Fortinet tightens grip on $1bn UTM market

Cisco and Juniper the only contenders to miss out on double-digit growth

Fortinet has tightened its stranglehold on a unified threat management (UTM) market that finally broke through the $1bn (£621.3m) mark in 2011, according to Gartner.

UTM's meteoric rise began in the mid-noughties but the market only made it into 10 figures last year as revenue surged from $972m to $1.2bn, the market watcher said.

Although a lot of that growth was driven by Asia-Pacific, western European revenue also pogoed 16.7 per cent to $310m.

UTM pioneer Fortinet, which recently underwent an IPO, increased its lead over the chasing pack following a 33 per cent rise in revenue last year.

It now has 19.6 per cent market share ahead of SonicWall, Juniper, Check Point and WatchGuard.

Cisco and Juniper were the only non-pure-play security vendors in the top 10 and also the only two to miss out on double-digit growth last year.

Gartner said the western European market was driven by "macro-consolidation and regulatory and threat-based product acquisition themes".

Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner, said: "The UTM market is in the midst of a transition of its customers from older technologies, such as stateful firewall inspection, to the latest next-generation firewall technology supporting application control capabilities.

"Many UTM vendors delivered new products during the past several years, with some vendors performing product refresh efforts to their UTM portfolios while others worked to expand their small or mid-size business (SMB) offerings and wireless UTM offerings."