Cisco leads the way in growing security appliance market

Cisco continues to lead the overall security appliance market, according to the latest figures from industry analysts International Data Corporation.

The global market is continuing on its growth trajectory for the first half of 2015, with Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) experiencing a solid year-over-year growth.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, both factory revenues and unit shipments continued to grow in the first half of 2015.

Worldwide vendor revenues increased 9.6% year over year to $4.9 billion, and volume shipments expanded to 1.1 million and grew 8.8% year over year.

For the second quarter of 2015 (2Q15), worldwide vendor revenues increased 12.2% year over year to $2.6 billion, marking the 23rd consecutive quarter of revenue growth.

Shipments grew 10.6% year over year for the seventh consecutive quarter of volume growth ending 2Q15 at 567,388 units shipped.

According to IDC, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan)(APeJ) continued to experience solid year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2015, and accounted for 17.6% and 21.6% of unit shipments and vendor revenue, respectively.

The regional market is primarily driven by China, which accounted for more than 50.0% of both unit shipments and vendor revenue and grew more than twice as fast as the regional market.

For the second consecutive quarter, Central - Eastern

"Cybercrime remains a growing global problem and attacks against mission-critical and sensitive services or systems that leads to massive data leaks continue to have far-reaching effects," explains Ebenezer Obeng-Nyarkoh, senior research analyst, Worldwide Trackers Group.

"Because there are so many ingenious ways into a network, having sophisticated cyber security measures is not the end game of a defensive prevention strategy.

Obeng-Nyarkoh says the key is faster identification and prevention and this is why in the last seven consecutive quarters the deployment of intrusion detection and prevention solutions (IDP) have been gaining traction.

"Even though this category only represents 4.2% of volume shipments, we are seeing remarkable expansion with the second quarter showing 13.7% year-over-year growth," he says.

Vendor Highlights

Cisco continued to lead the overall security appliance market with 17.1% share in vendor revenue and a net loss of 1.1 points of share year over year and 0.5 points sequentially. Overall revenue expanded 5.9% year over year and 8.5% sequentially.

Check Point remained the number 2 security appliance vendor with 11.9% year-over-year and 6.7% sequential revenue growth. Check Point ended the quarter with 12.8% worldwide revenue share.

Since entering the top 5 in the second half of 2013, Palo Alto Networks has consistently grown its revenues faster than the overall market. In 2Q15, Palo Alto Networks grew its revenue 51.5% year over year with a net gain of 2.4 share points when compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Fortinet was the number 4 vendor with worldwide market share of 8.3%, resulting in a net gain of 0.7 share points sequentially and 1.1 points year over year. Fortinet had double-digit revenue growth of 30.3% in 2Q15.

Blue Coat rounded out the top 5 vendor list with solid year-over-year revenue growth of 7.3% despite a net loss of -0.4 share points sequentially.