Quarterly Shipments of Security Appliances in Western Europe Exceed 100,000 Units for the First Time, Says IDC

During the second quarter of 2005, close to 102,000 security appliance units were shipped in Western Europe, according to the 2Q05 results from IDC's European Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker. This was the first time quarterly unit shipments of security appliances in the region exceeded 100,000, following growth of 27% over the second quarter of 2004 and 7% over the preceding quarter.

"Over the last few years the number of security appliance units sold in Western Europe has continued to rise," said Oliver Harcourt, senior research analyst for IDC's European Enterprise Server research team. "Vendors, resellers, customers, and service providers increasingly utilize appliances to deliver security because of the benefits they offer in terms of performance, convenience, and cost. IDC believes this trend will continue and is forecasting that in excess of 1 million units will be shipped in the region in 2009."

Over both the annual and sequential period, growth was stronger from a unit shipment than a revenue perspective. Revenue generated from second-quarter security appliance sales was around $170 million, an increase of 17% over 2Q04 and a decrease of 3.0% over 1Q05.

The market shift towards multifunction unified threat management (UTM) security appliances continued into the second quarter. UTM security appliances' share of the market was up from the preceding quarter to 37% and 23% in terms of units and revenue, respectively. Intrusion detection and prevention (ID&P) security appliances' share of the market was relatively flat when compared to the first quarter, while firewall/VPN security appliances' share was down slightly.

Vendor Highlights
- Cisco was the leading vendor in the total market, the firewall/VPN category, and the ID&P category in both unit and revenue terms.
- SonicWALL was the leading vendor in the UTM market in both unit and revenue terms.
-  In unit market share terms, for the total market, Cisco was followed by Juniper, SonicWALL, WatchGuard, and Check Point.
-  Nokia exhibited the strongest annual revenue growth of the top 5 revenue vendors with 40.7% growth, and Cisco exhibited the strongest annual unit growth of the top 5 unit vendors with 72.4% growth.

IDC's European Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the European security appliance market on a quarterly basis. The tracker includes quarterly revenues (both customer and factory) and unit shipments segmented by vendor, security appliance category (firewall/VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, and unified threat management), model, country, and price band. Current vendors tracked include Arkoon, Check Point, Cisco, CyberGuard, Equiinet, Fortinet, Internet Security Systems, Juniper, McAfee, Netasq, Nokia, Nortel, Radware, Secure Computing, ServGate, SonicWALL, Sourcefire, Symantec, TippingPoint, and WatchGuard.