* Sales of VPN/firewall gear flat, sales of SSL equipment down, report says
Quarterly VPN sales numbers and projections are out again and indicate that sales of VPN/firewall gear was flat between the first and second quarters of 2003.
The study by Infonetics says that revenue worldwide in the second quarter was $705 million, a 1% increase over the quarter before, an increase that seems surprising small given the heightened interest businesses have in security. With VPNs firmly established as a security tool, higher growth might be expected if businesses are really that worried about keeping their networks safe.
Similarly, sales of Secure Sockets Layer remote access equipment – also called application-layer VPN gateways – suffered in the second quarter, with sales actually dipping slightly, Infonetics says.
But the author of the report “VPN and Firewall Products,” Infonetics research director Jeff Wilson, says that heightened interest in security may breed heightened caution as well. “With all the changes going on with security products and architectures, end-users are hesitant to make purchase decisions quickly,” Wilson says.
He says that according to vendors interviewed for the study, customers are still showing strong interest, it’s just taking them longer to make up their minds to buy. The fourth-quarter projection for VPN/firewall sales will be up about 18% to $831 million, Wilson says.
Sales of SSL gear was $18.3 million in the second quarter but that number will grow to $43.9 million for the same quarter next year, the study predicts. Some of the sluggishness in the second quarter this year was due to some vendors shutting down, he says.
The study also looked at how the revenue was spread among the individual vendors. Cisco and Check Point clearly led in terms of their share of the total spent, the study says, but Wilson would not specify their percentages. He listed a group of other vendors as “strong second-tier players” – NetScreen, Nokia, Nortel, SonicWall, Symantec and WatchGuard.
