to Bove.

“Selling to the transaction is probably going to be a dying breed. It’s really important that partners have the capabilities to install, deploy and support on the ongoing basis, in which is really becoming a best practice in the security space,” he said.

In the digital transformation era, he’s seeing customers consuming technology, especially internet-connected devices, more than ever before. He gave a use case of K-12 schools, noting that the top five largest school districts in U.S. have a fully deployed wireless mesh network, each deployed with Fortinet’s security products FortiGate and FortiOS.

“A lot of organizations aren’t looking into vulnerabilities and patches and remediation,” said Bove, referring to K-12 schools.

Fortinet also seeks to develop a rich transparency within its alliance partnerships, according to Bove. There is a partner advisory council that’s been in existence for more than 10 years, where business leaders and owners have access to Fortinet’s product roadmaps and executive staff.

“I am amazed how partners have embraced and really wrapped a business practice in a services-first business practice around that fabric,” Bove concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. (* Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE