Security appliance market set to break $4bn mark

Latest figures from IDC show the market grew by 2.9 per cent year on year in 2014

The EMEA security appliance market is set to break the $4bn (£2.68bn) mark in the next two years, according to IDC.

The analyst predicted that the security appliance market, which grew 2.9 per cent year on year to $3.38bn in 2014, will grow by between six and seven per cent annually over the next three years and hit $4.07bn by the end of 2017.

The EMEA market was dominated by western Europe in 2014, with the region's revenues growing 3.7 per cent annually to $2.58bn. This was driven by unified threat management (UTM) appliances, which accounted for half of the total revenues.

Romain Fouchereau, manager of security appliance research at IDC, said: "Unified solutions have now been leading the security appliance market for several years. UTM solutions enable companies to simplify network security and do so in a very cost-effective way. IDC forecasts the trend to continue over the coming years and UTM's market share in western Europe to grow significantly."

Despite this growth in western Europe, in Russia, economic sanctions, depreciation of the rouble in Q4 and an economic slowdown saw the country's market shrink in 2014 by 22.7 per cent year on year.

Oleg Sidorkin, senior research analyst at IDC, said: "Although the Russian government declared import substitution as one of the main goals for the coming years, this would be difficult to achieve in IT security, even in the medium term."

In 2014, Cisco kept its position as market leader, with 18.4 share of the market and revenues of $621.44m, up by 0.6 per cent in 2013.

But Check Point, coming in second, narrowed the gap with the leader and saw it hold a 17.5 per cent share of the market with revenues of $592.35m, an increase of 2.1 per cent from 2013.