Fortinet wants Calgary cybersecurity hub to be a home base for Western Canadian partners

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Fortinet recently made a pretty substantial bet in Western Canada, opening a new $30 million cybersecurity innovation hub in downtown Calgary.

But what interested me about the announcement wasn’t so much the building itself as what Fortinet plans to do with it, and particularly what it plans to do with partners.

The company wants the Calgary facility to become something of a home base for its Western Canadian ecosystem. Partners will be able to bring customers into the facility, hold their own meetings and events there, work with Fortinet engineers to model and demonstrate customer environments, and eventually even use dedicated touchdown and content creation space.

There’s also a distinctly Western Canadian element to the investment. Calgary puts Fortinet closer to a large concentration of critical infrastructure and operational technology customers, and the company sees a growing opportunity for traditional IT partners to participate in the OT security market, although, as we’ll hear, there are some important differences that partners need to understand.

To talk about why Fortinet chose Calgary, how partners can take advantage of the new centre, the convergence of IT and OT security, and the company’s bigger ambitions for the cybersecurity ecosystem in Western Canada, I am joined by Gord Phillips, Fortinet’s Western Canada chief.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Gord Phillips.

Gord, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Gord Phillips: Thanks, Rob.

Robert Dutt: Let’s start with the whys here. Fortinet has obviously been doing business in Western Canada for a long time and hasn’t had a facility like this one. So I guess: Why this centre? Why Calgary? And why now?

Gord Phillips: Yeah, there’s a few things. Fortinet really started, kind of, in Canada. Our first products were designed and engineered in Burnaby, actually, 26 years ago. So when we founded the company — when I say “we,” I was not one of the founders — we actually built the first product there, and it still is the location of our largest R&D centre in the whole wide world.

So we’ve just kind of taken advantage of that all the time from the West. We’ve been able to obviously grow the market very large because we have that in our backyard. That’s made a big difference. So we’ve got a very large customer base in the West.

Calgary was really interesting for a number of reasons. One is critical infrastructure. The energy sector is such a big part of critical infrastructure across Canada and even globally. We do a lot of unique work there around the operational technology security side. So Calgary was logical from that perspective.

As you can imagine, it’s hard to attract people to move to the Lower Mainland. Fortinet is growing very fast. We add between 20 and 30 per cent more people every year to Fortinet. To get those developers and to get the right people around the support side and the professional services side, it’s very hard to keep that level of growth in B.C.

B.C. is a very mature tech centre, so lots of the big companies are competing for that talent. Even though the schools are great at turning out talent, it’s just hard to maintain that growth level.

So we looked at where we could put another office. We’ve got a centre in Ottawa that works a lot with FedGov and does a lot of our global training program. We looked at where we could put one in Canada and looked at a few different locations, but we kept coming back to Calgary for a number of reasons.

The biggest thing was proximity to Burnaby, so proximity to our teams there. It’s easy to build those satellite teams here because they’re only an hour and a half away, really close time-zone-wise. There’s a whole bunch of advantages like that.

Calgary is a booming tech market. There’s a lot of tech talent in town. With the aerospace and defence industry investing in Calgary, with some of the big startups that have come in, Calgary is really finding its own in that tech world, and the post-secondaries are supporting that.

So we see this availability of talent right now. That’s really, really important for our growth and for what we’re doing. That was another big factor.

And then supporting that critical infrastructure industry — that’s such a high-growth vertical for us — it made a lot of sense to just focus on Calgary.

Robert Dutt: What does having the facility there let you do now that you either couldn’t do before, or couldn’t do nearly as well?

Gord Phillips: I think there’s a few things. One is optionality of where our solutions are based to serve our customers.

What you really want anytime you’re looking at data sovereignty is three locations, kind of a two-plus-one scenario. So having Calgary allows us to put a lot of those products, data, all that kind of thing in another location in Canada to serve our Canadian clients a little bit better.

The other piece of it, outside of data sovereignty — when I say data sovereignty, I’m not just talking about the information we have with our customers, but even how we handle customer support tickets. We can actually handle all those within Canada.

We’ve got multiple support teams in Canada. We can keep that ticket or that data in Canada. So we can support the customer right from the beginning to the end through a support process without data leaving the country. That’s a big piece of it.

You’ll see some announcements from us around managed services as well, working with service providers and some of the things we’re doing on our own. Being in Canada and having that extra location has certainly helped that along as well. So that was a big piece of it.

Anytime we look at where we’re going to put one of our FortiCloud points of presence, which supports our FortiSASE business and all the other pieces around it, having our solutions close to the customer is very critical for us globally.

Our executive has invested heavily to make sure that we have offices in strategic locations that we own, where we can provide our solutions to our customers faster. So, less latency. And obviously, you’re less dependent if there’s a technical problem or any sort of global problem. The more individual locations you have shores all that up and makes sure that the failover is here.

So this being our second location in Western Canada, we’ve got a really cool ecosystem being built from a tech availability perspective for our customers and partners as well.

Robert Dutt: Let’s look at this a bit from the partner perspective. What’s the expectation around what channel partners across Western Canada will be able to do in terms of interacting with the centre? What do you see partners being able to do there in Calgary?

Gord Phillips: I think that’s a great question, and I’ve been very lucky. The company’s given me a lot of leeway on this.

I come from the channel and have been in IT sales my whole life, so I had a bit of a different vision on what I wanted.

One of the things I love about Fortinet is we have one of the largest sales teams in Canada. What does that mean? It means our partners don’t have to be experts on everything because we have account managers to go on those calls with those partners.

In Calgary alone, I think we have 11 account teams. In Alberta, we have almost 20. In B.C., a similar size. We have account teams in Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well.

We’re very fortunate in that our partners come to us and we can go in the door with them and be that cybersecurity expert or that subject matter expert for them.

Calgary has enabled us to do something even bigger around that. As we build up the space, first of all, we’ve got a beautiful conference floor that we’ve already had a number of partners utilize. They host QBRs there, but they also can host customer meetings there, and we don’t charge them for that currently.

They can bring in their customers and host a session in our space. It’s a great space. It can hold kind of 80 people seated with their laptops out, or a hundred and some if you want to do it reception-style. I was going to say cocktail-style — I’m just thinking of cocktails.

So there are some neat things they can do around activating that space. That’s the first thing we were able to leverage.

The second thing, as we moved into the space, we’re showing off some of our technologies. It’s not that we have to do an EBC down in Sunnyvale necessarily, or out to Burnaby. We have a lot of that tech working here.

We have an SE lab here on the fifth floor where our SEs will actually build out the customer’s environment or the prospect’s environment and show: This is what you’re running now. This is how we get to where you want to be. And these are all the tools that are part of that.

Or if you add this technology, this is how we can leverage your data, this is how we can make you more resilient, those kinds of things.

So we can show them live. It’s not a PowerPoint presentation and a whiteboard. We can have hands on keyboards here, which is really, really cool.

The next phase of it, as we build out the briefing centre, is I actually have a partner touchdown area. This is going to be kind of neat, and we’ll talk about how the partners will engage in that environment soon.

A lot of resellers gave up offices during COVID, so it’s a place for them to book a meeting room, actually book a little content-creator studio if they’d like to for podcasts and that kind of thing, as well as they can just book a desk and work out of the office for the afternoon, for the day, for whatever they need.

If they’re downtown and need a place to work out of between meetings, instead of being in a loud coffee shop, they can actually have a place to work out of that’s got a proper cubicle and whatnot, and be able to use the facilities and be closer to the Fortinet team. That’s really what we want in the end.

There are some great activations around that, and it’ll be bookable off an app. They’ll be able to request it, get a quick notification that it’s approved and they get Cube Three, and they’ll get a digital fob and be able to scan in on their own after they’ve done the agreements and all that kind of stuff.

For partners that are in from out of town, or for partners that have one sales guy here because they’re based out of Toronto or whatever, they’ll have a spot they can work out of when they need it.

And again, no charge to our partners around that. We’re trying to really make sure the channel feels part of our family, too.

Robert Dutt: It sounds pretty flexible for everything from, as you described, that kind of solo salesperson who needs a place to make a couple of calls for a few hours, through to helping a single customer through a problem or PoC a solution, through to — when you describe an 80- or 100-person room — a lunch-and-learn or a cocktail soirée to talk to prospects.

Gord Phillips: Yep, that’s exactly what it’s designed as, Rob.

The whole idea is to make it a community hub and make sure our partners can feel like it’s theirs, that they can activate it, they can leverage it, they can use it.

Robert Dutt: And what kind of flexibility is there in terms of, especially when they’re bringing customers in, how those are run?

Sometimes I think partners are going to want to bring in a customer and hand it off to the technical folks at Fortinet who are there to walk through a solution. And sometimes they’re going to want to have more direct control of that situation themselves.

Gord Phillips: Yeah, we’ve done both, and we’ve also done some that are co-branded. We’ve done events with a partner and AWS, or a partner and Claroty, and other vendors as well.

So we’re pretty flexible on that. Obviously, we’d like some Fortinet involvement if possible, but I get that that’s not always available.

Certainly when they’re doing things like an off-site meeting or whatever, I’m just happy they’re using the building. I know they’re bringing customers to the lobby, which has our logo, and I’m happy that they’re using our conference centre that has our logo.

The location of the building is amazing. Making sure they see it in the middle of downtown and people are leveraging it, they think of us first. That’s really the intent.

Robert Dutt: Does a facility like this potentially level the playing field for a smaller regional partner?

A large integrator has its own labs, its own specialists, its own demo space. But especially when you describe that VAR or MSP who maybe gave up their space during COVID, or is a post-COVID organization, they probably don’t have those kinds of facilities to bring people into.

It sounds like they can effectively borrow some of the scale and expertise of Fortinet by using the centre here.

Gord Phillips: It certainly is. I think it does level-set some of that.

I think the access to the team has always been there regardless of partner size. And that access to that team and being able to use the facility at no cost, I think, is a big piece of it because they don’t have to have a big marketing budget to leverage a space that can hold those kinds of people. We can be really thoughtful about it.

The other thing, too, is what we’re finding as kind of a tertiary action of that is we’ve got partners that are on committees and groups in the tech industry. There’s one around AI, there’s one around data builders, there are all these different industries that people are involved in, and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re always looking for space. Can we run our event there the evening of the 20-whatever? Can we leverage the space there?”

So we’re exposing brand-new people to that as well.

And same kind of thing: Typically those are not the big companies that are supporting those events. There are a bunch of these small ones that I’m not going to say we’ve never heard of, but aren’t as active. We can raise that profile, I hope, and really see them change the business.

I think there are a lot of smaller businesses, too, particularly around OT. We’re finding lots of the partners are a mom-and-pop shop, I’ll call it for lack of a better term, where there are only a handful of people. They’re looking for that kind of space, too, to be able to come in and see the technology. So we’re able to leverage that as well.

Robert Dutt: You’ve spent a lot of time working with customers and partners across Western Canada. I’m curious to get your thoughts on how the security market is different from what you guys see across the country, either to the West or to the East.

Gord Phillips: Good question. I think a few things are common, and then there’s a lot that’s unique.

A few things that are common: Canada is the second-most-targeted country in the world when it comes to cyberattacks.

A lot of our public sector — because we have public healthcare and public support for education — holds a lot of data, and that data is what those bad actors are looking for. So all of Canada is a target.

If we look at areas like critical infrastructure, that’s a big target out West. Obviously municipalities and smart cities everywhere are targeted, but because of the energy sector, and because we have big power-generation companies out West — obviously Quebec does as well — those are heavily targeted.

If you look at the financial sector in Toronto, Central Canada, heavily targeted. So there are some really unique spots where there are places of focus that the bad actors can go after. We definitely see those.

And if you look at other spots, like we do a lot of work up in the territories, there’s a large public-sector customer base because they have to provide those services to the citizens, and they’re constantly under attack.

So it really is unique in how they do it. Canada’s got a large public sector, and that really gets hit a lot. The West has a large OT customer space. It gets hit a lot.

There are some really interesting unique things that come out of the market in the different regions because of that.

Robert Dutt: Especially with how tuned into OT and critical infrastructure you are because of that focus in Calgary, I’m curious: Can you help me through what that opportunity looks like when I’m coming at it from the viewpoint of a traditional IT channel partner?

Is there an opportunity for an MSP or VAR that’s historically secured enterprise IT to get into that space? Or does it require a different set of skills and expertise and experience?

Gord Phillips: I think a little bit of both, Rob.

People are trying to leverage that data. Ten times more devices than people are coming online. So what we’re seeing is this massive pool of data that’s available that all the companies that own that data want to leverage to lower operating costs, to make their environment safer, to do remote monitoring, to allow third-party access, to get their cost of support down.

There are all these advantages of leveraging that data, but what it requires is connecting that data that has traditionally been air-gapped.

So a bunch of the skills that I would say we kind of — I’m not going to say took for granted — but things that we did where we connected businesses to the Internet 25 or 30 years ago, and we’ve scaled up that connectivity over the years, and now we’re somewhere where we’ve got lots of data and it’s very fast from the IT side and we can monitor so many things, they’re just turning on in OT.

So it’s definitely a spot where people can leverage all those skills.

Where I think the change is happening is around the AI side. I’m seeing these little AI companies come out.

When I say little, I’m thinking of one of them right now in my head, a guy I went to high school with. He’s really a one-man shop with a couple of consultants, and he’s got a great practice around the costing of power on the grid.

It requires a whole bunch of connectivity and a whole bunch of data that his software ingests, or his LLM ingests, and then he can provide certain monitoring systems and feedback back to the power-generation companies.

So you’ve got these little companies that are smaller shops coming out of this AI world now that are providing tremendous value — as much value as probably some of the big companies around the consulting world have provided — because they’ve made something specific that helps that industry.

So I think companies from all sides benefit from this. It doesn’t matter if you’re the big consulting companies, if you’re an established SI, right down to someone who’s got a great idea that they’re going to vibe-code an app and release that to the public and make some money off it.

I think it does benefit the whole realm.

Robert Dutt: It seems like, in many ways — along with AI, obviously — the word of the current time in the channel scene is the idea of “ecosystem,” that it doesn’t always have to be one partner answering everything.

I guess it begs the question: Around OT, is there any place that a traditional IT partner should not try to go it alone and should look to build connections to those who’ve been there, done that?

Gord Phillips: Yeah. I would say building connections with the control vendors is really critical.

I think that having the Honeywells, Rockwells, Siemens and ABBs, and all those companies as somebody you’re talking to, to understand what they’re doing, is really important.

They’re in deep in those customers, and making sure you have some relationship there so that the agenda that you’re working on is compatible with the agenda they’re working on, I think, is really important.

When a customer tells us that they’re going to use Control Vendor X to monitor their environment, it’s probably not a good idea to try to sell against that because this is the mission-critical family jewels of the organization.

But I get that you want to do business there, so figure out how you attach to that safely would be my advice, and how you co-sell with that as opposed to potentially selling against it, because that will cause friction for sure.

I think that relationship with control vendors is very, very critical.

Robert Dutt: We’ve seen other technology boundaries disappear over time. I’m thinking back to voice and data becoming one, until the point where most partners stopped thinking of them as separate businesses and became kind of an overall networking business. And, oh, by the way, we can add security onto that, and, oh, by the way, we can add this.

Do you think we eventually head towards something like that between IT and OT security, where eventually customers simply expect their security provider to understand both of those worlds and treat them as similar terms?

Gord Phillips: Great question. It’s funny, our telephone and camera business is booming right now because there are so many people that have gotten out of the game.

And for us, you’re right: It’s a network-attached device, and you know what attaches to our switches. So it made sense that we had those endpoints of cameras and phones, and that business is growing like crazy for us. It’s funny how it cycles, for sure.

But to answer your question, I think IT and OT will merge at some point. And again, I think it comes down to that data layer.

Companies are really going to analyze and dictate how their data is leveraged because it’s very, very valuable.

It’s valuable to the company because they can take that data and, like I said, drop operational costs or find ways that make sense to leverage something new, or know where to grow. There are so many things you can do with that data.

It’s also very valuable, though, from the threat-actor perspective. If I can steal Company X’s core sample data, I can go and sell that to a competitor and make money on it and say this is a great area for them to develop an asset in, for example.

So that data is valuable. And I think because IT has dealt with cybersecurity incidents for so long, they will get more engaged on that side.

The challenge is OT is really holding their cards close. They want to control what’s allowed. They cannot afford that system to go down. They don’t want that patch day of the week where things happen.

But I think they’ll both find a way to work well together.

I think most of those organizations over the next three years will find ways to merge a lot of that data layer.

I think there are obviously still very unique pieces of the business that they’ll run separately, but it’s more on the operations side. I think the architecture side will become a lot more common in how they work together.

I think cybersecurity and the incident planning and all that will come together very tightly, and they’ll have a proper understanding of how best to manage that.

So there’ll be a management layer, almost, that’s common, and then how they operate will be unique.

Robert Dutt: The centre obviously isn’t just about selling technology. There’s also training, skills development and that sort of thing going on. That’s a big part of it.

I don’t know if there’s anywhere globally right now that you could say the skills-gap situation around security is good, but I’m curious: Can you give me a little bit of a feel for where the cybersecurity skills situation in Western Canada is right now? And particularly, where are partners feeling the shortage most acutely at the moment?

Gord Phillips: I think there are a few things that are tough, and we’re hoping that — we’re building a training facility in the Calgary office. It should be done here in the next four or five weeks.

I was just down there for a tour this morning. We’ve got the walls up, we’ve got the framing all done. We’re getting closer.

There’s a skills shortage. And at first, we saw this great little dip because people started leveraging AI to support some of that. It didn’t last very long.

So we got back up to that point where we have this skills shortage still being very relevant.

I know people keep saying, “Are we all going to lose our jobs because of AI?” Our modelling’s not showing that right now. People still need this cybersecurity talent.

I feel like Canada’s done a pretty good job of training cybersecurity professionals, and people that want to get into the industry certainly have lots of options for training, from free to master’s degrees and things like that, of course, post-secondary degrees.

So there are a lot of options.

If I look at what the schools are building in Alberta and B.C. specifically, because I’ve worked with a lot of them in the last few months, we definitely see cyber talent increasing every year.

But we also see that need at a similar pace. So we’re not really winning. We’re not getting ahead of the curve. Maybe slightly, but not by much.

We’re hoping that with centres like we’re building here in Calgary, we can upskill some existing workers from different industries and turn them into cybersecurity professionals to help shore that gap up.

I think the OT side, again, comes into effect there because a lot of these plants are in very remote sites.

We’re working with one of our forestry and lumber companies, and they have these data shacks at all their different mill and cutting sites. The problem is, when there’s an attack, it’s Friday at 8 p.m. when the IT guy’s gone home.

So how does this operator go, “Okay, everything’s blinking red. Something’s wrong. What do I do?”

What’s good now is we’re able to leverage things like agentic AI to, in plain English, ask those questions and help them get to a resolution without having to be that IT professional.

That’s great for half of the problems, but the other half are a lot more complex, and that’s where we need that skill set to come up.

So you need guys that understand the problem-solving, the technical side of the house, that kind of piece.

I think we have an opportunity right now where we can kind of shift people from what they were thinking.

If vibe coding is going to take away developers, maybe we can convince them to be cybersecurity professionals. Come and try some courses and see.

So the industry as a whole, it’s not going to shrink the amount of people that are required, but maybe different technologies and pockets are.

And I think we’ve seen that in the past, where there are certain things we did years and years ago. Token Ring networking is a great example. Nobody’s running those anymore, and boy, some of us were really smart in that space.

So now you just take those skills and transfer them to something else. That’s really the idea.

Robert Dutt: How much of the mission here is developing skills and people that ultimately wind up out in the partner ecosystem rather than necessarily at Fortinet itself?

Gord Phillips: Not just the partner ecosystem, the customer ecosystem too. But that’s a big part of it.

There’s a young man I met a couple of years ago at the Calgary Stampede. He was working security at the Cowboys tent, and he was like, “Hey, Gord, I heard you worked for a cybersecurity company. Wanted to introduce myself. I’m thinking about going into cybersecurity, and I’m in computer engineering now. Any advice?”

I’m like, “Yeah, take our free courses. See if you like it, and then go that path.”

Not too many months ago, about four months ago, he told me he got an internship at one of our customers. He’s interviewing at one of our partners right now.

So he did a four-month internship, now he’s interviewing at a partner, and he’s got tons of cybersecurity experience and training now from that process.

That’s what I want to see, is we can get some really smart young people into the industry.

We can work on reskilling. Our Fortinet Veterans program is part of that reskilling, and lots of them end up at a partner as well.

So a lot of it is building that talent so that our partners can help those customers out.

I think a few things that partners are doing, and are doing very, very well, is — cybersecurity is hard. It’s not an easy thing. It’s daunting.

If you’re a big company and you’ve got a cybersecurity team of eight, that’s great.

If you’re a restaurant group or a retail store and there are 20 locations, your IT guy half the time is also your CFO. He doesn’t have the time, or she doesn’t have the time, to be that cybersecurity expert.

Then they need those managed services, and they need partners to help shore that up. So they turn to their partner and they say, “Hey, can you help me out?”

I think that’s where we’re going to see a lot of that growth, with the services that the partners are offering to those midsize businesses, small and midsize businesses in particular.

It becomes very, very sticky, very, very important, because cybersecurity is not easy and everybody’s under attack all the time.

That’s the constant, is that you’re always at risk. Cybersecurity awareness is a big piece of that, and the training is a big piece of that, and it’s daunting. It’s daunting for a company.

The partners are the ones that instill that confidence that we can operate the business, that we can stay running because we’ve got Partner X behind us, and this guy that we work with is super smart and he’s gone through and made sure that we’re as resilient as possible.

And if there is a problem, they also know who to call. They’re going to call that partner and say, “Hey, something happened. I can’t get on my laptop.”

Having that expertise to come in and get them through that very challenging time is really important.

Robert Dutt: Thinking across the whole cybersecurity ecosystem — the tech ecosystem, even — we have a few markets across the country that have kind of planted a flag as national, or international even, hubs of excellence around different aspects of technology.

I’m curious: As you build this out, do you see an opportunity to help make Calgary a cybersecurity centre of excellence for Western Canada, bring together customers, partners, the educational system, basically the whole ecosystem?

Gord Phillips: Thank you for reading my dreams, Rob.

I think we have something pretty unique in Calgary, in that we’ve got a ton of engineers just because of the energy industry for years.

We’ve got schools that have done a great job of building that resource over time. Our engineering schools and programs have done a great job of kicking that out.

I feel that cybersecurity is very adjacent to that.

I look at some of the investments that Lufthansa and De Havilland and all those companies are building out east of town in the aerospace park, what they’ve done around the industry. Aerospace and defence is growing like crazy.

We’ve got a drone manufacturer that I met with a couple of weeks ago out there that’s making some of the technology for defence drones.

You’ve got Garmin up in Cochrane and how much growth they’ve had. There’s so much interest here right now.

And the schools are really good at adapting to that. And they’ve had to.

We’ve heard from all the schools that the financial pressures — they built a lot of infrastructure to support foreign students, and of course the program changed and there are fewer foreign students now.

So they’ve got to find ways to change their investment to support what the next phase of growth is. And I think that’s technology here in Calgary.

We’re getting great support and interest from all the post-secondaries of all different levels around that in particular.

And we’ve got a great program to support them. We create curriculum. We provide guest lecturers.

Having that expertise here in Calgary means that we can participate in that.

We just did a scholarship a couple of weeks ago that we announced with U of C, a five-year scholarship program that we’ve announced with U of C to help develop that as well and get our name in front of them.

The ultimate idea at the end, Rob, is they come work for us. They come work for our partners. They come work for our customers that utilize our technology because they’re already Fortinet-educated when they come out of post-secondary.

So we support them with labs, guest lecturing, curriculum, you name it. We’ve got a really great program around that.

Robert Dutt: Okay, let’s wrap this up by continuing to read your dreams a little bit and look a little bit further out even.

Five years from now, what would be happening at the centre for you to look back at it and go, “You know what? We really got the most out of this investment. We really rocked this one.”

Gord Phillips: That’s a great question.

We bought the building two years ago, and we’ve been renovating it, working on it quite a bit.

Phase one of my crazy dream was I wanted to put a cowboy hat up on it during Stampede. I don’t know if you ever saw the 27-foot inflatable cowboy hat that I put up every year during Stampede, because we overlook the parade.

We do a lot of things around Stampede and supporting the community. We support one of the chuckwagon drivers for part of Stampede, and we do a lot of fun things around the centre.

Again, we run a big event, bring our clients and partners in for a pancake breakfast, and just try to make it as fun as possible.

So that was kind of my first thing, was put us on the map.

We put some great signs on the building. We put a cowboy hat on the building. We kind of did something unique to put us on the map so that everybody would say, “Who the heck’s Fortinet?”

So that was the first thing.

Now it’s about executing on leveraging that awareness.

Making sure partners are bringing their customers in. Making sure that our customers are utilizing the centre and learning more. Making sure the public is more cyber-aware.

We’re actually going to be putting some screens on the outside of the building to provide awareness around what cyber threats hit Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the energy sector, the municipalities as well, what hits post-secondary.

We’re going to have these screens that change every 20 seconds. Our FortiGuard research team is working on it for me right now, where that information will be out there just to make people think twice.

We did a big program in October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month, where we’ve got our cybersecurity awareness program going out to K-12 as well.

The idea is, as early as possible, educating everyone around that.

So what I’m hoping is, in the next two years, we build a large awareness around cybersecurity in the market so that everybody thinks cyber-first.

Like, how do I be safe when I interact with — is this really Rob on the video call with me that’s asking me for my bank information? Those kinds of things.

How do we make sure people are as prepared as possible to take on cyber challenges? And that has to start at a young age.

So that’s a big piece of it.

The next phase is our customer experience lab that we’re building on the top floor and what we’re doing around critical infrastructure with the control vendors.

We’re partnering with a number of the control vendors up there to show in real time and in real life that this is how you protect that pump jack. This is how you protect that windmill. This is how you protect that water-treatment plant. This is how you protect those coolers in your grocery stores.

When they go down, this is how the alerts happen. This is how you set up third-party access to your critical infrastructure.

We’re going to show some best practices, again, to make us as cyber-resilient as possible.

So I would say phase one is awareness. Phase two is resiliency.

We’re going to invest in some other managed services and whatnot that we’ll be able to deliver from our Calgary office. So again, as close as possible.

We already have professional services here. I’m working with our FortiGuard threat-intelligence team on adding some resources here as well, so that we have some of those big threat researchers looking at the market closely.

One of the coolest things about working here — and I’m just sidetracking here, Rob, so get me back on track in a minute — is because we have this big office in Burnaby and this great office in Calgary, we’re customers to all those businesses in the region.

When we fill up for gas, or when I buy electronics, or when I go to the grocery store, those are customers.

So they mean something different when they’re the place you go to, right?

It impacts you in a different way, and there’s a different level of pride about servicing those customers, knowing that you’re helping operate their business.

That’s a big deal to me. It’s a big deal to our whole team.

So I think there’s a great benefit from that right across Canada.

Like I said: awareness, to building that resilience, and now innovation.

We’re going to innovate some things here. I don’t know what that looks like today.

I can tell you that our teams move so fast and it changes so quickly, and the ideas come out of everywhere.

We have the most patents of any cybersecurity company, and we have the most cybersecurity AI patents of the next two companies behind us as well.

And it’s interesting because there are sales guys who have technical patents because they’ve thought of something and have talked to our patent team, and we said, “Yes, we’re going to develop that.”

So you don’t know where the next idea is going to come from.

As we get more people here, we’ve got a great community building in our Calgary office, but as it gets bigger and bigger, the discussions change at the water cooler. The ideas that come out are very different.

One of our team in our office on a regular basis will come by and say, “Hey, look what I built on the weekend.”

Again, AI has enabled this whole new thing where we can all be an expert when we don’t know how to be.

“Look what I built on the weekend. Look at the information I’m getting out of this dashboard.”

And you go, “Okay, we can leverage that. That’s really unique. How do you apply that to your clients in this sector?”

And now it’s created a whole side project that we’ve got one of our dev teams working on.

So the innovation becomes that next piece over and above that.

The whole idea under it, though, is I just want people to be comfortable with Fortinet and making sure they’re leveraging us for that.

We’re really open to ideas. We’re very creative ourselves, but the best ideas come from a customer’s need or a partner’s need.

Or a partner says, “I’ve seen this common trend in three or four of my customers. You guys should do this.”

And then we can take that away and say, “We have an idea of how we address it,” bring it back to the partner, and they create a practice around that.

That’s my ultimate goal.

I think that’s the stuff I want to see, and we’re seeing that more and more starting to develop here now.

Robert Dutt: All right. Big dreams and big goals.

I wish you all good luck in reaching those and realizing them, and thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through what you’re doing today, where that’s going, and the new Calgary facility.

Gord Phillips: Well, thanks so much for having me. This has been really great. It’s good chatting with you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Gord Phillips from Fortinet. I’d like to thank Gord for taking the time and, of course, thank you for listening.

A few things that stood out for me from that conversation.

First, there’s a surprisingly practical partner story behind this investment. Fortinet isn’t just inviting partners to come admire its new building.

Partners can use the meeting space and event space, bring customers in, tap Fortinet’s technical resources and labs, and, as the facility continues to build out, even use it as a place to work when they’re in Calgary.

For smaller partners in particular, that’s an opportunity to borrow some of the facility’s expertise and scale that they might not be able to justify building themselves.

Second, the OT opportunity is worth watching.

Western Canada’s concentration of energy and critical infrastructure makes it particularly important here, and Gord expects IT and OT security to increasingly converge.

But his advice to traditional IT partners was also important: Don’t assume you can simply walk into an OT environment and take over.

Relationships with the control-system vendors and OT specialists already trusted by those customers are going to matter here.

And finally, Fortinet’s ambition for Calgary clearly extends beyond one building.

Training, partnerships with post-secondary institutions, new OT demonstration capabilities, additional services and threat-intelligence resources are all part of a broader effort to make the facility — and potentially Calgary itself — a cybersecurity hub for Western Canada.

If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to or follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, all the usual suspects. And, of course, ratings and reviews are always appreciated.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.