Security appliance market shows positive growth

The total security appliance market showed positive year-over-year growth in both vendor revenue and unit shipments for the second quarter of 2016, according to IDC. Worldwide vendor revenues in the second quarter increased 5.8% year over year to $2.75 billion, and shipments grew 15.2% year over year for a total of 659,305 units.

The Unified Threat Management (UTM) sub-market has doubled in size over the last five years and continues to be the major driver for the entire market. The UTM market generated revenues of $1.35 billion in 2Q16 for year-over-year growth of 13.4%.

During the first half of the year UTM vendor revenue grew 15.7% compared to the first half of 2015 to $2.6 billion and it is the only sub-market with double-digit growth for seven consecutive years.

The Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) sub-market, with $402 million and 4.8% annual growth, and the Content Management sub-market, with $426 million and annual growth of 4.9%, also had a solid performance in 2Q16. The Firewall and VPN sub-markets experienced year-over-year declines of 6.7% and 14.6%, respectively.

Regional highlights

In the second quarter of 2016, the United States remained the largest market with 41% of global security appliance market revenue and year-over-year growth of 6.0%. Asia/Pacific was the second largest region with 22% of total worldwide revenues and year-over-year growth of 1.7%. Western Europe accounted for 20% of worldwide vendor revenue and had annual growth of 5.9% compared to the same quarter of 2015.

“The second quarter saw growth of 5.8% led by growth in the UTM, IDP, and Messaging Security categories. UTM continues to be the only category with sustained strong growth metrics,” said Elizabeth Corr, research analyst, Security Products at IDC.