Fortinet Raises $156M in IPO

Share prices then rocketed to $17 when they became available, and were hovering just under $17 by mid-morning.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security vendor raised over $156 million via the IPO.

Fortinet had been expected to price its IPO between $9 and $11 per share.

Fortinet, which develops unified threat management solutions, began trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq stock market under the ticker symbol FTNT.

The company's IPO of 12.5 million shares includes about 5.8 million shares being offered by the company and 6.7 million being offered by selling stockholders.

Fortinet's flagship UTM offering consists of the FortiGate appliance product line and the FortiGuard security subscription service. Together, they provide a wide range of security and networking functions, including firewall, VPN, antivirus, intrusion prevention, Web filtering, antispam and WAN acceleration.

The FortiGate appliances are available in various models that can protect companies from small businesses and branch offices to large enterprises and service providers.

The company also offers a series of FortiManager appliances which allow customers to manage the configuration and security functions of multiple FortiGate appliances from a centralized console, FortiAnalyzer appliances which enable collection, analysis and archiving of content and log data.

According to Fortinet's prospectus, the company had a 15.4 percent share of the UTM appliance market in the second quarter of 2009, based on IDC reports. IDC forecasts the UTM market will grow to $3.5 billion by 2012, up from $1.3 billion in 2007, making it the fastest-growing part of the network security market, Fortinet said in the perspective.

As of September 30, Fortinet had shipped over 475,000 appliances to over 5,0000 channel partners and 75,000 end users worldwide, the company said.

That has resulted in total revenue for the company of $211.8 million for all of 2008, up from $123.5 million in 2006. For the first nine months of fiscal 2009, total revenue for Fortinet was $181.4 million, up from $152.7 million during the same period of 2008.

Fortinet also wrote in its perspective that 37 percent of its business comes from the Americas, 37 percent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and 26 percent from the Asia-Pacific area.

Fortinet also wrote that it depends on channel partners for substantially all of its revenue.