Infrastructure Refresh and New Features Drive Worldwide Security Appliances Market Expansion in 1Q18: IDC

The total security appliance market saw positive growth in both vendor revenue and unit shipments for the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18), according to new research from International Data Corp. (IDC).

Worldwide vendor revenues in the first quarter increased 14.3 percent year-over-year to $3.3 billion and shipments grew 18.9 percent year-over-year to 838,098 units, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker,

The trend for growth in the worldwide market driven by the Unified Threat Management (UTM) sub-market continues, with UTM reaching record-high revenues of $2.1 billion in 1Q18 and year-over-year growth of 16.1 percent -- the highest growth among all sub-markets.

The UTM market now represents more than 53 percent of worldwide revenues in the security appliance market. The Firewall and Content Management sub-markets also had positive year-over-year revenue growth in 1Q18 with gains of 17.4 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively.

The Intrusion Detection and Prevention and Virtual Private Network (VPN) sub-markets experienced weakening revenues in the quarter with year-over-year declines of 13 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

The United States delivered 42.3 percent of the worldwide security appliance market revenue and was the major driver for spending in Q1 2018 with 16.7 percent year-over-year growth. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) had the strongest year-over-year revenue growth in 1Q18 at 15.9 percent and captured 21 percent revenue market share.

The more mature regions of the world – the United States and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) – combined to provide nearly two thirds of the global security appliance market revenue. Both regions had positive growth in the single-digit range.

EMEA saw an annual increase of 11.6 percent. Asia/Pacific (including Japan)(APJ) and the Americas (Canada, Latin America, and the U.S.) experienced year-over-year growth of 13.1 percent and 16.3 percent, respectively.

"The first quarter of 2018 exhibited strong growth for network security due to consistent double-digit growth across nearly every region and continued momentum from UTM as vendors reported $240.6 million more in revenue for 1Q18 than in 1Q17,” said Robert Ayoub, program director, Security Products. Firewall and UTM are the strongest areas of growth as network refreshes drive perimeter security refreshes and as vendors add new features and improve performance across all product lines".

(For more information visit https://www.idc.com).