Fortinet has announced the winners of its annual channel awards. The ceremony took place during Fortinet’s largest Global Partner Conference to date, on a cruise in the Caribbean from 9 to 13 January.

At the event, Fortinet recognised the outstanding achievements delivered by its global distributors and resellers. The company also launched its Connected UTM Platform designed to enable businesses to simplify their complex networks, improve management, ensure seamless policy enforcement and reduce TCO.

This year’s award winners included:

* Top resellers – ACP (Austria – EMEA); Nicstech (Korea – APAC); CDW (U.S); Telefonica (Brazil – LATAM);

* Top distributors – Veracomp (Poland – EMEA); SCSK (Japan – APAC); Ingram Micro (U.S); Grupo Dice (Mexico – LATAM);

* VIP partners – DCI (France – EMEA); NTT Communications (Japan – APAC); Security Confidence (U.S); Secure Sense (Canada); NCT Informatica (Brazil – LATAM); and

* Rookies of the year – DataCentrix (South Africa – EMEA); Pacific Intech (Malaysia – APAC); Enterprise Integration (U.S); Neo Secure (Chile – LATAM).

“This year’s Global Partner Conference was our largest so far, with over 1,300 partners and distributors in attendance,” says Patrice Perche, senior VP of International Sales and Support for Fortinet.

“In 2013, we reached an important milestone by replacing Juniper as the third largest network security vendor worldwide according to IDC, and this success is in large part due to our partners’ commitment and execution.

“The conference was the opportunity to congratulate our partners for their significant achievements, as well as share with them our latest technology innovations and business strategies in order to equip them with solutions that address the increasing and rapidly changing requirements of our end customers.”

The launch of Fortinet’s Connected UTM Platform was one of the key technology highlights of the event. By integrating the flexibility of Fortinet’s UTM appliances, wireless access points, wireless WAN extender and switching products, businesses can benefit from unparalleled policy and access control, threat protection and business continuity.

Alongside this launch, the company also highlighted the benefits of its FortiGate D-series network security appliances, using Fortinet’s latest custom NP6 ASIC. Initially announced in late 2013 with the launch of the FortiGate-3700D data centre firewall, the D-series has been designed to disrupt the enterprise security market, delivering cutting edge network speed with state of the art network security.

New models of the D-series will come up this year to address a variety of enterprise deployment scenarios – including campus edge, data centre or even branch office – redefining the standard for price per gigabit protected, price per port density, power dissipation per gigabit and space per gigabit.

These performance improvements lower both capital and operational costs for customers while providing the highest performance and lowest latency available.