Security market growth hides spending slowdown

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IDC today said the security appliance market saw negative quarterly growth in the total revenue across Western Europe for the first in three years.

In spite of this, the analyst’s Western European Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker saw 2008’s first quarter (Q1) revenues reach $332.08 million (£169.4 million), which amounted to an 8.1 per cent increase over the same quarter a year ago.

Romain Fouchereau, IDC research analyst, put the negative growth into context: “Following the very strong results seen in Q407, the decrease in the security appliance market was seen across all five workloads of the security appliance tracker and reflects the weakness of the general economy rather than the decline of a particular segment.”

But he added that some areas - including unified threat management (UTM), content management and intrusion protection systems (IPS) - were still showing strong growth overall and would continue to drive the market.”

The firewall/virtual private network (VPN) market represented $92.9 million (£47.4 million) in Q108, a 0.3 per cent decrease on last year's first quarter.

The analyst said this was because this market sector is becoming more mature in Western Europe, as well as the fact that vendors are increasingly moving away from offering traditional firewall/VPN appliances and are starting to offer UTM solutions instead. Broken out by vendor market share, Cisco remained the number one in this segment, followed by Juniper Networks.

UTM represented the largest market of the tracked security appliances, with total revenue of $102.2 million (£52.1 million) in the last quarter, corresponding to 12 per growth over Q107. These appliances were proving popular in Western Europe and IDC said they have a role to play in organisations of all sizes.

“However, it is important to note that because security requirements vary between business sizes, so will the role of UTM appliances and the way in which they are deployed,” it added. In this segment, Fortinet was the market leader, followed by Cisco and Checkpoint.

Intrusion detection system (IDS) appliances revenue reached $10.1 million (£5.2 million) in Q108, a 22 per cent decrease over Q107. The analyst said this market will cease to grow due to the shift towards IPS offerings.

IPS grew 8.3 per cent over last year’s final quarter, representing a $70.6 million (£36 million) market driven by compliance and particularly the payment card industry (PCI) standard in Europe. Here, Cisco was market leader in both the IDS and IPS markets, followed by IBM-ISS and McAfee for IPS.

Lastly, content management appliance revenue grew by 26 per year-on-year, reaching $56.3 million (£28.7 million) in Q108. IDC said its messaging security and web security segments are following the same evolution as the threat management market, from software to appliance form factor. And IronPort remained the number one vendor in these subcategories. Secure Computing led the web security appliance submarket, while McAfee dominated the web and messaging subcategory.

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