The security appliance market in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region rose 5.2% during the fourth quarter of 2012 (4Q12) to $696.8m compared to the corresponding quarter in 2011, according to a new report from IDC.
IDC’s latest EMEA Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker revealed that security appliance shipments increased to 200,089 units. For the whole of 2012, factory revenues generated by the security appliance market rose 2% to $2.5bn.
Cisco topped the list of overall security appliance vendors by capturing 19.6% market share for 4Q12 and 20.6% for the entire year.
Unified threat management was the largest security appliance segment during the quarter.
IDC security appliances service manager Romain Fouchereau said: "As happened with the firewall market a few years ago, unified threat management appliances are now cannibalizing the dedicated IPS standalone appliance revenue, as unified solutions are proving more and more popular in organizations of all sizes."
In Western European countries, the security appliances market generated $522.9m in revenues during the quarter, up 3.9% over the corresponding quarter in 2011, while it generated revenues about $1.15bn during overall 2012.
"A strong last quarter in Western Europe, mainly led by the UTM results, helped security appliance market growth to remain positive in 2012," Fouchereau said.
"Demand for unified solutions remains as strong as ever, as simplified deployment and lower TCO are major selling points for these security solutions."
During 4Q12, the security appliance market in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region reported 9.5% year-on-year growth and reached $173.9m in factory revenue, while generating revenue of $593m for the full year.
IDC senior research analyst Oleg Sidorkin said in 2012 many companies in CEMA continued to acquire appliances with essential security functions, such as firewall/VPN and IPS.
"At the same time, end users valued appliance scalability and the possibility to add more security functions to the same appliance in the future," Sidorkin said.
