Shares of computer security expert Fortinet (Nasdaq: FTNT) jumped as much as 19% in early Thursday trading. The bounce erased three months of weak trading and brought Fortinet to a 22% 52-week gain. The stock trades within roughly 10% of yearly highs set back in April.
It's all thanks to Fortinet's strong second-quarter results, published on Wednesday night. Strong demand for high-performance network security tools drove sales across all geographic segments. Yes, even Europe. Italy and Greece might be weak, but Fortinet makes up for that in healthier markets like France and the United Kingdom.
The company is currently the fourth-largest vendor of network security systems behind Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR), and Check Point Software Technologies (Nasdaq: CHKP). CEO Ken Xie claims that Fortinet is growing much faster than these rivals, which leads to the logical conclusion that Fortinet is gaining market share. As an example of this success, Fortinet beat Cisco in head-to-head bidding for an unnamed Fortune 50 retailer during the quarter.
Fortinet holds a performance edge over all these respectable competitors thanks to its unique hardware acceleration of security checks. The company even designs some of these chips in-house and keeps them close to the vest, making it harder for others to build equivalent products.
Network security is a hot button nowadays, thanks to a slew of very public hack-attacks and security snafus. By locking down the networks behind the scenes, Fortinet participates in mobile computing in a big way. Learn more about this trillion-dollar revolution and how even fringe players stand to collect huge paydays -- this free report will get you right up to speed.
