Seccom Global got underway this week with a portfolio of managed security services based on Fortinet's unified-threat-management device. Richard Stiennon, former chief marketing officer of Fortinet and onetime Gartner analyst, is founder and CEO of the new company, which also offers backup and disaster-recovery services.

"At Fortinet, I became enamored with the equipment," says Stiennon, who expects the device-maker's UTM gear to be the foundation for Seccom Global's firewall, VPN, antispam, antivirus, content filtering and intrusion-prevention services. (Compare UTM products.) 

Seccom Global is an independent venture based in Burlingame, Calif. It's supported by Seccom Networks, a privately held managed-security-services provider in Sydney, Australia, that also uses Fortinet's UTM product as the basis for its services. Seccom Networks has roughly 200 business customers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Seccom Global will provide monitoring, maintenance and response for customers and "help them establish policies, maintain them, and generate reports and alerts," Stiennon says.

To date, Seccom Global has received less than half a million dollars in funding, provided by Stiennon and Seccom Networks; additional fundraising is underway.

The start-up is establishing a security operations center (SOC) in Burlingame and plans to hire a core team of about 15 people, mostly engineers, Stiennon says. The company also plans to establish a backup SOC in Atlanta or Boulder, Colo.