Sales of Security Appliances Soar

Cumulative sales of UTM, firewalls and other VPNs amounted to 2.7 million units for $ 11.5 billion in revenue last year.

The volume growth of the global market for security appliances has increased more than two times between 2015 and 2016, according to IDC. Last year, shipments jumped 17% to 2.7 million units. However, turnover in the sector has only increased by 8.95% to $ 11.51 billion, while its growth was 9.9% for shipments up 8.1% 12 months earlier. In the fourth quarter alone, invoices totaled $ 3.22 billion (+ 9.2%) for approximately 765,000 items (+ 21.4%).

UTMs now account for half of sales

By product segment, the largest increase was recorded in the UTM segment, which annual turnover increased by 16.7% to $ 5.6 billion. This type of hardware now accounts for nearly 50% of the global market for security appliances by value. Sales of firewalls and content management solutions also increased, but to a lesser extent, by 10.4% and 0.8%, respectively. The only product families with declining revenues were intrusion detection and prevention solutions (-4.6%) and VPNs (-4.3%).

The overall dynamism of the market is also to be credited to the Asia-Pacific zone (including Japan). Sales grew at double-digit levels and accounted for 28% of global revenues for Security Appliance vendors. In EMEA and the United States (65% of market revenues), billings increased by 6.8% and 5.1%, respectively.

Huawei up sharply, Palo Alto Networks number 3

On the manufacturers' side, Huawei now has the highest growth in revenues (+ 70.3%), which now has a market share (PDM) of 3.3%. Fifth in the world ranking of IDC, Chinese is still far from the number one Cisco (15.4% of PDM) which billings increased only 4%. Check Point, its dolphin with 12.9% of PDM, raised its revenues by 9.9%. Behind it, there is Palo Alto Networks, which market share rose from 9.6% to 11.9% in one year, and Fortinet, which gained 1.2 points of PDM to 9.6%.