For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. This factor can impact your investment portfolio as well as help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

FOMO, or the fear of missing out, also plays a role in investing, particularly with tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Fortinet (FTNT) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to FTNT for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Fortinet's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Fortinet's main business drivers.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Fortinet, Inc. is a provider of network security appliances and Unified Threat Management (UTM) network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide.

Its solutions are designed to integrate multiple levels of security protection, including firewall, virtual private networking (VPN), antivirus, intrusion prevention (IP), web filtering, anti-spam and wide area network (WAN) acceleration.

Through its products and subscription services, the company provides integrated protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT security infrastructure. Its solutions incorporate application-specific integrated circuits, hardware architecture, operating system, and associated security and networking functions to defend against multiple categories of IT security attacks without impacting network performance.

The company’s network security gateways protect customer data, reduce security complexities and lower the total cost of ownership. Customers are able to implement their security policies on traffic between internal networks and the Internet, as well as between internal and private networks shared with partners.

Its flagship UTM solution consists of the FortiGate appliance product line and FortiGuard security subscription services.

Its products and services are sold through a network of more than 20,000 channel partners worldwide, including distributors, resellers, value-added resellers and managed service providers. The company caters to more than 450,000 customers worldwide that includes most of the Fortune 100 companies.

Fortinet reported revenues of $5.3 billion in 2023, which increased 20.1% from 2022. Product revenue was $1.93 billion, up 8.2% while Service revenue of $3.38 billion improved 28.1% year over year in 2023.

The company faces significant competition with Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, Qualys and Cisco in the network security as well as cloud security space.