McAfee leads, Cisco moves to second spot in tight (and growing) content security gateway market

CAMPBELL, USA: Infonetics Research released highlights from its recently published fourth quarter (4Q11) Content Security Gateway Appliances, Software, and SaaS vendor market share and forecast report.

Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research, said: “It’s almost impossible to comprehend the volume and impact of publicly disclosed threat events in 2011, and regardless of the actual impact on business and revenue, we know these events have driven an unprecedented level of visibility for IT security issues. The hacks of 2011 were highly successful, the repercussions for hackers (at least the ones who were caught) won’t deter the hordes filling the holes they leave behind, and there are more tools, more bandwidth, more targets, and more money to be made every year.

“So, 2011 wasn’t THE year of the hack, it was simply A year, and it will be followed by another year, and the high visibility of security issues required to keep security at the top of the priority list of shrinking IT budgets will be as present in 2012 as it was in 2011.”

Highlights
* The tight race for revenue market share leadership continues in the overall content security gateway appliance and software market, with McAfee maintaining its top-dog status in 2011, and Cisco moving into 2nd position ahead of Symantec by a fraction of a point.

* In the appliance segment, despite declining revenue in 4Q11 from 3Q11, Cisco held on to its lead, ahead of Blue Coat, McAfee, Symantec and Barracuda.

* In the software segment, Trend Micro regained the lead from Websense in 4Q11.

* The global content security appliance and software market grew 10 percent in 2011 to $3 billion. Infonetics’ year-ago forecast hit within 2 percent of actual results.

* Sales of SaaS (software-as-a-service) content security gateway solutions jumped 32% in 2011 over 2010, and represent the key growth area for most of the top content security vendors.

* The global SaaS content security market is forecast by Infonetics to near $800 million by 2016.