Global security appliance revenues rose by 6.8% to $2.4bn during fourth quarter of 2013, which was mainly driven by shipments that rose by 0.6% to 546,384 units, a new IDC report revealed.
According to the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, the global factory revenue rose by 5.4% to $8.6bn, while shipments dropped by 2.1% to two million units.
IDC Security Products programme manager John Grady said that the fourth quarter was definitely a strong finish to the year, with revenue increasing 10% sequentially, and nearly 7% compared to last year’s fourth quarter.
"With high profile security incidents, such as the Target breach, becoming more common, organisations are continuing to prioritise security spending," Grady said.
During the quarter, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) reported topped the list with 14.6% rise in factory revenue, followed by Canada (11.9%) and US (7.7%), while in contrast the Central and Eastern Europe posted the largest drop by 4.9%.
Cisco topped the list of the overall security appliance market with an 18.1% share in factory revenue for the quarter with 23.6% growth, followed by Check Point with a 12.7% share with 5.6% revenue growth; Fortinet captured 6.6% share; while Juniper dropped by 6.4% over last year; with Palo Alto Networks covering 5.4% on 47.7% growth over last year.
Among all the functional markets, Unified Threat Management (UTM) segment topped the list with 25.7% rise in revenue and accounted for 41.2% of revenue in during the quarter, while Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) also rose by 3.8%.
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However, Firewall and content security segment reported 7.1% and 2.9% drop in their revenues respectively during the quarter.
IDC Worldwide Trackers senior research analyst, Ebenezer Obeng-Nyarkoh, said that providing a high degree of reliability and advanced security is key to identifying and minimising cyber crime.
"With the number of cyber threats increasing, business owners are looking for comprehensive solutions to protect their network," Nyarkoh said.
