×Internal recap for Fortinet · FCS West 2026, Calgary
The floor, played.
What 693 external attendees did with a scavenger hunt on their phones at FCS West, Western Canada's flagship cybersecurity conference, and what it means for Toronto on November 19.
The day at a glance
People didn't stop playing.
Source: MoVA platform data, 693 external attendees, excluding staff, speakers, vendors and test accounts.
The recap
39 seconds on the floor.
What you asked for
Three asks from the planning meetings.
Paraphrased from the planning meetings with Valerie Kammerer, June to September 2026.
Make it feel different
Technical content made accessible and fun, with moments worth photographing, and every pavilion, booth and session visited through a real conversation, not a badge tap.
Show who engaged
Which attendees engaged with which products and sessions, how long they stayed and where they dropped off, plus evidence of value for sponsors, which is why platinum and gold sponsors got the hunt as a complimentary add-on.
Build it once
Shared infrastructure, so the game, the immersive experiences and the reporting run again at FCS Toronto at lower incremental cost.
Who played
The people who started kept going.
One bar, the whole room. Select a group to see who engaged and who joined but never played.
Source: MoVA platform data, 693 external attendees.
Results
Completion beat every target.
Both bars sit on the same 0 to 100% scale. The black line marks the target set before the event.
Full completion 7.6× target
15 of 18 stops, share of attendees
Halfway 2× target
7 stops, share of active players
Participation: a first-time benchmark
36% of attendees joined in year one, most of them after the head of marketing's keynote walkthrough, which is when most people learned the game existed. Players who started kept going, so the lever is getting people in earlier.
How we raise it next time
A short animated explainer in your pre-event email, the keynote walkthrough again, and larger, more numerous QR posters on the route between session rooms and the floor. Full list in the Toronto plan below.
Source: MoVA platform data; targets from the FCS West scope of work.
The floor plan
Eighteen stops across one floor.
Every pavilion, sponsor booth and session room on the hunt, as attendees saw it on their phones.
How the day moved
Drag through the day.
Tap any moment on the line, or drag the slider from doors to awards.
Sponsor reach
Every booth visit, named.
Each check-in is linked to the attendee's registration, with consent given at sign-up. Reach was consistent across all six booths, so the numbers below hold for each one. The per-visitor detail is in the workbook.
Source: MoVA platform data, six sponsor booths.
Sales signals Draft views for our debrief
Engagement that reads at the account level.
The sponsor section reads the floor booth by booth. This section reads the same consented check-in data account by account: which organizations engaged with which product areas, and how deeply. These are drafts; our debrief decides which views ship in the final package.
Top 20 organizations by product-area engagement
Unique people engaged per product area, per organization. Darker cells mean more people from that account engaged the area. Duplicate spellings in the registration data are merged.
| Organization | Vertical | At event | Engaged | Secure Networking | Security Operations | Unified SASE | Operational Technology | FortiGuard Services | Pavilion check-ins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yukon Hospitals | Healthcare | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 69 |
| Pason Systems | Energy & Natural Resources | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 68 |
| Compass Energy Systems Ltd. | Energy & Natural Resources | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 61 |
| Wolf Midstream | Energy & Natural Resources | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 46 |
| TELUS | Telecom (partner) | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 46 |
| Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. | Energy & Natural Resources | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 46 |
| Pacific Western Transportation | Transportation & Logistics | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 45 |
| TransAlta | Utilities & Power | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 43 |
| Softchoice | IT Services (partner) | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 42 |
| Rogers | Telecom (partner) | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 39 |
| Trimac | Transportation & Logistics | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 38 |
| Bell Canada | Telecom (partner) | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 31 |
| Shing Digital | IT Services (partner) | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 31 |
| DIRTT | Manufacturing & Industrial | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 30 |
| Infosys | IT Services (partner) | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 26 |
| Maple Respiratory Group | Healthcare | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 23 |
| Nutrien | Energy & Natural Resources | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 23 |
| FFCA | Education | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 23 |
| Decathlon | Retail | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 23 |
| KadTek Automation | Industrial Automation (partner) | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 22 |
Engagement by vertical and buyer type
Pavilion check-ins by inferred industry vertical.
Seven organizations had a full buying group on site (two or more people, including someone Director-level or above): Yukon Hospitals, Compass Energy Systems, Pacific Western Transportation, Amacon, Insight Canada, SUBNET Solutions and TACADA.
Fortinet industry alignment and OT cross-sell
The same organizations in Fortinet's own industry naming, so each account lands in the language your field team already sells with. Highlighted rows hold the 22 OT cross-sell accounts: an OT-heavy industry confirmed by a visit to the Operational Technology pavilion.
| Fortinet industry page | Organizations | People engaged | Pavilion check-ins | OT cross-sell orgs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technology | 30 | 44 | 433 | 0 |
| Oil & Gas | 10 | 16 | 269 | 6 |
| General enterprise (no industry page) | 13 | 19 | 161 | 0 |
| Manufacturing | 13 | 16 | 160 | 9 |
| Transportation | 5 | 7 | 113 | 5 |
| Healthcare | 3 | 6 | 94 | 0 |
| Government / SLED | 8 | 10 | 69 | 0 |
| Power & Utilities | 4 | 6 | 62 | 2 |
| K-12 Education | 5 | 5 | 44 | 0 |
| Higher Education | 4 | 4 | 30 | 0 |
| Hospitality | 4 | 4 | 28 | 0 |
| Retail | 1 | 1 | 23 | 0 |
| Financial Services | 2 | 2 | 13 | 0 |
Oil & Gas is the largest end-customer industry at this event in Fortinet's taxonomy. Route to market:
Engagement tiers across 176 active players
The 53 Finishers are the same group behind the 7.6% full-completion figure: 30% of active players. Tier definitions are MoVA defaults until your lead definitions replace them.
| Tier | People | Avg stops completed | Avg check-ins | Avg time on floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finisher | 53 | 15.7 | 29.4 | 4.7 h |
| Deep | 40 | 10.1 | 18.5 | 4.1 h |
| Engaged | 30 | 4.4 | 8.8 | 3.8 h |
| Light | 53 | 1.8 | 2.3 | 1.4 h |
Seniority mix, from job titles: 8 Executive or VP, 9 Director, 56 Manager or Team Lead, 85 practitioner-level, 18 unclassified.
Interest confirmed twice: session to pavilion
Technical breakout attendees who went on to visit the matching product pavilion the same day.
Sample account card · to be swapped for an account you choose
Yukon Hospitals
All three attendees completed the full hunt, visited all five product areas and all six sponsor booths.
| Job title | Stops (of 18) | Check-ins | Time on floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director, Information Services | 18 | 56 | 5.0 h |
| IT Lead | 18 | 56 | 2.4 h |
| Network engineer | 18 | 48 | 5.0 h |
What each signal could trigger Proposed
For our debrief
Source: MoVA platform data, 693 external attendees, FCS West 2026, Calgary, September 17; enrichment built October 5. Vertical, buyer type and seniority are inferred by MoVA from organization names and job titles. The industry and route-to-market mapping uses Fortinet's public website naming (October 2026) and is not yet confirmed by Fortinet. Not for external distribution.
Immersive experiences
Moments people shared.
Alongside the hunt, three experiences built for the camera. No download for any of them, and each one gave booth staff an easy opener: "scan this."
Scan to Defend 181 sessions
Scan the poster and a power plant comes under attack on your phone. Tap to apply the patch and protect the grid.
Become the Guardian 112 sessions
Raise a fist and augmented-reality wings and a shield appear. Take the photo, save it, share it.
Live social wall 137 sessions
Attendees made an AI portrait in a cyber role: 45 generated, 42 shared on the wall next to the live leaderboard.
What attendees told us
Interviews from the floor.
Sophie interviewed players between stops. Paraphrased here, with each attendee identified by role only, plus what they flagged for next time.
IT Infrastructure Manager
Visited every booth to collect and crack the passcodes, and was among the first to redeem the 60-token backpack. Rated the questions simple, with a mix of difficulty.
Desktop Support Team Lead and indie game developer
Called the hunt a gamified way to explore Fortinet products, and backed the choice to run it in the browser, with nothing to install.
UX/UI professional, with a colleague
Tried the Guardian selfie together, praised the wings and the shield, and rated it 8 to 8.5 out of 10.
"AR" needs to be obvious
The game developer found the AR poster neat but confusing and suggested bolder "AR" wording on the poster.
iPhone camera hiccups
Another attendee reported camera issues on iPhone during the AR experience. Android worked fine.
Booths without codes
The UX/UI attendee flagged stalls that were missing their hunt codes.
Source: on-floor interviews by MoVA, FCS West, September 17, 2026. Paraphrased; attendee clips approved for sharing.
Fair play
Someone scored 178 in a game capped at 100.
One attendee left each session five minutes early to collect the next room's code. It was a cybersecurity crowd. Finding the holes is the job.
The platform's fairness rule credits one session per time slot, since nobody can be in two rooms at once. It went live on the floor before the awards, and attendees were glad: it kept the game fair for everyone who walked the floor.
Nobody games something they don't care about. Next time, session codes only work during their own hour.
Highest token count reached against the maximum.
Session check-ins caught by the fairness rule.
The plan for FCS Toronto, November 19
Twice the size. Here's what changes.
About twice Calgary's attendance. The game stays; the changes get people in earlier and take passcodes off the speakers. Tick items off as they're agreed.
Where this can go next
Three ideas that came out of Calgary.
Beyond Toronto on November 19 and XPERTS Montreal on November 22 to 26.
A game for channel partners
A referral-style version for partners, raised by your channel team on the floor. Partners could earn more for the people they bring.
One app for the whole event
The platform already holds the full agenda and a map with every station located, so it can stand in for a conventional event app.
A report for each sponsor
Every booth's visitors, organizations and job levels, packaged so each sponsor sees what their add-on returned.
The team behind the floor
Started at Princeton.
Founded by architects and technologists who design how people move through space. We bring that to the conference floor to make events playable and measurable.
Sophie Jiang, CEO and co-founderShe was on the floor all day, holding every passcode. Connect with her on LinkedIn.Let's make Toronto the one you can prove.
We'll bring the Toronto plan and the sponsor report format to a planning session with your team.
Book a Toronto planning call
On LinkedIn
The floor, in their own words.
Attendees, partners, sponsors and the Fortinet team posted about the day, unprompted, and many shared the AI persona they made on the floor.
The cybersecurity industry has reached a turning point. …
Posted his AI persona: Automation WizardEvents like these are a great reminder that security is ultimately about people, partnerships, and sharing experiences as we work through new challenges together.
Posted his AI persona: Threat HunterThe energy of our SEs is amazing! So many dialogue with customers happening on the floor.
Posted his AI personaI am the Threat Hunter at FCS West 2026 — Finds hidden attacks. #FCSWest2026
Took on his AI personaView on LinkedInFortiStore is officially open for business tomorrow! … Come see us, say hello, check out what's on the shelves, and hunt for the swag. Happy hunting!
Looks busy enough. At the Fortinet Cyber Security Summit.
FCS West 2026 is tomorrow! We're sponsoring Fortinet's first flagship…
The TechJutsu team is at the Fortinet cybersecurity summit Canada West today. A big thank you to the Fortinet team and sponsors for bringing the western Canadian cybersecurity community together!
Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me just how much I love being part of the cybersecurity community!