Communications and Technology Industry Research

The money generated by the global unified threat management (UTM) market exceeded the $1 billion mark in 2011, fueled by the increased demand for the technology by the small and medium businesses in North America and Western Europe.

Analyst firm Gartner says the global revenues for the UTM market increased from $972 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion in 2011, an increase of 19 percent in a space of one year.

The UTM market is undergoing a lot of change, with its customers replacing older technologies with the latest next-generation firewall technologies.

“Many UTM vendors delivered new products during the last several years with some vendors performing product refresh efforts to their UTM portfolios,” said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner (News - Alert). “Others worked to expand their small or midsize business (SMB) and wireless UTM offerings.”

For the UTM market, North America has become the largest consumer with the continent accounting for nearly half of its worldwide revenues ($431 million) last year.

In North America, the demand for UTM products increased rapidly as companies in the payment card industry started looking for firewalls and intrusion prevention products.

As the network-based attacks increased, so did the demand for UTM products.

Among the vendors, Fortinet (News - Alert) has retained the number one position, accounting for 19.6 percent of the market, while SECUI showed the strongest growth, increasing its revenue 59 percent year over year.

Western Europe has turned out to be the second-largest market for UTM products, with revenues up from $266 million in 2010 to $310 million last year. Though Asia-Pacific is in the distant third position it is believed to be the fasting growing market, with year-on-year expansion of 31.8 per cent to $204 million.

Consolidation into virtualized environments, as well as IT cost-savings measures related to regional recessionary forces, also drove stronger growth in the combined UTM appliances in 2011, says the research firm.

Middle East and Africa UTM revenue reached $28 million in 2011, up 13.5 percent from 2010 revenue of $25 million. Growth in this region was driven by a mixture of transformational government projects, high-speed Internet connectivity adoption and a heavier reliance of regional SMBs using Internet access to conduct business.

In Japan, UTM revenue reached $32 million in 2011, a 4.7 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $30 million.

Latin America grew 28.2 percent in 2011 with UTM revenue of $45 million, up from $35 million in 2010, making it the second-fastest-growing region. The primary target for UTM products were SMBs. Latin America is believed to have a large number of SMBs and therefore supports stronger growth for products that target this segment, says the research firm.