Major UK Municipality Turns To Fortinet for Advanced Protection

• Thursday, 19 October 2006

Comprehensive anti-virus, anti-spam and Web filtering protects Liverpool’s City Council departments from inappropriate content

LONDON, UK, October 19th, 2006 – Fortinet – the pioneer and leading provider of multi-threat security solutions – today announced the completion of a significant project with Liverpool Direct Limited (LDL), a joint venture between BT and Liverpool City Council, that will provide comprehensive web-filtering, anti-virus scanning, and anti-spam solution to a broad user base including more than 200 schools and Europe’s largest public sector contact centre.

With responsibility for ensuring the integrity of communications between Liverpool citizens/businesses and the City Council’s departments, LDL prides itself on pioneering the most technologically advanced and innovative solutions available. LDL provides access, connectivity and ICT services for Liverpool City Council, its partner organisations, schools and City Learning Centres.

Prior to the deployment of a suite of Fortinet devices, including the FortiGate-800™ enterprise –class multi-threat security appliance, these services were susceptible to more than 20,000 viruses a month. LDL needed comprehensive security that would protect the networks around the clock without degrading network performance, particularly at peak times. Working in real-time, the FortiGate™ devices ensure all the networks remain fully protected.

“The comprehensive anti-virus scanning offered by the FortiGate devices is second to none, and delivers superb protection on behalf of our incredibly large and increasing customer base,” said Mark Orford, Head of Technical Architecture and Strategy at LDL. “In addition to superb functionality and reliability, the FortiGate appliances offer an attractive and highly cost-effective per-device licensing model and are fully scalable to accommodate our ever-increasing needs.”

Fortinet is helping LDL uphold its duty to schools in both the Liverpool and Stockport areas by blocking inappropriate email and web content. Complementing the FortiGate systems, Fortinet’s FortiMail-400™ secure messaging system offers anti-spam capabilities to the schools and the FortiAnalyzer-500A™ systems allows LDL to carry out detailed reporting and analysis to understand where and when breaches of policy occur.

“By deploying Fortinet’s FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiAnalyzer systems, Liverpool Direct can reap the benefits of having integrated, scalable multi-threat security and a valuable analyzing tool with minimal fuss and maximum reward,” said Andre Stewart, vice president, Fortinet EMEA. “As Liverpool has found, the combination of these three systems provides a full-scale security platform to address the myriad of enterprise security, management and reporting requirements now and into the future. Fortinet’s scalable multi-threat security platform affords Liverpool Direct the option to adopt more functionality as the business grows and its needs change.”

For more information on Fortinet FortiGate™, FortiMail™, FortiAnalyzer™ and other solutions, please visit: www.fortinet.com/products.

About Liverpool Direct Limited (www.Liverpool.Gov.uk)

Liverpool City Council’s pioneering Joint Venture with BT began in July 2001 and is putting Liverpool at the forefront of local government. A combination of new working practices, deployment of the latest technology and real partnership working is helping to revolutionize how council services are delivered and firmly putting the customer at the heart of everything they do by radically improving service levels. Liverpool Direct is the largest Joint Venture partnership of its kind in the UK. No longer do citizens have to contact differing departments or be transferred from one person to another.

The contact centre successfully resolves nine out of every ten enquiries first time – a better record than any comparable call centre in the country. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. People can get in touch at any time – day or night.Information technology is an important part of the way of working for the benefit of citizens of Liverpool. More than 230 computers have been introduced at libraries across the city to make sure everyone has access to new technology. The pioneering £1.1million scheme, ‘C-Net’, is making sure every child in care can access vital information and communicate with others in similar circumstances through a dedicated website.Liverpool Direct Ltd is changing the way Liverpool works, improving services, giving residents more choice and making the Council easier to reach.

LDL have introduced a new electronic document management system for our Revenues and Benefits service. The service receives more than five million documents every year, and the new system is leading to a faster and improved council tax and benefits service for our customers with reduced turnaround times for council tax benefits of over 50%.LDL’s Human Resources and Payroll service centre is the first council-run ‘virtual’ information centre in the UK. It is the first contact point for all human resources enquiries, and has dramatically cut paperwork, reduced costs by £3million per annum and improved customer service. The experience and expertise they have built up means that LDL are now offering services to other public and private sector organizations.By working as a true partnership and resolving issues positively, Liverpool Direct has improved service levels and reduced costs. They are now giving customers and businesses the level of service they deserve. However there is still much for LDL to achieve, and they continue to grow and improve. These are exciting times in Liverpool.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)

Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated multi-threat security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam--providing customers a way to protect multiple threats as well as blended threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified eight times over by the ICSA (firewall, antivirus, IPSec, SSL, IDS, client antivirus detection, cleaning and antispyware). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.

# # #

For more information, please contact:

David Evans/Jen Manning
Cohesive Communications
+44 1291 626200
fortinet@cohesive.uk.com

This press release was distributed via SourceWire, a service from Daryl Willcox Publishing, on behalf of Cohesive Communications. For more information visit http://www.dwpub.com/pressreleasewires