Executive Vice President of Marketing, Fortinet
2025 ZKast #78 with Jaime Romero, EVP of Marketing at Fortinet at RSA 2025
At #RSAC 2025, Jamie Romero, EVP of Marketing at Fortinet discussed the company's focus on #AI and security consolidation.
About Jaime Romero
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.
Transcript (27 segments)
Z
Zas Garavan0:05
Welcome to Zcast everyone. I'm Zas Garavan from ZK Research and I'm here at the Fortinet stand inside the Expo Hall at RSA 2025. I'm with Jamie Romero, EVP of marketing at Fortinet. Relatively new role for you, right?
J
Jaime Romero0:19
Yes, sir. Been at Fortinet for over 6 years now. Just recently stepped into head marketing up for the company.
Z
Zas Garavan0:24
Excited about that?
J
Jaime Romero0:26
I am absolutely excited. It is an exciting time for Fortinet. We're launching so many new products, so many new innovations coming out of Fortinet, and it's a great time to be here.
Z
Zas Garavan0:36
Well, it's an exciting time for the industry. This is by all accounts the industry's biggest show. What's the vibe here? What are you picking up? What excites you? What's been interesting here?
J
Jaime Romero0:45
I've been coming here for a few years. It's really crowded here. The booths are super crowded. There's a lot of talk around AI. Obviously. And you're seeing a lot of concentration of attendees at some of the bigger companies. One of the key themes this year I'm seeing is around consolidation, and I think customers are looking at some of these big consolidators.
Z
Zas Garavan1:08
So for key themes, obviously AI is a big one. Yes, platformization has been big for the last couple years. Anything else you're picking up as a key theme here?
J
Jaime Romero1:16
For us, looking at the booths, it's consolidation and AI. They go hand in hand in some ways.
Z
Zas Garavan1:24
Yes. I think in some parts they do, because the problems customers are trying to face revolve around reducing their attack surface, trying to manage lack of resources. In both cases, when you have a platform you need less resources to manage multiple tools, and AI drives more efficiencies for our customers.
J
Jaime Romero1:44
Yeah. And it seems like we've been talking about platformization now for more than a decade, but it seems like over the last couple years customer mindset has actually shifted to platform as the way forward. I think some of that's been driven by AI, but what else is driving that?
Z
Zas Garavan2:02
What we're seeing is the average customers are managing over 50 tools in their tech stack. And because they're managing over 50 tools in their attack stack, they're seeing a tremendous amount of lack of visibility, inconsistent security policies. Last year we published our OT security report and we found that 61% of OT organizations had three intrusions in the last year. So between multiple point products, between a lack of resources, they need to solve the problem. And the Fortinet Security Fabric platform we believe is the way we can do that.
J
Jaime Romero2:35
Okay. Now, at the AI theme at your Accelerate event in Berlin, you announced FortiAI. Right. Now, if I look around the Expo Hall there, I see AI everywhere. What's unique about FortiAI?
Z
Zas Garavan2:47
Absolutely. There's two things that make FortiAI unique. Number one, the premise that AI has to be useful for our customers. Ken believes that there's a lot of hype out there and making AI useful for customers enhances their value, enhances their protection, and we do it best because it's fully integrated into the Security Fabric. FortiAI 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 generative AI to proactively triage alerts, to do auto configurations and policy creations on its own, as well as knock management to improve network performance for our customers.
J
Jaime Romero3:29
Yeah. And one of the use cases of FortiAI is the Protect AI to secure LLMs. Right. And is that something you're seeing more of? What are customers thinking about with LLM security?
Z
Zas Garavan3:40
We're hearing a lot of interest around that. Customers are either hosting their LLMs or their AI infrastructure on prem or in the cloud. If you're hosting it on prem, you absolutely need to employ data security. And with FortiDLP and some of our other AI-driven data security tools, we're preventing data leakage, LLM injections, and those kinds of things. If you're hosting AI in the cloud, our AI web gateways provide secure access to your AI infrastructure.
J
Jaime Romero4:06
Yeah. And what's interesting about that is when you look at the world of LLMs, there's new ones being developed all the time and companies are having to switch between them, because different languages, whatever. I've talked to a lot of companies about they're not sure how to secure that. So if you use something like FortiAI as the foundational technology to secure your LLMs, now companies can actually mix and match their LLMs without having to worry about securing each one individually, right?
Z
Zas Garavan4:36
FortiAI Protect is fully built in and native into FortiGuard Labs. It's included with your FortiGuard subscription and provides things like AI app detection, preventing your employees from accessing things like ChatGPT, DeepSeek if you want them to.
J
Jaime Romero4:52
Yeah. Now, another theme that's been consistent across RSAs over the last 5 years or so has been SASE. Yep. Now, SASE, I know Fortinet's best known as a network security vendor, but it's grown a pretty impressive SASE stack. So talk about that and how you think that differs from what I consider an increasingly crowded market of vendors that are using the terminology SASE. Some actual SASE, some maybe not.
Z
Zas Garavan5:19
Yeah. Well, we are seeing a tremendous amount of momentum with our SASE, growing triple digits quarter over quarter. What we do differently with SASE is we invest in SASE like we did OS and our ASIC technology, and we're building our own cloud infrastructure to deliver our SASE and security services seamlessly to our customers. No one else is building a cloud infrastructure like we are. As a matter of fact, we have a large US retailer with 30,000 SASE users that have feature-for-feature parity with all of our competitors and are being cloud delivered through our FortiCloud infrastructure. We're just really excited about it.
J
Jaime Romero5:51
Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the really underappreciated aspects of the Fortinet portfolio is FortiSASE. I think it's had pretty good growth, but obviously a lot of the attention still is on the firewall side. But when you look at FortiSASE, you've got the traditional FortiGate product, the platform story that allows you to collect a lot of data. And we're here in front of the threat intel station, and that's been another really emerging aspect of what Fortinet does. So what's new on the threat intel side?
Z
Zas Garavan6:23
Yeah, so we just launched and released our new FortiGuard Labs threat intel report, and we're seeing a ton of trends happening in the market. We're seeing an acceleration of scanning across the internet, across 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. We're seeing exploit kits being easily packaged and available to people with less and less skills required to exploit them. So we're seeing a ton out there.
J
Jaime Romero6:56
Yeah. So I think the threat intel side of what you're doing in this AI-driven world of phishing and deepfakes becomes more and more important. I think more and more I hear companies talking about the deepfakes are getting indistinguishable, even on the phishing side they've gotten so good that trying to help users by coaching them isn't working anymore.
Z
Zas Garavan7:21
That's right. Yeah. And so anyway, you stepped into this role at Fortinet at a pretty interesting time, right? A lot's changing with AI and cloud. So what excites you most about the security, more importantly about Fortinet moving forward?
J
Jaime Romero7:35
Yeah, I'm really excited to be at Fortinet right now. I've been with Fortinet as I said over 6 years. We have a huge focus on transparency for our customers. We believe in responsible disclosure. 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.
Z
Zas Garavan7:58
Well, trust is the number one thing for security today. Right. So that's right. Absolutely. So we had trust, AI, SASE. Anything else you want to add?
J
Jaime Romero8:04
No, I think I'm really excited. I appreciate you having me. We're going to see great things from Fortinet this year.
Z
Zas Garavan8:11
Yeah. All right. Well I'm looking forward to seeing more. So thank you. So until we meet again, on behalf of Jamie Romero from the Fortinet stand at RSA 2025, I'm Zas Garavan from ZK Research. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time on the next episode of Zcast.