Worldwide
security software revenue totaled $16.5 billion in 2010, a 12 percent increase
from 2009 revenue of $14.7 billion, according to Gartner.

 

The
2010 results show that overall vendor revenue demonstrated a rebound in growth
after a sharp fall in performance in 2009 due to the slow economy and tight IT
budgets.

 

“Products within the security market are undergoing rapid
evolution, in terms of both new delivery models – with security as a service
showing increasing popularity – and new technologies being introduced, often by
startup companies,” said Ruggero Contu,
principal research analyst at Gartner.

 

“Key vendors continued to expand their product portfolios,
buying companies where appropriate and expanding their reach into emerging
markets,” Contu added.

 

Growth
across the security segments showed great levels of variation, with more mature
areas, such as endpoint security and Web access management, showing
single-digit growth, while security information and event management (SIEM) and
secure Web gateway products experienced double-digit growth.

 

Symantec
retained its market share lead and accounted for nearly 19 percent of total
security software revenue in 2010. Performance of the largest players varied
considerably; Symantec, Trend Micro and IBM recorded below-average growth,
while other larger players, such as EMC, experienced above-average growth.

 

The security market can be divided into four groups of vendors
from a competitive perspective. At the top are the large vendors Symantec and
McAfee, with a strong presence in both the consumer and enterprise markets, as
well as 30 percent combined market share.

 

On the second tier is a group of vendors that offer a breadth of
product capabilities covering many of the security segments – some with an
almost complete focus on security, such as Trend Micro, and others, such as
IBM, EMC, Cisco and CA Technologies, for which security is only a part of
overall corporate interests.

 

A third tier is composed of specialized midsize vendors, such as
Kaspersky, Websense, Sophos, Blue Coat Systems and ESET, which tend to have
more of a focus on certain segments in which they have built a relatively
strong presence.

 

The fourth tier is composed of large IT vendors with a small
presence in the security space or small players with specialization in one or
two security segments.

By TelecomLead.com Team
[email protected]