Speaking at the company's first UK reseller event in Birmingham earlier this month, Darren Turnbull, Fortinet's vice president of Strategic Solutions, said that the company's new products will include enhanced FortiASIC Security Processing technology, a hardware technology, which will bring high-end security to lower-end users.
Central to the new budget range will be a high-performance firewall, delivered as a system on a chip technology that is unique to this sector of the market, he said.
Firewall speeds, he told his audience, continue to accelerate, going from 600 Mbps in 2005/2009, through to 16 Gbps, and evolving hardware that can handle 10,000’s to 100,000’s transactions per second.
"In 2011, we will see higher capacity and more intelligent firewall technology becoming the norm for Fortinet. There will also be support for accelerated IPv6 technology", he said.
And at the high-end range of Fortinet's appliances, he says, there could be support for ADSL2+ connectivity, T1/E1 connections and even 3G models being a possibility.
"As we enter 2011, you are going to see millions of transactions being processed by company firewalls every second. This is a significant speed change and one Fortinet intends to support", he said.
Turnbull, whose experience in the IT security industry dates back to the 1980s, went on to say that 2011 will see Fortinet further extending the secure perimeter, as well as introducing new voice (over-IP), DLP and other topologies adding to the IT security mix.
The challenges for 2011, he says, will include the introduction of IPv6 technology and integrating new technologies into the UTM platform.
"Other challenges will be including support for 64-bit environments, as well as creating a policy wizard system that requires little or no hand holding being required for end users", he said.
"The other issue, and one that I know many of you have seen interest in, will be supporting users' move to virtual technology, in other words, building the IT security technology into a virtualised environment," he added.