The Unified Threat Management (UTM) market saw its revenues smash through the billion dollar mark in 2011, driven by the shift from older security technologies to next-generation firewalls, according to a new report by Gartner.
The analyst house claims that revenue for 2011 hit $1.2bn, up 19.6% on 2010’s figure of $972m.
UTM appliances tend to include firewall, VPN, intrusion protection, spam filtering, and virus screening.
North America makes up $431m of that, a 15% increase on the $373m it generated the year before. Western Europe was the second biggest revenue generator, producing $310m in revenue in 2011. This was a 16.7% increase on 2010’s figure of $266m.
Both of these markets were driven by increased regulations and "threat-based product acquisition themes," said Gartner. North America benefited from demand from the payment card industry requiring, "both firewalls and intrusion prevention technologies in midsize businesses with higher credit card transaction volumes."
Western European UTM revenue was also driven by increased adoption of virtualised environments, said Gartner.
The two regions that saw the biggest revenue growth were Asia/Pacific, which climbed 31.8% to $204m, and Latin America, where revenue increased 28.2% to $45m.
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As for vendors in the space, Fortinet produced the highest revenue. The Sunnyvale, California-based company pulled in $228m in revenue in 2011, up 33% from $172m in 2010. This gives Fortinet a market share of just under 20%.
SonicWall was second on the list with $154m in revenue, up 13% from $133m in 2010. The company was recently acquired by Dell, as the Texan company looks to move away from its PC heritage and into software and services, a move that served IBM so well when it made that change in 2004.
UK-headquartered Sophos also appeared on the list, thanks to its 2011 acquisition of Astaro. Gartner says Sophos generated $73m in UTM revenue in 2011, up from $54m in 2010.
The biggest climber on the list was SECUI, whose revenues increased nearly 60%, from $33m in 2010 to $52m last year.
Some of the grand old players in the security space were also on the list. Juniper Networks pulls in $138m in revenue from its UTM operations, ahead of Check Point and WatchGuard on $127m and Cisco on $107m.
"The UTM market is in the midst of a transition of its customers from older technologies, such as stateful firewall inspection, to the latest next-generation firewall technology supporting application control capabilities," said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner.
"Many UTM vendors delivered new products during the last several years with some vendors performing product refresh efforts to their UTM portfolios while others worked to expand their small or midsize business (SMB) offerings and wireless UTM offerings," he added.
