Who Was Fortinet’s Chief Marketing Officer in 2024?
John Maddison was Fortinet’s chief marketing officer for most of 2024. He also held senior responsibility for the company’s product organization, appearing in official materials as either executive vice president of products or executive vice president of product strategy.
This combination made his position broader than a conventional corporate marketing role. Maddison helped shape how Fortinet presented its cybersecurity products, platform strategy, industry research, and technical direction to customers and partners.
Near the end of 2024, Maddison left Fortinet for a new executive position at F5. The move means articles about Fortinet’s 2024 CMO should describe his role historically rather than suggest that he still holds it.
Who Held the Fortinet CMO Role in 2024?
Fortinet identified John Maddison as its chief marketing officer throughout its 2024 event pages, product announcements, and corporate communications.
A Fortinet Cloud Summit speaker profile, for example, listed him as “Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Products.” Other Fortinet materials used “Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Strategy.” These variations referred to the same executive and reflected the wide scope of his responsibilities.
Maddison was therefore responsible not only for promoting the Fortinet brand but also for connecting the company’s technical products with a broader market strategy. His public appearances frequently addressed how organizations could manage increasingly complex networks, cloud services, security tools, and remote users.
What Did John Maddison’s Role Involve?
Fortinet did not publish a complete internal job description for Maddison’s position. However, his public work shows that the role combined corporate marketing, product positioning, technical communication, and go-to-market strategy.
He regularly appeared in announcements involving new products, industry research, partnerships, analyst recognition, and Fortinet events. His role included explaining how individual technologies fit within the company’s wider cybersecurity portfolio.
This was especially important for Fortinet because the company operated across numerous areas, including network security, cloud security, secure remote access, security operations, operational technology, and employee training.
Rather than presenting each product as an isolated offering, Maddison generally communicated them as connected parts of Fortinet’s broader security platform. His product background allowed him to discuss technical architecture while still focusing on the business problems customers were trying to solve.
What Did He Focus On During 2024?
Maddison’s public communications in 2024 centered on a few consistent themes. These examples help illustrate his role without providing a complete record of every Fortinet announcement from that year.
Cybersecurity Platform Positioning
One of Fortinet’s main messages in 2024 was that businesses could reduce security complexity by using technologies designed to work together as a platform.
During Fortinet Accelerate 2024, Maddison discussed the continuing debate between specialized security products and broader cybersecurity platforms. He acknowledged that organizations would take different approaches but argued that they should examine how closely a platform’s components were integrated.
This platform message gave Fortinet a way to organize its extensive portfolio around a single idea. Instead of asking customers to view network protection, cloud security, endpoint access, and security operations as unrelated categories, the company presented them as parts of a coordinated system.
The approach also helped Fortinet distinguish between products developed around shared technology and collections of tools assembled through separate acquisitions. Those claims came from Fortinet’s own corporate messaging and should be understood as the company’s market position rather than an independent assessment of competing platforms.
Unified SASE and Hybrid Work
Secure access service edge, usually shortened to SASE, was another recurring subject in Maddison’s 2024 work. SASE brings networking and cloud-delivered security functions together to protect users who may be connecting from offices, homes, or other remote locations.
Maddison participated in Fortinet events and announcements that positioned Unified SASE as a way to manage networking and security through a more consistent framework. The company emphasized centralized management, shared security policies, secure web access, zero-trust access, SD-WAN, and support for distributed workforces.
At the Fortinet Unified SASE Summit 2024, Maddison also spoke with Google Cloud Vice President Muninder Sambi about combining Google Cloud’s network infrastructure with Fortinet’s security services. The session demonstrated how partnerships could support Fortinet’s platform strategy while giving customers additional deployment options.
Cybersecurity Skills and Awareness
Fortinet’s marketing in 2024 was not limited to products. The company also published research about the shortage of trained cybersecurity workers and the risks organizations faced when employees lacked sufficient security knowledge.
The 2024 Global Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report found that 70% of surveyed organizations believed the skills shortage created additional security risks. It also reported that 87% had experienced at least one breach that they could partially attribute to insufficient cybersecurity skills.
Maddison used the report to discuss the need for security technology, professional training, recognized certifications, and better security awareness throughout an organization.
Research of this kind allowed Fortinet to participate in a wider industry conversation. It connected the company’s products and training programs to workforce development, executive accountability, and organizational risk without making every communication a direct product promotion.
John Maddison’s Career Before and During Fortinet
Maddison had more than 30 years of experience in cybersecurity and telecommunications by the time he served as Fortinet’s CMO.
Before joining Fortinet, he held executive leadership positions at Trend Micro, where his work included advanced threat research and cloud-delivered security services. Earlier in his career, he worked with organizations including Lucent Technologies, Hewlett Packard Software, and Cable & Wireless Global Networking.
He joined Fortinet in 2012 to lead its cloud and software-as-a-service security development teams. He later moved into the combined marketing and product leadership position that he held during 2024. Fortinet’s speaker biography also states that he earned a degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.
His career helps explain the technical nature of his marketing work. He had experience with product development and cloud security before becoming the company’s public marketing leader, allowing him to discuss both product architecture and customer needs.
John Maddison’s Move From Fortinet to F5
On December 3, 2024, F5 announced that John Maddison had joined the company as chief product marketing and technology alliances officer.
The announcement described him as having most recently served as Fortinet’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president of product strategy. It said his new responsibilities at F5 would connect product marketing, technology partnerships, and the company’s wider market strategy.
F5 did not identify Maddison’s exact final working day at Fortinet. It is therefore more accurate to say that he served as Fortinet’s CMO for most of 2024 and moved to F5 near the end of the year.
He has since continued at F5 and is now identified by the company as its chief marketing officer. F5’s current leadership biography says he spent 12 years at Fortinet, most recently as CMO and EVP of Product Strategy.
Why His Fortinet Role Was Notable
Maddison’s Fortinet position stood out because it combined corporate marketing with direct product responsibility. In many organizations, those functions are led by separate executives with different priorities and reporting structures.
At Fortinet, the combined role allowed one executive to connect technical development, portfolio organization, customer communication, and market positioning. That structure was particularly relevant for a cybersecurity company offering many products to audiences ranging from technical specialists to senior business leaders.
His work also illustrates a broader challenge in B2B technology marketing: complicated products cannot be communicated effectively through branding alone. Marketing leaders need enough technical understanding to explain how products work together, which problems they address, and why their underlying architecture matters.
Conclusion
John Maddison was Fortinet’s chief marketing officer for most of 2024. He also served as executive vice president of products or product strategy, depending on the title used in a particular Fortinet publication.
His work connected product leadership with corporate marketing and focused heavily on cybersecurity platforms, Unified SASE, cloud security, industry partnerships, and the cybersecurity skills shortage.
F5 announced his appointment to a new executive role on December 3, 2024. Because his move occurred near the end of the year, John Maddison remains the appropriate answer when identifying Fortinet’s chief marketing officer during 2024.
Featured Image Source: f5
