Executive Vice President of Marketing, Fortinet
Search every verified Jaime Romero interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jaime Romero, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Fortinet, discussed the company's focus on AI and security consolidation at RSA 2025. He stated that customers are managing over 50 tools in their tech stack, leading to a lack of visibility and inconsistent security policies. Romero said Fortinet's platform approach reduces the attack surface and resource needs, and that its 40AI technology works across the security fabric to automatically fix network problems, triage alerts, and create policies. He also noted that Fortinet's SaaS business is growing triple digits quarter over quarter, attributing this to the company building its own cloud infrastructure. Romero emphasized a focus on transparency, saying Fortinet believes customers need to trust their security partners and that he is excited to educate the market on that message. In a 2021 interview, Romero discussed data-driven marketing, stating that the most important data is first-party data such as website visitors and email engagement. He said third-party data, like content data, can help trigger marketing activities into new accounts. Romero described data as a commodity and said the key is finding a vendor whose algorithm extracts the needed insight. He added that intent data is valuable for filtering millions of potential accounts down to tens of thousands that are actively researching. Romero also mentioned that he reads, listens to audiobooks, and engages with peers through the Revenue Collective community for professional development.
“The problems customers are trying to face revolve around reducing their attack surface and trying to manage lack of resources, and in both cases when you have a platform you need less resources to manage multiple tools and AI drives more efficiencies for our customers.”
“The average customers are managing over 50 tools in their tech stack, and because they're managing over 50 tools under attack stack, they're seeing a tremendous amount of lack of visibility and inconsistent security policies.”
“We believe that our customers need to trust their security partners. So I'm excited to build that message and educate the market on how important transparency is and we're going to take that message all the way.”
“40AI works seamlessly across the security fabric. So if you're having problems on your network, it can automatically fix problems on your network. It now has a GenAI to proactively triage alerts, do auto configurations and policy creations on its own as well as knock management to improve network performance for our cu...”
“If you're hosting AI in the cloud, our AI web gateways provide secure access to your AI infrastructure. And if you're hosting it on-prem, you absolutely need to employ data security. With 40DLP and some of our other AI-driven data security tools, we're preventing data leakage, LLM injections, and those kinds of things.”
“We're seeing a tremendous amount of momentum with our SaaS growing triple digits quarter over quarter. What we do differently with SaaS is we invest in SaaS like we did OS and our ASIC technology and we're building our own cloud infrastructure to deliver our SaaS and security services seamlessly to our customers. No on...”
“We're seeing an acceleration of scanning across the internet and networks. That tells us there's a large scale being implemented across our adversaries. We're seeing AI being used by adversaries all the time. They're crafting phishing emails indistinguishable from the real things. Exploit kits are easily packaged and a...”
“For me the most important thing is really what data is going to actually move the needle, what data can you operationalize. A lot of the most important data is obviously your own first party data: website visitors, email engagement and so on.”
“Once you can get your hands on some third-party data like content data, that's where you can start triggering activities and marketing behavior and actions into white space accounts that you can help grow your business.”
“Most times you'll need a partner to help you, like the Man Matrix, Success MRP, Bumboro—all these companies are resolving identities using different techniques and data sources to try and identify accounts that are proactively doing research on specific topics.”
“The data itself is a commodity to some extent, so what you need to do is find a vendor whose secret sauce works for you—who have built their algorithm, natural language processing into their software that extracts the insight that you need.”
“Any marketer can get access to the raw data feed; you just plug into any ad exchange or 100 sources of data, you get all this data—but what are you gonna do with a billion lines of code? The real magic is the formula to extract that intent.”
“You can aggregate a lot of different data sources from many vendors and come up with your own formula, but you definitely need a good partner who's put the work in and really understands how to extract the value.”
“What's important to decide is what data sets are going to move the needle. There are thousands of data points you can select from, but if they're just going to add incremental growth to your business, oftentimes it's not worth the work, effort, and energy to optimize those data sets.”
“For me, intent data is really important because it's data that we don't have access to internally, and it helps us identify out of millions of accounts which ones are actually doing some sort of research to at least point us in the right direction.”
At #RSAC 2025, Jamie Romero, EVP of Marketing at Fortinet discussed the company's focus on #AI and security consolidation.
In this Spotlight interview, Jaime Romero shares his insights on Data-Driven Marketing: The latest data sets that are available to ...
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Jaime Romero.
The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →