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Network security appliance market in sea-change

Old firewall products lose out to app-aware systems

The network security appliance market grew 4% qtr/qtr says research, with Fortinet’s strong sales into large enterprise customers in the US pushing its security revenues up 8% and giving it third place behind Cisco and Check Point Software Technologies.

According to a recently published Network Security Appliance quarterly report by Dell’Oro Group, gains were recorded in both Physical and Virtual Appliances as new threats, the necessity of protecting network assets, and the priority of mitigating the risks associated with attacks continued to drive demand.

The market also saw a change in vendor rankings in the second quarter 2014 as Fortinet’s strong sales into large enterprise customers in the Unites States pushed the company’s security revenues up eight percent. The transition to new products platforms caused some softness for vendors such as Juniper as they migrate customers to higher end SRX platforms

“The way security policies are created and enforced has changed. The previous generation of perimeter-deployed firewalls was not equipped to address new network complexities,” explained Casey Quillin, Director of Data Center Appliance research at Dell’Oro Group. “Application-aware new security platforms—such as those offered by Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point, Dell (SonicWALL), Juniper, and Cisco (Sourcefire)—use deep-packet inspection to create and enforce user- or application layer policies. We believe such enterprise firewall products will continue to grow in utility and increasingly contribute to NSA growth,” Quillin explained.