Seemingly never-ending regulation and compliance initiatives and a strong demand for security gateway appliances helped power the overall content security sector to $1.93 billion in 2008, a 25% improvement on 2007 according to market watchers.
New numbers released by Infonetics Research show that for the year, Websense ranked first in worldwide revenues in 2008, followed closely by Symantec, Blue Coat, and McAfee which will have since moved into pole position after its acquisition of Secure Computing.
Principal Analyst, Jeff Wilson, said that the short- and long-term opportunity for content security is strong.
“When McColo was shut down in November 2008 and overall spam volumes were cut by two-thirds in a single day, there was some question about how resilient the spammers, malicious code authors, and black market economy really were. But the consensus is that, like a virus, the spammers that survive will be more dangerous and more resilient.”
The market researchers are predicting double-digit annual growth in 2009, slowing to single-digit increases through 2013.
Infonetics has also done its sums for the $5.5 billion network security segment, and found Cisco remains the revenue-leading vendor overall with 40% of total network security appliances and software in 2008, with Juniper coming in second, and CheckPoint third.
Competitive positions in the market segment could well be changed, however, as the impact of the merger of McAfee and Secure Computing, Check Point’s assimilation of Nokia’s security appliance business and the shaky financial state of Nortel all unfold, the company suggested.
