The total EMEA security appliance market has remained flat despite strong growth from unified solutions, says IDC.
IDC's EMEA Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker shows that the EMEA security appliance market reached $837.65m in 2Q15, a 0.2% year-on-year decline because of falling prices. Shipments increased 4.0% year on year to 183,885 units.
Over the next five years the security appliance market is expected to accelerate at a CAGR of 6.3% and reach $4.59bn (1,018,373 units) by the end of 2019.
Check Point secured the top position in 2Q15 in the overall security appliance vendor market with 19.2% value share. Cisco's market share has increased for the past three quarters and represented 16.8% value market share. With a very strong second quarter (40.6% annual growth in value), Fortinet took the third spot with 11.1% of the market.
The Western European market showed moderate growth in security appliances, with $646.79m in value in 2Q15, representing 2.4% growth over the same quarter in 2014. The main market driver of the security appliance market in Europe remains UTM solutions, which represented over half of the value (56.5%) in 2Q15, with associated 16.9% growth.
"The European appliance market is driven by the UK and Germany - the two largest economies - which represented over 45% of the total Western European market last quarter," said Romain Fouchereau, manager, security appliance research, IDC. "Unified threat management appliances continue to be the main market driver in Western Europe, and although IDC sees organizations' interest in IDP products, they often prefer to have it deployed through UTM/NGFW rather than a stand-alone product."
In the emerging markets of CEMA, security appliance hardware shipments contracted 2.2% year on year in 2Q15. Vendor revenue declined in turn by 6.7% over the same period, to $150m.
"Central European and Gulf region countries are slowly regaining health as confidence in the market increases," said Mohamed Hefny, senior analyst, systems and infrastructure, IDC. "Amid geopolitical tension and instability, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are still in decline."
Unified threat management (UTM) adoption continued to increase, taking the largest share of shipments to CEMA. The product category reached maturity and, with many successful stories from neighbouring Western European countries, end users are no longer hesitant about consolidating their data centre security.
UTM appliances were the only product category that increased in value in 2Q15, expanding 12.9% year on year. As a result, their value share reached 53.9% of the total. Over the next five years, UTM is expected to remain the largest product category, representing about 62% by 2019.