NAC market halves in size

Talked-up technology trails expectations as quarterly revenues collapse to $37m

Sales of network access control (NAC) appliances have collapsed over the past 12 months, figures from Infonetics Research reveal.

NAC was earmarked as a lucrative growth hotspot by VARs last year when revenues from the sector were still surging.

But according to Infonetics, global NAC enforcement appliance revenues hit just $37m (£23m) in the third quarter, less than half of the $76.4m the market was worth in the same period last year.

Revenues were also down six per cent sequentially.

Infonetics is still a fan of NAC, recently using a white paper to argue that sceptical end users should give it a ‘second look’.

The analyst predicted that the market would return to growth in the current quarter and increase at double-digit percentages annually until at least 2013. Long-term drivers include compliance, the explosion in the volume and variety of threats, security investment as a cost-saving measure and service provider spending on security.

Infonetics had previously said that it expected the NAC market to hit $534m in 2011.

However, the research house confirmed the market have been impacted squarely by the downturn with market leader Cisco suffering “large decreases” in security revenue throughout the first half of 2009.

“And while there is still strong fundamental demand for NAC technology, many companies are looking for NAC functionality to be included in infrastructure purchases, or to solve NAC problems with software or management, shifting some of the opportunity away from the discrete standalone appliance market,” said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics.