CRN Channel Awards Australia: Finalist Q&A with Dale Nachman, Regional Director, Australia and New Zealand at Fortinet
Dale Nachman talks about being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards Australia
Dale Nachman is regional director for Australia and New Zealand at Fortinet, leading the company’s strategic direction across the region and strengthening partner and customer engagement. With more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Dale brings extensive expertise in business leadership, sales, and technology. He has been with Fortinet since 2018, including more than five years as country manager for Australia, where he led a growing team and built strong channel partnerships. Dale has a deep understanding of the cybersecurity challenges facing organisations across the region.
What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards Australia this year?
Entering the awards is about recognising what the Fortinet channel team and our partners have achieved together. The channel is a complex ecosystem, and success depends on finding mutual value across vendors, partners, distributors, and customers.
Over the past year, Fortinet has focused heavily on helping partners build deeper capabilities, move into new areas of specialisation, and have stronger business-led conversations with customers. Fortinet has also invested in its own channel team so it can provide partners with more relevant, specialised support. The awards are an opportunity to recognise that collective effort and the people behind it.
What would winning this award mean to both your teams and your customers/partners?
Winning this award would be a strong recognition of the work Fortinet’s team and partners put in every day to deliver better customer outcomes. Fortinet’s philosophy is that a successful channel relationship has to create mutual value. Partners need the skills, technology, support, and commercial opportunity to build sustainable businesses, while customers need confidence that the people delivering their solutions have the expertise to support them over the long term.
Fortinet has invested in additional channel account managers and systems engineers, certifications, hands-on labs, and partner specialisation. Winning would validate this focus, while recognising the partners that have invested alongside us.
What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?
A major achievement has been Fortinet’s continued investment in its people, including growing the local team and continuing to hire despite a challenging market. This investment has strengthened the specialist support available to partners and customers as they expand into new technologies, services, and market segments.
One of Fortinet’s proudest achievements has been seeing partners expand their capabilities, take new technologies to market, and move into new customer segments. Fortinet has seen strong uptake of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) among existing partners, alongside expansion into enterprise and large government engagements and increased cloud capabilities.
Fortinet has also continued to expand its local SASE infrastructure footprint across Australia. Most recently, the Perth FortiSASE point of presence (PoP) complements existing in-country PoPs, increasing redundancy and giving organisations greater confidence in continuous service availability while supporting low-latency access to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and business-critical applications. This is particularly relevant for sectors such as mining and government, where resilience, performance, and data sovereignty are important considerations.
What have been the biggest challenges of the current year so far and how have you overcome them?
The pace of AI adoption has added another layer of complexity. Customers are increasingly considering both AI for security, using AI to strengthen detection, response, and operations, and the security of AI itself, including shadow AI, data exposure, and governance. The challenge is moving quickly enough to capture the benefits of AI without losing visibility or control.
At the same time, customers are navigating more technology choices while modernising legacy infrastructure and consolidating fragmented multi-vendor environments. For partners, this creates pressure to maintain profitability, develop new skills, and demonstrate clear business value.
Fortinet’s response has been to invest in partner capability. Fortinet has added channel account managers and systems engineers with specialist expertise, expanded access to certifications and labs through distributors, and increased architecture workshops and presales collaboration.
Fortinet is also helping partners move towards a platform-led go-to-market model and have more business-led conversations with customers. Rather than focusing on individual products,
the aim is to understand the outcome a customer needs and show how an integrated approach can simplify operations, improve visibility, and support future requirements.
What lessons do you think the industry has learned over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?
The industry is learning that adding more technology doesn’t necessarily make cybersecurity simpler or more effective. Customers and partners are dealing with increasingly complex environments across network, cloud, operational technology (OT), and security operations, while AI is changing both cyber defence and the threat landscape.
One lesson is that people remain central to cybersecurity. AI can automate tasks and support decision-making; however, it cannot replace human judgement, trusted relationships, or accountability. Human behaviour can also create risk, which makes ongoing education for employees and the wider community essential alongside technology controls.
Organisations also need to be more deliberate about where they focus resources. Not every asset or dataset carries the same business impact, so leaders need to understand what matters most, prioritise protection accordingly, and apply controls proportionate to the risk.
The next step is turning innovation into practical outcomes. With AI, for example, organisations need governance, visibility, and clear guardrails rather than adopting technology for its own sake. AI should reinforce strong cybersecurity fundamentals and help teams automate appropriate tasks, improve visibility, and respond faster.
The channel also needs to keep investing in skills. Technology is evolving quickly, and partners that can combine technical expertise with an understanding of customer business outcomes will be increasingly valuable.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming 12 months?
AI is a significant opportunity in two areas: AI for security and securing AI. AI for security can help organisations manage growing complexity by supporting security teams with greater visibility, faster analysis, and automation of appropriate tasks. At the same time, as organisations adopt AI applications and agents, securing AI becomes increasingly important. Customers need to understand how AI is being used, what data it can access, and where new risks may emerge.
The opportunity for the channel is to help customers innovate while maintaining strong visibility, governance, and control. Partners that can combine AI capability with cybersecurity expertise and an understanding of customer risk will be well positioned to become increasingly strategic advisers.
There are significant opportunities across SASE, security operations (SecOps), OT security, cloud, and AI. These areas reflect some of the biggest challenges customers are trying to solve: securing hybrid environments, improving visibility, protecting connected operational environments, and using automation without creating additional risk.
Fortinet’s focus is on helping partners build specialist capabilities in these areas and expand across a broader part of the Fortinet portfolio. This means continuing to invest in technical skills, certifications, hands-on experience, and the ability to develop professional and managed services.
AI is also a major opportunity, although the channel needs to build confidence and capability around it. The partners that can help customers apply AI securely to real operational challenges, while maintaining strong governance and visibility, will be well positioned.
Ultimately, Fortinet’s role is to remove friction and help partners turn these technology shifts into repeatable, profitable services that deliver better outcomes for customers.
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