PUNTA CANA, DR—Fortinet is bringing its partners’ engineering teams together for its Xperts Summit training event for the first time in a few years.

This year’s Xperts Summit is the first time the Americas International partner community has come together since the pre-pandemic era. The event went virtual for a few years and alternated between holding separate events in Latin America and Canada and bringing the two groups together under one roof. 

About 40 Canadian technical staff made the trip to the Dominican for the week, a hard request to make of any Canadian enjoying the typically balmy mid-January weather.

Originally labelled Xtreme, the event was initially designed to solve a unique challenge Fortinet faced, said Martin Hoz, senior vice president of pre-sales engineering for Americas International at Fortinet. At the time, the company felt a bit pigeonholed as an SMB-focused company that didn’t have the technology to meet enterprise needs. However, as it started to develop a broader stack of technologies, it saw the opportunity to do more in the enterprise space.

Hoz said that, at the time, Fortinet’s partner base knew its technology well but lacked the business language that made enterprise customers comfortable.

“We had to develop knowledge in the partner ecosystem so they could talk about the business challenges and the day-to-day issues of the people operating our technology,” he said.

Azim Makan, senior vice president of pre-sales systems engineering at Fortinet Canada, said Canada began participating in the event in 2011, just five years after it launched in Latin America. Last year, the company hosted a Canada-only version of the training conference.

Over the years, the event has developed its own culture, mixing entertainment and training. For example, in the Ultimate Fabric Challenge, teams of two participate in a “simulated real-life experience” to face and solve common customer issues. Any similarities to popular cage-fighting events in terms of that acronym are purely coincidental. 

Canada fared well in the competition, with Canadian teams taking four of the top 15 spots and moving on to the second round of the company’s competition.

“I couldn’t do that well myself anymore. You have to have so much knowledge of a number of our products to succeed in that event,” Makan quipped.

As this is an event for security-minded engineers, woe be to attendees who aren’t observing security best practices with their machines. Connect to the network with a malware infection or known vulnerability, and you may be greeted by a team of luchador mask-adorned “technicos” who bear a striking physical resemblance to the event’s MIS team.

Holding the events in winter in popular resort destinations like Punta Cana makes them quite popular with the company’s Canadian partners. Hoz said business owners initially balked at having their sales engineers at the event, particularly in a resort environment. In the early years, the company had a business-focused track for partner executives to attend. Still, Hoz said that was as much to establish with managers that their team would be using their time diligently and not hitting the beach instead of the lab.

Today, partner executives are still welcome at the event if they have the technical chops and certifications to earn a seat and the discipline to use it.

“By all means, come and enjoy the beach, but that’s not going to make our customers happier,” Hoz said. “We’re here because getting our partner engineers trained renders higher satisfaction at the customer level.”

While Xperts Summit is unique in its long-lived nature, other vendors make similar efforts to reach out to, train, and show appreciation to partner technical resources. Consider, for example, Barracuda’s recently announced partner sales engineer community and its evolving strategy around that outreach.