Sales of SSL VPN gear enjoy solid growth

Clarifying issues surrounding this emerging security architecture

Juniper sold more SSL VPN gear by revenue in the first half of this year, hanging on to the No. 1 spot from the previous year, according to a Synergy Research report on sales of security gear.

The company took in 50% more revenue from SSL equipment than its nearest competitor, Citrix, the study says. Citrix was followed closely by F5.

All three are on track to significantly outstrip last year's sales assuming they do as well in the second half of this year, with Citrix in line to have the largest increase of nearly 60%. This is speculative, but it indicates the strength of interest in SSL VPNs, which continues to grow significantly.

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Juniper sold more SSL VPN gear by revenue in the first half of this year, hanging on to the No. 1 spot from the previous year, according to a Synergy Research report on sales of security gear.

The company took in 50% more revenue from SSL equipment than its nearest competitor, Citrix, the study says. Citrix was followed closely by F5.

All three are on track to significantly outstrip last year's sales assuming they do as well in the second half of this year, with Citrix in line to have the largest increase of nearly 60%. This is speculative, but it indicates the strength of interest in SSL VPNs, which continues to grow significantly.

This represents a slight cooling of growth since two years ago if you just look at the percentage increases year to year, but that was when the technology was just catching fire and the sales until then had been comparatively low. At this stage in the maturing of SSL, though, double-digit growth is still solid and impressive.

Synergy looked at six other SSL VPN vendors, and according to the vendors' sales so far this year they rank as follows, No. 4: Aventail, No. 5: Nortel, No. 6: Whale Communications, No. 7: Array Networks, No. 8: SonicWall, and No. 9: Symantec.

This is a good list of vendors to consider when weighing which SSL VPN equipment to buy. The volume of devices these sales indicate - at this stage in SSL development - that the vendors have produced credible gear.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.