INFORMATION security-appliance vendors Blue Coat Systems Inc. and McAfee Inc. rounded out the top 5 companies listed by International Data Corp. (IDC) in worldwide market revenue and unit shipments share.
Blue Coat and McAfee finished the fourth quarter of 2014 in a tie with each vendor holding a 4.3-percent share of worldwide revenues in the security-appliance market.
“Both vendors experienced declining revenue share on a year over year [YOY] and sequential basis,” IDC said in a statement.
Blue Coat and McAfee’s declining revenue share comes at a time when IDC said both factory revenue and unit shipments continued to grow in fourth quarter of 2014.
IDC’s worldwide quarterly security-appliance tracker revealed that vendor revenue grew 8.6 percent YOY to $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter, the 21st consecutive quarter of revenue growth.
“Shipments grew nearly twice as fast as revenue at 16.7 percent YOY to 635,933 units, making fourth quarter of 2014 the fourth consecutive quarter of shipment growth.”
A security appliance is an equipment to protect computer networks from unwanted traffic.
For the full year 2014, revenue and shipments improved 8.4 percent and 8.3 percent, respectively, to $9.4 billion and 2.1 million units.
Japan and Canada combined accounted for 6.2 percent of total worldwide revenue in fourth quarter of 2014, IDC said. The two markets experienced YOY revenue declines of -20.4 percent and -0.4 percent, respectively. The Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan captured 22.7 percent of total worldwide revenue in fourth quarter of 2014 and 23.4 percent of total worldwide shipments and gained significant shares both YOY and sequentially following a strong performance by Huawei in China. Shipments in the region surpassed 100,000 units in the fourth quarter and grew almost twice as fast as revenue at 32.1 percent YOY.
Cisco continues to lead the overall security-appliance market with a 16.6-percent share of worldwide revenue in fourth quarter of 2014.
“This was the first time since the fourth quarter of 2014 that Cisco failed to achieve double-digit year-over-year growth in a quarter.”
Check Point and Fortinet followed Cisco at No. 2 and No. 3 security-appliance vendor, respectively, in terms of revenue share in the quarter. However, Fortinet remains the largest security-appliance vendor in terms of shipments with 18.8-percent share of total unit shipments in fourth quarter of 2014, driven by its unified threat management solution.
We saw in 2014 “a record number of serious data breaches causing both government agencies and companies to realize how susceptible they are to cyber threats that cut beyond boundaries,” IDC Executive Ebenezer Obeng-Nyarkoh was quoted in a statement as saying.
Nyarkoh, IDC worldwide trackers group senior research analyst, added: “In spite of this, many companies still have not done enough to protect their systems, which could compromise their security and jeopardize sensitive data and information.”
In a news briefing in Makati City, Blue Coat CTO for Asia Pacific Matthias Yeo pointed out the Philippines’s growth in terms of threat awareness as more and more Filipino companies become aggressive in thinking of ways to protect their businesses.
Yeo reminded Filipino organizations to remain wary of the latest threats in enterprise security and to take the necessary steps to prevent them from compromising a business.
There’s a “need for total visibility in order to block threats as they happen and continuously monitor for hidden ones that bypass a network’s defenses,” he added.
Dennis D. Estopace
Image credits: Photo courtesy of Blue Coat/Businessmirror