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Ken Xie

Co-Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Fortinet

Search every verified Ken Xie interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ken Xie discussed Fortinet's second quarter 2026 financial results on the company's earnings call, reporting that billings grew 33% and total revenue increased 26%, with product revenue up 52% and free cash flow nearly tripling year-over-year to almost $1 billion. He attributed the results to the company's strategy, innovation, and execution, and described Fortinet's focus on network security through internal R&D and long-term investments, including its own ASIC design and global infrastructure. Xie stated that Fortinet is the only vendor to organically develop key SASE functionality into a single operating system, FortiOS, which integrates NGFW, SD-WAN, ZTNA, secure web gateway, CASB, and DLP, and he introduced the concept of a "SASE firewall" that combines secure networking and universal SASE on the same platform. Xie also commented on competitive positioning, saying Fortinet is likely the only network security vendor discussing OT security and that its ASIC design provides advantages in performance, cost, and energy consumption. He noted that FortiGate products are experiencing the strongest growth, partly because they run the same FortiOS for both traditional firewall and SD-WAN/SASE functions, which can make categorization difficult. He expressed belief that the SASE firewall represents a significant opportunity for accelerated growth in areas like SASE, AI, and quantum, similar to how next-generation firewalls replaced traditional network firewalls two decades ago.

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Notable quotes

“This year 2026 is the first year network security market will be bigger than the traditional networking market because the customer will benefit a lot from better security from easy to manage from low cost of total ownership and also can consolidate a lot of solution together.”

“So we also invest billions of dollars. So we actually the only cyber security company invest a billions dollar on AI infrastructure data center the GPU all this AI model.”

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