The third-quarter results “further confirm our view that the firewall market is recovering,” Keith Jensen, Fortinet’s chief financial officer, said Thursday.

Fortinet is seeing growth again from its firewall business after several quarters of decline in the cybersecurity vendor’s largest segment, executives said Thursday.

While details of firewall growth were not disclosed, during the third quarter ended Sept. 30, “secure networks returned to positive growth,” Ken Xie, Fortinet’s co-founder and CEO, said in during the vendor’s quarterly call with analysts.

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The rebound in firewall growth was reflected in the rebound in global product revenue growth for Fortinet, which reported that product revenue rose 1.7% year-over-year to $473.9 million in the quarter third.

Services revenue, meanwhile, rose 19.1% year over year to $1.03 billion. Total revenue rose 13% from the same quarter in 2023 to $1.51 billion, beating analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.48 billion.

Fortinet’s stock price fell 3.6 percent to $80.65 a share in after-hours trading Thursday as revenue and billings forecasts fell short of Wall Street expectations.

Firewall Refresh Ahead

During Thursday’s quarterly call, Fortinet CFO Keith Jensen said the current firewall recovery will also soon be supported by a major refresh opportunity.

On the recovery side, Fortinet continued to see strong readings when it comes to FortiGuard contract records, which had previously “indicated that end-user inventory digests are coming back or back to normal,” Jensen said.

“In the third quarter, this measure was flat, further validating our view that the firewall market is recovering,” he said during Thursday’s call.

Looking ahead to the next two years, Jensen said that in 2026 a record number of FortiGate firewalls will reach end of support.

As a result, “we expect these customers to begin the refresh cycle for these products sometime in 2025,” he said.

Finally, the total number of firewalls reaching end-of-life in 2026 is “by far the highest we’ve seen, probably ever, but certainly in the last five or six years,” Jensen said.

Typically, most of the refresh cycle is focused on entry-level firewalls, he said — but “in 2026, we see a significant portion of that actually being in mid-level firewalls as well. And this is a very unusual and positive situation.”